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 re-
spective 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 alter-
native 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
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 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 inter-
national. 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 schol-
arship, 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

List of Contributors  xi

PA RT I I N T RODU C T ION
1. Modernity and Granularity in History and International Relations 3
Mlada Bukovansky and Edward Keene

PA RT I I R E A DI N G S
2. Origins, Histories, and the Modern International 21
R. B. J. Walker
3. Historical Realism 35
Michael C. Williams
4. Liberal Progressivism and International History 49
Lucian M. Ashworth
5. Historical Sociology in International Relations 63
Maïa Pal
6. Global History and International Relations 79
George Lawson and Jeppe Mulich
7. International Relations and Intellectual History 94
Duncan Bell
8. Gender, History, and International Relations 111
Laura Sjoberg
9. Postcolonial Histories of International Relations 125
Zeynep Gulsah Capan
10. International Relations Theory and the Practice of
International History 137
Peter Jackson and Talbot Imlay
viii   Contents

11. Global Sources of International Thought 155

Chen Yudan

PA RT I I I P R AC T IC E S
12. State, Territoriality, and Sovereignty 173
Jordan Branch and Jan Stockbruegger
13. Diplomacy 188
Linda Frey and Marsha Frey
14. Empire 202
Martin J. Bayly
15. Barbarism and Civilization 218
Yongjin Zhang
16. Race and Racism 233
Nivi manchanda
17. Religion, History, and International Relations 249
Cecelia Lynch
18. Human Rights 262
Andrea Paras
19. The Diplomacy of Genocide 277
A. Dirk Moses
20. War and History in World Politics 292
Tarak Barkawi
21. Nationalism 306
James Mayall
22. Interpolity Law 320
Lauren Benton
23. Regulating Commerce 334
Eric Helleiner
24. Development 348
Corinna R. Unger
 Contents   ix

25. Governing Finance 363

Signe Predmore and Kevin L. Young
26. Revolution 379
Eric Selbin

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 395
Julia Costa Lopez
28. Modernity and Modernities in International Relations 410
Ayşe Zarakol
29. The ‘West’ in International Relations 424
Jacinta O’hagan
30. The Eighteenth Century 439
Daniel Gordon
31. The Long Nineteenth Century 454
Quentin Bruneau
32. The Pre-​Colonial African State System 469
John Anthony Pella, Jr
33. The ‘Americas’ in the History of International Relations 483
Michel Gobat
34. ‘Asia’ in the History of International Relations 499
David C. Kang
35. The ‘International’ and the ‘Global’ in International History 513
Or Rosenboim and Chika Tonooka

PA RT V M OM E N T S
36. The Fall of Constantinople 531
Jonathan Harris
37. The Peace of Westphalia 544
Andrew Phillips
x   Contents

38. The Seven Years’ War 560

Karl Schweizer
39. The Haitian Revolution 573
Musab Younis
40. The Congress of Vienna 587
Jennifer Mitzen and Jeff Rogg
41. The Revolutions of 1848 602
Daniel M. Green
42. The Indian Uprising of 1857 617
Alexander E. Davis
43. The Berlin and Hague Conferences 631
Claire Vergerio
44. The First World War and Versailles 646
Duncan Kelly
45. Sykes–​Picot 660
Megan Donaldson
46. World War Two and San Francisco 675
Daniel Gorman
47. The Bandung Conference 690
Christopher J. Lee
48. Facing Nuclear War: Luck, Learning, and the Cuban Missile Crisis 705
Richard Ned Lebow and Benoît Pelopidas

PA RT V I C ON C LU SION
49. History and the International: Time, Space, Agency, and Language 723
Maja Spanu and Christian Reus-​Smit

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 develop-
ment 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 mod-
ernity 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 spe-
cific Western perspective into any treatment of historical IR and international history.
We have therefore actively encouraged authors to imagine multiple modernities, alter-
native meta-​narratives, and different pathways of change that, in Zarakol’s words, will re-
veal ‘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 sover-
eignty’. 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 signifi-
cance 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 struc-
ture, 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 intellec-
tual 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 re-
gionalization. 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 his-
torical 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 ra-
ther it constitutes ‘an imagined community that has acted as a strategic and normative refer-
ence 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 fea-
ture 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 momen-
tous 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 his-
torical IR, but we hope that they will offer a provocation that opens possibilities for new re-
search 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 methodo-
logical 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 under-
standing 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 pro-
ceed 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 scien-
tific 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 histor-
ical 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 interpret-
ation 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 stand-
point 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 in-
sistence 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 the-
oretical 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 ele-
ment 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 theoret-
ical perspectives and assumptions that underpin them. Taylor’s work is very much a crea-
ture 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 rep-
licate persistent patterns of exclusion and omission as move either or both disciplines for-
ward. 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 his-
torical evidence for theoretical purposes, or generation of theoretical insights from histor-
ical 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 histor-
ical 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 bit-
terly 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 cer-
tain 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 po-
tential 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 ubi-
quity, 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 re-
lation 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 in-
tend 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, prop-
erty, or some such form of social or political organization, and that the question of mod-
ernity 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 signifi-
cant 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 distin-
guish 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 mod-
ernity 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 pos-
sible? To the extent that intellectual historians have identified modernity with something
like the ‘Enlightenment’, what is the relationship between the development of ideas and cul-
ture 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 inter-
national 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 pre-
occupation 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 develop-
ment of the forms of actors, institutions, modes of production, and both strategic and nor-
mative 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 commer-
cial 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 pol-
itics 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 geo-
graphical 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 ad-
vantage of offering a common frame of reference without closing off debates about its geo-
graphic 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, transmis-
sion, 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 con-
cept, 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 mod-
ernity 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 dis-
tinction 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 avail-
able 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 con-
testation 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 under-
standing 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 sci-
entist: 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 al-
ways 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, granu-
larity 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 topo-
graphically 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 ana-
lysis 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 ana-
lysis; 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, produc-
tion 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 phe-
nomena 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, microbio-
logical, and quantum phenomena have been evoked as sources of either continuity or trans-
formation 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 par-
ticularly 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 vari-
able. 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 en-
gagement 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 es-
sentially 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 perspec-
tive 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 demon-
strate 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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 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 com-
plement 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 inter-
national 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 mi-

raculous 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 des-
tination 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 sub-
stance, 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 some-
times 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 struc-
tural 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 determin-
istic 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 neverthe-
less 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 cyc-
lical 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 inter-
national 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 hu-
manity, in spatial terms; and something sharply different from or just a bit less than an inter-
national 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 ana-
lysis 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 tem-
poral 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 al-
ready 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 eight-
eenth 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 secu-
larization; 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, co-
lonial 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 pref-
erence 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 spa-
tial 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 under-
stood 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 under-
standing 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 increas-
ingly 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 dir-
ection 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 (‘do-
mestic 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 dis-
crimination, 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 col-
onization 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 uni-
versal 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 be-
tween 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 rec-
ognize 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 sys-
tematic 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 to-
wards 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 ana-
lysis. 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, es-
pecially 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 some-
thing 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 on-
going 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 signifi-
cance 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 heredi-
tary, 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 neces-
sity, 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 spe-
cific 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 nega-
tively ‘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/​transcen-
dental 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 im-
agine 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 histor-
ically 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 under-
standing of what the Renaissance was all about: to the ‘great outbreak of dualisms’ that in-
creasingly 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/​nat-
ural authority; and thus as a creature who might be understood both in the singular, as hu-
manity, 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 hu-
manity 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 dissol-
ution, to which not only the claim to sovereign statehood but also claims to popular sover-
eignty 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 quantita-
tive 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 rad-
ical 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 unfortu-
nate because Wight had already identified significant complementarities between in-
ternal and external forms of politics in their differential privileging of temporalities
and spatialities respectively. Yet neither difference nor complementarity imply separ-
ation: 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 dis-
solution 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, dis-
tinctive 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 sys-

temic 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 dis-
tinctive 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 pri-
mary 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.

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Butterfield, H. 1955. Man on His Past: The Study of the History of Historical Scholarship.
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Collingwood, R. G. 1946. The Idea of History. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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 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 na-
ture 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 histor-
ically. 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, be-
come 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 un-
precedented dangers. This realist vision of history is not tragic in the sense of eternal repeti-
tion: 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 prom-
inent 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 spe-
cific 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 inter-

national 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 struc-
ture 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, tra-
gically, 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 con-
flict 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 cooper-
ation 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 re-
turn: that structural determination may experience some lag and allow some relatively
temporary variation, but it will eventually reassert itself. For his part, Mearsheimer has re-
cently 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 pre-
vious section. Although he is often lumped in with a relatively undifferentiated and ahistor-
ical 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 per-
haps 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 (cap-
italist) social class and dominant (British) state. In its heyday, liberalism’s notion of the ‘har-
mony 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 his-
torical order changed and liberalism failed to recognize its ideological function and its inad-
equacy 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, nation-
alism, 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 clas-
sical 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 struc-
turally 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 polit-
ical 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 dis-
tinction, 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 prin-
ciple 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 dem-
ocracy, 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 alter-
native 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 emer-
gence 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 mod-
ernity 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 ab-
solutism (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 in-
creasingly 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 de-
cline 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 in-
dustrial 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 compensa-
tory 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, con-
flict, 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 in-
dividual 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 to-
talitarianism, 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 vio-
lence 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 it-
self. 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 dema-
gogic 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 engage-
ment 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 cap-
able 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 in-
tellectual history. Nowhere is this clearer than in the divide between realism and liber-
alism. 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 descrip-
tive term’ (Guilhot 2017, 12).
Finally, postwar realism’s vision of history was deeply marked by the question of nu-
clear 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 deci-
sion, 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 his-
torical 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 ad-
vent 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 pro-
gressivism 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 simul-
taneous 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 his-
tory 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 pol-
itics. 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 dir-
ection 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.

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 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 pos-
sible 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 so-
cialist 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 lib-
eral 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 im-
portance 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 na-
ture 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 under-
stand 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 inter-
nationalism 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 lib-
eralism 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 my-
self 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 nine-
teenth 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 inter-
nationalism 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 mod-
ernity 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 under-
standing 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 com-
munal 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 in-
stead the government becomes ‘external and tyrannical’ (Bosanquet 1916–​17).
Philosophically a cosmopolitan, Bosanquet nonetheless rejected the idea of cosmopol-
itan 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 gov-
ernment (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 commu-
nity 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 in-
dustrial 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 import-
ance 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 impera-
tive. 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 com-
munity, and the new liberal idea of governance needing to enclose an interdependent polit-
ical 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 per-
petual peace. Instead Hobhouse argued that interdependence (under industrialized mod-
ernity), 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 manifest-
ation 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 gov-
ernance. 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 mech-
anical machine designed to harness interdependence and prevent war. Shifting from an or-
ganic 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 indi-
vidual 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 lib-
eral 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 inter-
national 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 lib-
eral 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 specif-
ically 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 cen-
tury 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 so-
cial 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 satisfac-
tion 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 im-
mediately to hand, but both were flawed. One was an overarching powerful global organiza-
tion (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 con-
stitutional 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 prag-
matic 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 dir-
ectly 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 feder-
alist 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 devel-
opment 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 pos-
ition 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 ref-
erence 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 democ-
racy 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 ideo-
logical 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 oppos-
ition 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 mani-
festation 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 develop-
ment 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 ap-
plication 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 histor-
ically 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 empiri-
cist 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 gov-
ernment 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 de-
velopment of a new strata of global governance from the 1970s. The neoliberal approach
endeavoured to protect the free market from government interference by increas-
ingly 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 neo-
liberalism 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 pol-
itics 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, des-
pite 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 re-
vival, 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 exem-
plar 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 re-
action 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 in-
dustrialization 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 re-
newal (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 par-
ticular schools of liberalism are likely to be eclipsed, the ideas that make them up will be
reassembled in new ways.

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 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 under-

graduate 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 dis-
rupt international relations? What makes an order, system, society ‘international’? How ap-
propriate 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 the-
orize 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 his-
torical 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 pro-
vide 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, ma-
terialist, 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, some-
where 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 mod-
ernity, 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 ana-
lysis 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 pol-
itical 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 granu-
larity. 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 tex-
ture, 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 dia-
lectic 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 ana-
lytical 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 the-
oretical 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 chrono-
logical 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 rela-
tion 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 schol-
arship which contested their Weberian perspective in the second half of the twentieth cen-
tury, 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 syn-
chronic 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, intellec-
tual, 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 trad-
itional 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 ex-
ternal angles of analysis by theorizing and de-​externalizing the international so as to pro-
duce 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, pres-
entism, and Eurocentrism of realism and neorealism. The goal of contesting
Eurocentrism has broadened beyond realism and neorealism, becoming a rich and vi-
brant 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 em-
pirical (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 construc-
tion 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 his-
tory but insists on embedding it within a specific socio-​temporal bloc, thereby offering socio-
logical 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 conven-
tional 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 mod-
ernity 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 inter-
action, 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 com-
parison (diachronic or synchronic) of secondary literature; b) concept-​formation; c) em-
pirical 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 ‘in-
ternal’ 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 terri-
tory’ (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 ma-
terial, 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 geo-
political 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 inter-
national 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 caus-
ality 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 expan-
sion 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 re-
veal 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 onto-
logical 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 cer-
tain 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 de-
termine empirical and methodological problems such as Eurocentrism and claim to pro-
vide 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 am-
bitious 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 methodo-
logical 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 uni-
versal 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 de-
vice, 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 increas-
ingly 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 con-
temporary 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 ex-
ample, 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 in-
fluence 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, de-
pending 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 soci-
ology 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 signifi-
cant for the history of international relations and why?

Teaching students how they should choose topics of comparison emphasizes the import-
ance 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 under-
standing 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, argu-
ment 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 com-
pare 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 com-
parison. 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 compara-
tive 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 dis-
cipline 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 so-
cial 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 de-
scriptive 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 epis-
temological 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 per-
sonal reasons involving relationships with supervisors, colleagues, funding bodies, insti-
tutional 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 ser-
iously 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 methodo-
logical 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 be-
tween 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 deter-
minate 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 simi-
larity(-​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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 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 tech-
nique 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 imperi-
alism, 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 his-
tory, 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 be-
tween 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 his-
tory 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 under-
stand 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 methodo-
logical 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 globaliza-
tion 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 di-
vergence’ 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 es-
sentially 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 ex-
plain 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 in-
advertently 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 de-
bate 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 extraor-
dinary 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 relation-
ship 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 mo-
bility 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 so-
cial 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 migra-
tion. 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 con-
text 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 meth-
odological project (Moyn and Sartori 2013). They have also done much to decenter
Eurocentric narratives of the emergence and spread of political ideologies, including na-
tionalism 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 lo-
cally anchored events.
The second major gap relates to the preponderance of power asymmetries in his-
tory. 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 histor-
ical 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 chan-
ging 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 ad-
ministration (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 discip-
line. 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 schol-
arship 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 continu-
ally 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 main-
stream 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 his-
tory 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 in-
stitutional 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 inter-
national 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 dis-
tinct 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 na-
tional, 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 cen-
tral 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 capit-
alist expansion to imperialism (Buzan and Lawson 2015). From the sixteenth to the nine-
teenth 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 be-
tween 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 in-
tensely 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 pro-
cess 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 cri-
tique it, is matched by a second link between IR and global history: the former’s tendency to-
wards 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 sub-
ject 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 pol-
itical 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 inter-
national societies have been culturally plural and geographically dispersed. The British im-
perial 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 un-
equal 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 char-
acter 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, incor-
porative 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 max-
imalist 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 her-
meneutic 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 substi-
tute 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 histor-
ically oriented International Relations (IR) scholars, not least because it is difficult to pub-
lish 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 under-
standing. 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 en-
terprise 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 reflec-
tion 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 ‘contin-
gency 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 dy-
namics 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 in-
quiry 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 typic-
ally 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 his-
torically oriented conceptions of justice to focus instead, following Rawls, on current dis-
tributive 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 de-
gree 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 con-
textualist intellectual history conceived of not (or not primarily) as the painstaking examin-
ation 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 con-
textualist 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 in-
clude 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 phil-
osophy 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 context-
ualism is both a hermeneutic technique and a form of social theory. Taking history ser-
iously 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 ana-
lysis, 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 ex-
planatory breadth.
This points to the question of granularity addressed throughout the volume. Many intel-
lectual 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 sover-
eignty, 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 intel-
lectual 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 construct-
ivism 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 ma-
terial 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 analyt-
ical 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 so-
ciety’ 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 na-
tionalist 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 ex-
ploration. 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 in-
creasingly 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 inter-
national 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 lib-
eral 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 re-
cast 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 ana-
lysis 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 nine-
teenth 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 twen-
tieth 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 his-
torical 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 theoret-
ical argument. Drawing together IR and political thought, Alison McQueen (2017) shows,
through a subtle reading of Machiavelli, Hobbes, and Morgenthau, how the idea of apoca-
lypse 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 out-
side 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 par-
ticular 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 uto-
pianism. Though such work might not contribute directly to the advancement of contem-
porary 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 schol-
arship 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 an-
thology, Women’s International Thought: Towards a New Canon? (Owens 2021). This pro-
ject 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 ex-
clusion has taken various forms. Much effort has focused on expanding the scope of inter-
national/​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 ‘renais-
sance’ 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 his-
tory 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 fem-
inism 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 in-
tellectual 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 schol-
arship 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 pro-
ductive 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 intel-
lectual 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 sub-
ject of inquiry (e.g. Bayly 2011; Bose and Manjapra 2010). Others are more directly compara-
tive, 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 histor-
ical 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 so-
cial 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 his-
tory 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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 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 fem-
inist 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 pro-
ject 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 organ-
ization. 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 know-
ledge 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 ‘dis-
ciplinary 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 discip-
line 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 dis-
ciplinary 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 discip-
line 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 ana-
lysis of global politics and advocacy about interstate relations. As Tickner and True ex-
plain, 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 in-
spiration 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 histor-
ically visible makes visible their subjection and their subjectivity—​both of which are im-
portant 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 ac-
tivist 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 inter-
national 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 re-
covery. 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 his-
tory 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 trans-
formation 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 to-
gether, 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 so-
cietal organization to kinship as co-​residence; in effect constituting a smaller and more in-
dependent household—​the “family”—​centered on husband-​wife-​offspring relations’. As
such, ‘historically, state-​making established heteropatriarchal family/​households as foun-
dational 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 inherit-
ance 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 reproduc-
tion’ (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 reproduc-

tion becomes a fundamental part of nationalist practice (Peterson 1999, 39). In this
way, ‘heterosexist ideology and practice is inextricable from the centralization of pol-
itical 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 cul-
tural 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 ‘normaliza-
tion of heteropatriarchal principles’ has been key ‘to securing ‘appropriate social repro-
duction and reliable transmission of property’ to make possible the ‘intergenerational
continuity of state formations’ (Peterson, 2014b, 605, emphasis in original). The preser-
vation 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, be-
cause ‘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 ‘capit-
alism 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 concep-
tually 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 cor-
rective 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 his-
tory 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 hetero-
sexist) 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 in-
visible not only these things but the people who live them.
Other queer theorists who think about history are less sure that history and historiog-
raphy are salvageable in the face of the ways that they are implicated in domination and sub-
jection. 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 histori-
cism 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 con-
tinuous 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 produc-
tion 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 simi-
larly 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 be-
yond 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 evolu-
tion 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 pol-
itics might be both more accurate and less subject to weaponization for social and socio-
logical 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, progres-
sivist) 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 al-
ways 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)im-
perial 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 neo-
liberal 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 con-
ceptual 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 ex-
plicit 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 an-
other 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 nei-
ther ‘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 feasi-
bility 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) ‘re-
covery’ 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 intellec-
tual project. Love (2007) suggests that even this is not enough—​that the complicated rela-
tionship 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 destruc-
tion 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 them-
selves. These perspectives, separately and together, provide insight into the matrixes of avail-
able 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).

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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 pol-
itician), 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 unfin-
ished 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 colo-
nial 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 trans-
formation 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 there-
fore 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 so-
ciety. (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 polit-
ical 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 na-
tionalism’ (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 sub-
ject 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 dis-
appeared 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 im-
perialism, 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 co-
lonial 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 simi-
larity 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 histori-
cism 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 constitu-
tion 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/​underdevel-
oped, 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 (trad-
itional, 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 re-
search 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 discip-
line 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 imperi-
alism’ (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 scholar-
ship 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 construc-
tion 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 ex-
pand 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 inter-
national order that focus exclusively on the West as the agent through which sovereignty
and subjecthood were imagined. Grovogui underlines how IR is ‘founded upon incom-
plete 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 dem-
onstrate that their ‘doctrines and visions were constitutive of a distinct ‘language’ of inter-
national 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 pos-
sibility 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 ‘an-
other 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’ be-
cause ‘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 dom-
inant understandings have been constructed.

Conclusion

The concerns of postcolonial history are wide-​ranging, and it is hard to present a sum-
mary 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 co-
lonial past. The second relates to who the subject of history is and who is presented by schol-
arship 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 problem-
atization 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 pre-
dominantly 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 colo-
nial empire as supposedly assimilated. They were usually involved in the colonial admin-
istration 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 mod-
ernity 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 his-
tory 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 inter-
national 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 ‘his-
torical’ 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 ma-
jority 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 inter-
national 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 deter-
minism 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 calcula-
tion 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 pol-
itical 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 his-
torical 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 interdepend-
ence (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, indus-
trialist and philanthropist Andrew Carnegie, colonialists Cecil Rhodes, philosopher Joseph
Chamberlain, and pundit William James and, for a time at least, economist and social the-
orist 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 ma-
terially 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 pro-
cess. 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 sem-
inal debate between ‘idealism’ and ‘realism’. It has done so not least by illuminating the ex-
tent 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 internation-
alist 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 be-
came 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 inter-
national 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 recon-
struct 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 internation-
alist’ (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 con-
sistently 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 indi-
cate the new developments in political science. It is surely not inappropriate that similar em-
phasis 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 out-
side 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 fi-
nancial 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 inter-
national 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 after-
math 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 de-
bate. 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 theoret-
ical 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 conver-
gence 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, in-
creasingly, 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 dip-
lomatic 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 scholar-
ship’. Significantly, Maier suggested international historians should shift their attention away
from reconstructing decisions and toward an exploration of systemic issues as well as trans-
national 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 indi-
cator is the edited collection, Explaining the History of American Foreign Relations. The most
recent edition contains chapters on corporatist frameworks, political economy, develop-
ment, 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 di-
versity, 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 coher-
ence 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 epis-
temological 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 per-
spective 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 diplo-
macy, 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 cooper-
ation 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 inter-
national historians and IR scholars often see as working in quasi-​automatic fashion to regu-
late 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 dy-
namics, 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 inter-
national 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 ne-
gotiate 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, ri-
valry, 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 influ-
ence 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 discip-
linary 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 in-
centive 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 be-
tween the two fields. There are ways to encourage convergence that do not require the cre-
ation 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 de-
ploy 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 insti-
tutional 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 se-
curity studies to argue for the emergence of a ‘new European security culture’ in the after-
math 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 be-
tween 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 oppor-
tunistic, 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 inter-
national 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 inter-
national thought as ‘theoretical reflection on that peculiar political arena populated vari-
ously 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 re-
semble 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 an-
cient 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 inter-
national 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 be-
yond 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 aca-
demic 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 back-
ground, 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 cen-
tury 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 his-
tory 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 them-
selves, and the language and social contexts in which they are embedded, have been in con-
tinuous 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 inter-
national 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 clas-
sical 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 innova-
tive 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 prolif-
erate 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 na-
tional 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 main-
land 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 pos-
ition of China made Confucianism able to be rediscovered as a significant source of its cul-
tural 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 conse-
quent 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 com-
prehensive 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 his-
tory 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, ra-
ther 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 spe-
cific 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 inter-
national 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 inter-
national 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 obvi-
ously 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 emer-
gence, 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 inter-
national 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 prefer-
ence, 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 inter-
national 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 contri-
bution 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 super-
iority 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 predica-
ment. Remedies found in and adapted from non-​Western classics have been provided onto-
logically, 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 an-
cient 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 inter-
action 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 inter-
national 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 polit-
ical 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 epis-
temological inquiries beyond the ‘Westphalian straitjacket’. Acharya employed Buddhist
philosophy to broaden the epistemology of IR (Acharya 2011). Ling noted that ‘[m]‌ost in-
sidiously, Westphalia World denies Multiple Worlds epistemically’, and turned to ‘the ancient
epistemology of Daoist dialectics for contemporary world politics’ which ‘enables inter-
action 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 explor-
ation 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 propos-
ition of symbiosis of international society would inevitably replace the proposition of inter-
national 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 method-
ology 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 meth-
odological 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 imma-
terialism, 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 phil-
osophy differ. Similarly, ancient Chinese philosopher Gongsun Long is linked to postmod-
ernity 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, en-
deavour 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 in-
terpretation, 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 his-
tory’, 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 his-
tory 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 in-
creasingly 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 un-
doubted 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 be-
tween 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 to-
gether 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 be-
yond, 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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 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 histor-
ical 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 ana-
lysis 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 sover-
eignty, but equally challenging with the other two). Furthermore, it can be difficult to distin-
guish 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 con-
clude 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 rep-
resent 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 eco-
nomic 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 institu-
tional trajectory of specific states (e.g. Collins 1995), abstract analyses of the state as an insti-
tution (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 pol-
itical 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 transi-
tion 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 per-
sistent complexity. Others have also identified specific institutional forms that were not
simple ‘way stations’ on the road to modernity: the early-​modern ‘conglomerate’ or ‘com-
posite’ 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 mo-
bilize people and resources, and some level of hierarchy. Or we could shift our focus to gov-
ernance 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 granu-
larity 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 out-
side 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 convention-
ally been operationalized in IR; how History, IR, and related fields have approached ‘sys-
temic 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 inter-
national 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 em-
pirical 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 recog-
nition 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) differ-
entiation 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 trans-
formation, 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 ex-
ternal 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, foun-
dational English School studies like Bull (1977) and Wight (1977) recognize the histor-
ical 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 inter-
national 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 con-
cept 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 nation-
alism (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) com-
parison of early modern Europe with Warring States-​era China demonstrates the contin-
gency 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 sys-
temic 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 conven-
tional narrative that the modern system emerged entirely internal to Europe and then was
imposed or imitated elsewhere. Colonialism and imperialism, in other words, have conven-
tionally 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 colo-
nial 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 polit-
ical 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 dir-
ectly. 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 con-
cept, ‘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 conceptualiza-
tion 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 pol-
itical 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 recogni-
tion 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 pol-
itics 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 re-
veal 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 re-
search: 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 his-
torical evolution of each, but scholars are often unclear which they are explaining. As a re-
sult, 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 sub-
ject to diverse causal dynamics. Of course, the three concepts are never completely dis-
crete. 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 sov-
ereign 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 par-
ticular 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 some-
times 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 coloni-
alism 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 de-
velopment 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 investi-
gate how their views and perspective pertain to modern conceptions of the state, sover-
eignty, 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 “ex-
ternal” sovereignty was well established in the Hindu philosophy of the state’. This might re-
veal 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 appro-
priate generalizable findings while avoiding anachronism. And addressing this problem,
in turn, has important implications for the granularity of historical research. One po-
tential 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 dif-
ficult, 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 analyt-
ical concepts and categories, rather than more historically contingent ideas such as sover-
eignty, statehood, or anarchy.
Finally, a promising new area of inquiry is the materiality of states, sovereignty, and terri-
tory. 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, sov-
ereignty 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 unex-
plored 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 ana-
lysis, 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 an-
cient 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 im-
munity 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 ex-
change was often thought to mean a state of war. Once war began, heralds obtained permis-
sion 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 main-
tain 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 hospi-
tality. 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 be-
came 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 reli-
gious 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 inter-
national 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 ul-
timately 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 cor-
rectly 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 be-
came 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 pro-
vincial 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 re-
pudiate 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 chan-
ging 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 com-
munication but written communication remained important; safe conducts were issued,
protocols established, terms provided (Millar 1988, 358). Rome passed down a highly legal-
istic 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 pri-
vate 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 representa-
tive 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 commu-
nity, 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 sur-
prisingly, clerics were often sent because they were men of learning and because their reli-
gious 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 establish-
ment and increasing spread of a new and uniquely Western innovation, the resident am-
bassador. 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 vis-
ibly symbolized goodwill—​the principal in sending and the accredited party in receiving.
This practice moved in every larger waves from the Mediterranean, northward and east-
ward 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 explo-
sive 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 dis-
charge 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 informa-
tion: ‘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 per-
manent 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 senti-
ment. 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 gen-
eration 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 haz-
ardous. 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 eti-
quette, 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 im-
munity for only then were relations possible. Because of the desire for, or the dread of, re-
ciprocal 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 dip-
lomatic 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 resi-
dent 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 ideo-
logical 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 entou-
rage, 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 trad-
itional assumptions and values. Revolutionaries criticized not only the old order but diplo-
macy 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 in-
trigue’ (Gilbert 1951, 255). The French revolutionaries saw the diplomatic system as an arti-
fact 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 ne-
gotiate 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 diplo-
matic 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 inter-
national 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 dom-
inate the expanded world. Throughout the nineteenth, twentieth, and twenty-​first centuries,
the ‘European’ law of nations collided with other mutually exclusive, imperial, and funda-
mentally 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 ei-
ther 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 polit-
ical interest. For jurists such as François Laurent, ‘the droit des gens should reflect the ineluct-
ability 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 de-
terioration 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 ad-
ministrative jurisdiction.
The attempt to codify the privileges accorded the personnel and representatives to inter-
national 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 limita-
tion 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 funda-
mentally 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.

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 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 re-
cent 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 organiza-
tion 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 po-
tentially 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 uni-
form 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 sub-
ordinate 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 in-
stance, 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 neces-
sarily imply a territorial or legal operation of power, but a form of social and ‘epistemic’ dom-
inance and exclusion—​a definition that aligns more closely with early twentieth-​century
anti-​colonial critiques of empire. Here hierarchies of imperial consciousness and know-
ledge 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 hier-
archy 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 imperi-
alism 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 con-
ception 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 histor-
ical 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 hap-
hazard 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 pol-
itics (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 con-
tinuation 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 geog-
raphy of law (Benton 2010; Keene 2002). Her observation on empire’s spaces being ‘polit-
ically 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 vio-
lence 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 co-
lonial 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 con-
found presumptions at the basic level of interstate intercourse. The pooling of sover-
eignty amongst imperial powers at treaty ports such as Shanghai offers one instance of
the imperial foundations of interdependence. Territorial ambiguity disturbs comfort-
able 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 patch-
work of ‘barbarous’ and ‘uncivilized’ states whose rulers were best managed rather than
occupied outright; a policy that frequently generated cooperation rather than competi-
tion (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 per-
iphery would be visited on the metropole (Arendt 2017; Barder 2015; Césaire 2001). The bur-
eaucratic 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 ter-
ritorial 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 under-
standing 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 tran-
sition 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 reflec-
tion) of these techniques; the crafting of imperial subjects (in part through their differen-
tiation); 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, collabor-
ation, and contestation for proto-​imperial entities (Bose 2009). Recognizing this is im-
portant 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 it-
self 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 pro-
vide 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 extrac-
tion 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, co-
lonial 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 in-
stance 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 intel-
lectual 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 re-
lief from the more pernicious universalizing tendencies of the modern is offered through
multiplying modernities: cosmopolitan (Mohanty 2018), multiple (Eisenstadt 2000), alter-
native (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 colo-
nial/​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 the-
oretical 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 vivisec-
tion 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 his-
torical 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 so-
cial 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 cir-
culation 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 surveil-
lance states (especially Dutch and British agencies), but for the fostering of pan-​regional
anti-​colonial groups (Alexanderson 2019). Similar processes were evident in the develop-
ment 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 discontinu-
ation 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 par-
tition 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 im-
perial 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 pol-
itical 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 trans-
national 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 dias-
pora 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 immi-
grant 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 revolu-
tionary 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 in-
stance 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: decoloniza-
tion. 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 cat-
egory 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 engage-
ment 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 substan-
tive concerns of contemporary world politics that mainstream IR currently struggles with.
The world ordering effects of circulations: labour movements, knowledge, technology, dis-
ease, 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 cam-
paign, terrorism, and the rise of the ‘new right’.
Perhaps most important for the project of historical IR, however, is that a deeper theor-
ization 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 re-
nationalization 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 histor-
ical 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 di-
chotomy 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 cul-
ture 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 out-
right 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 dis-
cursive 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 dis-
cursive 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 histor-
icity 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 his-
torical 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 edi-
fice 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 for-
eigner. 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 ‘in-
ferior’. 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 primi-
tivism, 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 ethnocentri-
city 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 cul-
ture 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 cul-
turally 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 op-
position 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 dyn-
asty (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 (bar-
barian) 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 sub-
sequently 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 be-
tween 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 be-
lief 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 re-
ligion 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, how-
ever, highlighted the cultural and moral antagonism of civilization versus barbarism over
their purely religious difference, reminiscent more of the Greek/​barbarian antinomy in clas-
sical Greece.
Two other evolving conceptions of barbarism are worth considering here. The disinte-
gration 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, how-
ever, 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 en-
counter 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 usu-
ally 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 in-
corporation 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 dis-
tinct 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 civiliza-
tion, 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 uni-
versal kingship and is informed by a perennial discourse on the distinction and relation-
ship 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 concep-
tion 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 dic-
tionary 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 refine-
ment, 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 histor-
ical process and an achieved condition of refinement and order underpinned by ‘the gen-
eral 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 re-
public 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 construc-
tion, 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 civiliza-
tion specifically based on the idea of a secular unity of Europe. For the first time the super-
iority 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 mod-
ernity’ (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 mod-
ernity. 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 civ-
ilization. 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, le-
gality, 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 civ-
ilization 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 de-
cline 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 jurispru-
dence 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 cul-
tural hierarchy defined, or rather disguised, in civilizational terms is integral to the nine-
teenth 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 in-
strumentally 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 vio-
lence’ (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 never-
theless 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 artifi-
cial 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 inte-
gral 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 geog-
raphy 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, bar-
baric, 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 en-
counter ‘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 per-
manent 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 interven-
tion 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 di-
verse civilizational roots into a functional and pluralistic international society. The prolifer-
ation 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 im-
perial 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 per-
petual violence against its inferior others, the colonized, is exposed cogently and unforgiv-
ingly 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 im-
morality 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 ideo-
logical divides of the Cold War, i.e., capitalism versus communism and democracy versus to-
talitarianism, 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 citi-
zens 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 “civil-
ization” 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 bar-
baric 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 dis-
order 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 cul-
ture 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 it-
self ’ 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 civiliza-
tion 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 histor-
ically 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 civ-
ilization 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 inter-

national 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 under-
standing the fluid and contested conceptions of barbarism and civilization.

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 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 na-
tional 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 ineluct-
able 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 defin-
ition 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 so-
cial 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 geog-
rapher 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 geograph-
ical 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 coloni-
alism, 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 par-
ticular, 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 perva-
siveness 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 presti-
gious 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 geopol-
itical 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 se-
curity 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 di-
verse, 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 un-
critical 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, ei-
ther through a mandate system in which erstwhile colonies (construed as pre-​modern) be-
came 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, be-
came ‘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 pol-
itics. 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 respon-
sible 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 pro-
tect’. 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 interven-
tion? 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 dis-
solution 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 colo-
nial 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 ra-
cial 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 hu-
manism or to the ‘progressiveness’ of white abolitionists. Thus, the slippery and slick char-
acter 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 scien-
tific 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 en-
dorsement 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 indi-
genous 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 dis-
cipline of IR is built.
Given the cacophony of voices advancing self-​determination at the time, one can de-
duce 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 devel-
opment, sedimenting the veneer of racial equality while retaining the Wilsonian logics of tu-
telage 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 trad-
itional, whereas the West was rendered modern. This bifurcation of the world was not inci-
dental, 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 be-
came a euphemism for ‘good’ (and white), sacrificing any nuance or granularity for sim-
plistic accounts of civilized people and their backward counterparts.
Wilson’s racial paternalism abroad—​which saw colonies rated on a sliding scale of devel-
opmental 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 gov-
ernment 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 in-
tolerable 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 eman-
cipation, 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 ac-
tually 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 ‘commer-
cial 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 coloni-
alism in Asia and Africa, sums up many of the concerns of this chapter thus far: ‘Here as else-
where 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 ra-
cism 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 pronounce-
ment 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 po-
tential 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 be-
fore 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 culmin-
ation of white civilization and the beginning of the inevitable decline, and the only sal-
vation 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 influ-
ential 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 audi-
ence, 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 some-
thing 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 con-
ceit 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 pol-
itical 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 disproportion-
ately 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 be-
yond 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 ubiqui-
tous 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 in-
formal 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 trans-
national 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 ‘sover-
eignty’ 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 pol-
itics. 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 struc-
ture world politics has to be contended with. As early as 1965, Kwame Nkrumah the presi-
dent 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 exci-
sion 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 sover-
eign 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 nomin-
ally 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 colon-
ization 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 al-
ready 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 pol-
itics, 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 sub-
ject 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 sov-
ereignty 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 inter-
national 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 cen-
tenary 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 sep-
aratist’ 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 to-
wards women. More pertinently, perhaps the very desire to ‘honour’ persons who are in-
variably ‘great men’ needs to be rethought, ‘decolonized’, and ultimately relinquished.

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 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, some-
times 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 analyt-
ical 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 in-
fluence 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 secu-
larism 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 ‘reli-
gion’, 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 ‘reli-
gion’, and also in downgrading, silencing, or even erasing the importance of many kinds of
religious commitments, practices, and experiences around the globe with significant histor-
ical 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 di-
minish 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 be-
tween 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 co-
lonial 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 gov-
ernance, 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 inter-
faith 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 inde-
pendent 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 jus-
tice . . . 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, be-
tween 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 secu-
larization 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’) mod-
ernity, 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 in-
exorable (although not inevitable) ‘rationalizing’ force that resulted in the development of
‘world religions’ organized according to bureaucratic criteria that would enable them to op-
erate transnationally, but, in some interpretations, would also eventually end in the progres-
sive 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 dem-
onstrate 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 mu-
tual 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 insep-
arability 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 defi-
cient ‘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 his-
torical role of ‘traditional’ or ‘Indigenous’ religions across the world, including their syncre-
tism 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 in-
complete 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 es-
sentialist 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 granu-
larity 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 pol-
itics 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 influen-
tial 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 ex-
plicitly 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 gen-
erally situated particular religious traditions within socio-​economic and political contexts,
adopting a constitutive understanding of ‘religious doctrine, economic development, polit-
ical 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 reli-
gious/​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 be-
tween 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 re-
ligious 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 re-
ligious 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 re-
ligious 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 under-
standing 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 spe-
cific 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 be-
yond 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 re-
ligious 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 rela-
tionship 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 nu-
merous commentators, his resulting framework is too mechanistic to account for intention-
ality 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 em-
pirical 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 ‘reflex-
ivity 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 rep-
resent 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 in-
terrogation, 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 ‘re-
ligion’ 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 histor-
ical 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 onto-
logical and epistemological commitments opens up our analysis of historical and contem-
porary 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 expres-
sion 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 be-

yond Weber’s ‘world religions’ is required to understand the historical as well as contem-
porary 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, col-
onization, 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 comple-
ment 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 sur-
face, 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 in-
stitutionalization 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 incompat-
ible 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 con-
temporary 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 discus-
sion 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 relation-
ship 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, his-
toriographical 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 evolu-
tion 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 historio-
graphical 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 con-
temporary 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 philo-
sophical 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 his-
torical 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 intel-
lectual 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 inter-
national 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 break-
through and consolidation of international human rights, particularly through decoloniza-
tion 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 emanci-
patory 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 rad-
ical 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 dis-
tributional 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 in-
stance, 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 ex-
plicitly engages in a historiographical critique of many of the orthodoxies of human rights his-
tory: 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 re-
cipe for their eventual downfall: Moyn argues the global expansion of human rights has ir-
retrievably 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 ar-
gument, not a history about the subject. Whether Hopgood acknowledges it or not, how-
ever, 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, par-
ticularly 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 lan-
guage 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 tremen-
dous 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 con-
trast 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 discus-
sion 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 trajec-
tory 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 granu-
larity 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 an-
cient 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 en-
tity, 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 be-
tween earlier rights . . . and eventual ‘human rights’ and that the rights that fueled eight-
eenth 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 granu-
larity 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 ‘nat-
ural 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, geog-
raphy, 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 defin-
ition 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 opti-
mism, 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 con-
siderably 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 twi-
light of human rights law. However, Posner’s conclusions have been criticized as faulty pre-
cisely 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 advo-
cacy 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 granu-
larity 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 recogni-
tion 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 com-
patible 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 dis-
course, 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 illus-
trate 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 historiograph-
ical 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 evolu-
tion 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 analyt-
ical 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 diffi-
cult 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 emer-
gence of twentieth-​century human rights during the postwar period within a coarser time-
scale 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 historio-
graphical 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 ana-
lytical 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 his-
torical 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 historio-
graphical consequences that directly impact one’s perspective about the role and effective-
ness 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 ra-
ther 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 incum-
bent 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 interpret-
ation 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 interpret-
ation, 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 in-
equality (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 compre-
hensively 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 imagin-
ation due to the immense symbolic aura of its archetype, the Holocaust, which set an im-
possibly 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 ma-
terial 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 inter-
national 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 by-
stander 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 in-
nocence; 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 be-
cause political logics govern any extensive civilian destruction, but the diplomacy of geno-
cide 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, pol-
itical) 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 legitim-
ately 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 geno-
cide 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 geo-
politics. The chapter concludes by noting the recurrence of atrocity language. By privileging
racialized civilian destruction (‘identity crimes’) over securitized and collateral civilian de-
struction, genocide has become virtually impossible to prove in courts, leading to the re-
turn 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 de-
bate 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 dy-
namics 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 in-
cipient 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 ob-
serve 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 admin-
ister 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 im-
perial 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 pre-
amble 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 im-
petus 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 occupa-
tion. 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 an-
cient 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 con-
text 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 ra-
ther 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 be-
tween 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 de-
bate 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 mili-
tary 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 inter-
national 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 des-
troy 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 des-
troy 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 inter-
ference 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 vir-
tual court of international public opinion. To be sure, this judgement had serious diplo-
matic 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 sub-
ject 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 phil-
osopher Jean-​Paul Sartre excoriated the US war in Vietnam in the same terms, while the un-
successful 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 mili-
tary conflicts in the Great Lakes region of Africa and in the Balkans occurred when
fleeting moments of consensus could be reached about an international legal response,
resulting in two ad hoc criminal tribunals (for Rwanda and the former Yugoslavia) and the
successful negotiation of the Rome Statute in 1998 to establish the International Criminal
Court (ICC).
The tribunals were also responses to the perceived failure to intervene based, as before,
on the proposition that these were roughly symmetrical conflicts driven by tribalism or
‘ancient hatreds’, and thus not analogizable with the Holocaust (Hansen 2006). Analysis of
UNSC debates indicates that it was inclined to vote for intervention when conflicts could be
depicted as ‘intentional’; meaning that clear victims and perpetrators could be identified.
It was less likely to support intervention when conflicts were ‘inadvertent’ and ‘complex’,
meaning ‘multifaceted, complicated, and tragic situations in which multiple and often
fragmenting groups are responsible’. In such cases, intervention was unlikely to be seen as
efficacious (Walling 2013, 26). For this reason, some have observed a ‘moral hazard’ in the
genocide optic, because it encourages secessionist movements to provoke attacks on civilians
to inflame international public opinion and lead to foreign intervention (Kuperman 2008).
Certainly, claiming they are victims of genocide is a favoured rhetorical move by secessionist
movements (Grodsk 2012).
Underling the legalization trend, UN member states signed off on the Responsibility
to Protect (R2P) norm in 2005 that had been developed in 2001 by the International
Commission on Intervention and State Sovereignty, an ad hoc committee chaired by the
Canadian government. The norm declared that states have ‘the responsibility to protect its
populations from genocide, war crimes, ethnic cleansing and crimes against humanity’ and,
further, that it ‘entails the prevention of such crimes, including their incitement, through ap-
propriate and necessary means’ (UN Office on Genocide Prevention and the Responsibility
to Protect). While R2P had to be consistent with the UN Charter’s limitations on inter-
vention, the norm did point to a renewed commitment to fulfill the spirit of the Martens
Clause and to take seriously the mandate of the ICC. Since then, the question of legitimacy is
mediated by legal considerations as parties try to attract ICC attention.
However, just as the ICC sparked into life, subsequent Russian and Chinese assert-
iveness in the Security Council inhibited its referrals. Russia, China, and other states be-
came alarmed by the seeming exploitation of the R2P norm in the campaign against Libya
in 2011, which they said exceeded the UNSC mandate by extending to regime change. Also
thwarting the ICC is the traditional practice of protecting client states. Just as Western
powers ensure Israeli officials and politicians avoid prosecution for war crimes, so Russia
and China block action on Syrian crimes and the Myanmar expulsion of Rohingyas, defying
the recommendations UN fact finding missions and the International Court of Justice. As a
result of this Cold War-​like split on the UNSC, legal considerations are now largely symbolic
as well, except for some African states.
 The Diplomacy of Genocide    287

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

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

Conclusion: The Return of Atrocity?

Because the diplomacy of genocide stymies rather than promotes civilian protection,
prominent advocates of humanitarian intervention have abandoned or supplemented
it by reviving the pre-​Second World War diplomacy of atrocity. Insiders now propose
‘crimes against humanity’, which debuted in the Entente note to the Ottoman govern-
ment in 1915, as an alternative to genocide, because it covers the same acts as genocide but
without the strenuous intent requirement (Evans 2006). Moreover, commentators have
advocated ‘atrocity crimes’ to cover the infractions covered by genocide, crimes against
humanity, and war crimes (Scheffer 2006). The Rome Statute of the ICC signalled the way
by bundling genocide, war crimes, crimes against humanity, and crimes against peace
under the rubric of ‘most serious crimes of concern to the international community as
a whole’ (Rome Statute, Article 5[1]‌2000). The new United Nations Office of the Special
Adviser on the Prevention of Genocide has effectively institutionalized this approach by
stating its ‘duty to prevent and halt genocide and mass atrocities’ (Office of The Special
Adviser on The Prevention of Genocide). The office’s ‘Framework of Analysis for Atrocity
Crimes’, released in 2014, elaborated this point by transcending the genocide concept’s
narrow national-​ethnic-​racial definition of a targeted group to include the more general
‘protected groups, populations or individuals’ included in crimes against humanity and
war crimes (UN 2014).
This innovation by scholars and diplomats working at the coalface of international pol-
itics represents a major critique of the modernist legal architecture to protect civilians and
combatants that culminated in human rights revolution after the Second World War. It
implies that the hierarchy of these various crimes is inimical to their prevention, and that
large-​scale atrocity is their common denominator. Taken together, the framework runs
counter to the monumentalization of genocide.
And yet, the allure of ‘genocide’ continues as before for victim groups and invaded states.
Advocates from and for the Uyghur minority in Xinjiag province of China allege that the
government’s incarceration and sterilization policies are tantamount to genocide (Finley
Smith 2021). Likewise, the Ukrainian government insists that the Russian invasion of early
2022 is genocidal because of attacks on its civilian population and the stated Russian aim to
destroy Ukrainian statehood and nationality. As always, external support is sought. Uyghurs
want diplomatic pressure exerted on China while the Ukrainians require weapons. It may
be no accident that US President Biden declared that Russia was committing genocide on
 The Diplomacy of Genocide    289

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

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 Chapter 20

War and H i story i n

World P ol i t i c s
Tarak Barkawi

The professors and the public just don’t like the same kind of history.
Doyne Dawson (2008, 603)

War may seem a familiar category to International Relations (IR) scholars who understand
their discipline to be about questions of war and peace. And historians have written many
histories of wars. The aim of this essay is the uncomfortable one of making the encounter
with war strange for both disciplines, in order to identify new directions for inquiry. I do so
by focusing on the relations between war and knowledge about war, a war/​knowledge prob-
lematic (Barkawi and Brighton 2011). In respect of IR, I situate the discipline as shaped by
war, in co-​constitutive relations with it, rather than intellectually in command of war. One
need only reflect on the significance for the development of IR of Anglo-​American victory
in the Second World War, or of the imbrication of the discipline in the Cold War US, to ap-
preciate the force of this point (Hoffmann 1977; Oren 2003). In respect of History, I turn to
History done outside of university settings, among soldiers, veterans, and publics. I seek to
highlight some of the ways in which war is reproduced through the writing and consump-
tion of military histories. At the same time, I draw attention to potential critical resources
and perspectives in these practitioner and amateur accounts. Critical traditions of inquiry
have a way of beginning outside the academy, as they have in areas as diverse as Marxism
or lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ) history (Kunzel 2018). This may
prove true of histories of war.
Armed encounters between and among peoples in world politics have shaped societies
and polities, economies, and cultures, and the relations between them. The histories and
sociologies of these encounters make up the domain of an international and historical war
studies. As a primary form of transboundary encounter, war should be a phenomenon to
be explored, not a fact to be explained or counted by IR theory. Although we have brilliant
classical statements, and extraordinary contemporary scholarship, the main challenge in
the study of war remains bringing together ‘war’ and ‘society’ in the same analytic frame in
 War and History in World Politics    293

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

By contrast, contemporary university-​trained historians think historiographically. They

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

War and Knowledge about War

Much systemic analysis related to war and military affairs, in and beyond the academy,
begins from the standpoint of instrumental rationality. For those at any level, from the pri-
vate solider to the statesperson, contemplating participation in war, the question of how to
prevail often dominates. It serves as a life and death incitement to research and inquiry of
all kinds. Most inquiry related to war and armed forces more or less baldly concerns how to
do some aspect of war better. In political science and strategic studies, this takes the form of
policy science and advice, often underwritten by objectivist and materialist epistemologies.
As Peter Paret comments, much traditional and official military history concerns ‘lessons
learned’ and other ‘purely utilitarian’ purposes (1971, 381). The industrialization and the
totalization of warfare in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries broke down barriers be-
tween distinctly military and civilian knowledge domains. Everything from physics to
area studies would eventually become relevant to ‘national security’ (Cumings 1999, 173–​
204; Leslie 1993). The preparation for and conduct of war became ever more complex and
rationalized, drawing in technical and natural sciences as well as more humanistic areas
of learning (Bousquet 2009). Developments in warfare helped drive developments in the
production of knowledge, across a range of fields (Light 2003; Lowen 1997; Rawls 2018).
These processes were historical, shaped by, and shaping, the epistemologies of the day as
 War and History in World Politics    295

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

History and Historiography

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

the incidence and rates of types of war. These claims can be mobilized as ‘facts’ requiring the-
oretical explanation. Examples include the putative decline of interstate war and the rise in
civil war since 1945, or that no states coded as ‘democratic’ have waged interstate war on one
another since the data began (Braumoeller 2019; Russett 1993).
CoW data is rigorously collected and revised, but within its own terms. For CoW, states
and wars are defined by the same criteria across time and place. Competing databases which
tweak definitions or more rigorously collect data from, say, non-​Western cases, do not differ
in principle in this respect (Lyall 2020; Reiter et al. 2016). War is not something that changes
and has histories of its own. Each war is essentially the same as another, subject to variation
in the number of combatants and casualties. The Second World War becomes a data point,
interstate war number 139 in the CoW data.
The dominant positivist traditions in political science and IR require fixed definitions of
social kinds and categories, such as states, regime types, or types of war. Only in this way can
patterns and generalizations be established that hold over time and place. The approach is
ahistorical on principle. In contrast, for historicist approaches to social inquiry, wars and
armed forces evolve, changing over time and place. An excellent example is the industri-
alization and totalization of modern warfare over the nineteenth and twentieth centuries,
culminating in the advent of nuclear weapons which transformed world politics and the
conduct of war (Buzan and Lawson 2015; Malesevic 2010; McNeill 1982). In these studies,
war not only changes historically, it is dynamically interrelated with society, economics,
science, politics, culture, and so on. But even historicist social inquiry seeks to generalize,
however attentive to historical detail.
By contrast, as Sarah Maza remarks of historians, their ‘purpose is not to extract
from one historical situation a generalization that can be applied to another’, but ra-
ther to ‘order, and make sense of, a complicated set of events at a particular point in the
past’ (2017, 164). Historians’ questions, interpretive frames, and sources have their own
histories; they are themselves historical. To train as a contemporary university historian
is to learn to think historiographically, to situate research in the context of the existing
historiography of an historical object or set of objects. The assumptions, questions,
silences, politics, and much else that have shaped history writing over time become evi-
dent. This does not mean that these histories do not contain facts, only that they have
certain facts, not others, and that they assign certain significances to those facts, and not
to others. Historians are not alone in arguing the facts of the past are constituted through
the concerns of the present (Benjamin 1968, 253–​264; Nietzsche 1997; Weber 1949). But
their training and practice are perhaps unique in driving this point home, even if they are
as susceptible in their own way as positivists to notions of the accumulation of knowledge
(Wilder 2012).
Historians see shifts in prevailing interpretations, and in the facts they uncover and assign
significance to, as salutary evidence of intellectual vitality. These shifts are also evidence of
how social and political change impacts the academy and its research. Only certain questions
and answers are thinkable in any given context. Some remarks on the Haitian revolution as
an historical and interdisciplinary object of inquiry illustrate these points. They also intro-
duce the significance of taking account of non-​university inquiry. This will give us some
tools to approach military historiography.
Broadly, in recent decades, scholars have reconsidered the meaning and signifi-
cance of the Haitian revolution as an object of inquiry. Notably, it had not figured in the
 War and History in World Politics    297

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

Military historiography

To address this question, I look at an important set of review essays of military history,
mostly written by prominent North American university historians (Citino 2007; Dawson
2008; Howard 1983; Lynn 1997; Paret 1971; Sherry 1990; Showalter 1975; Shy 1993). These
essays speak to, and cite one another, and are frequently cited as representing the state of the
field. I call attention to two entangled themes found in them. The first of these concerns the
characteristic antinomy in the study of war between war front-​and home front-​centered
approaches, between a focus on the fighting (‘war’) and a focus on its wider context and
effects (‘society’). In these review essays, and in scholarship they discuss, this antinomy often
takes the form of an opposition between traditional, operational, or ‘drums and trumpets’
military history, and work that focuses on the ‘society’ part of war and society (Showalter
1975). The second theme is the putatively embattled status of military history in history
departments in North American universities (Lynn 1997). The connection between the two
themes is the perception that social histories, broadly conceived, are more academically rep-
utable and have more legitimacy, or at least affinity, with the sensibilities of contemporary
historians who do not study military topics. War and society, it is said, made military history
safe for civilian universities by leaving the war part out (Morillo 2006, 40–​41).
One of the first things to note about these two themes is how they assign a ‘hard’, military
reality to operational history and a ‘soft’ signifier to the study of society. War front-​centered
scholarship tends towards materialist and objectivist formulations and this kind of hard/​
soft distinction is common (Citino 2007, 1089). Citino unwittingly provides an example in
approvingly quoting John Lynn: ‘[E]‌xtreme proponents of cultural history might dispute
the very existence of reality, since all is perception to them. In the realm of military history,
such airy discussions tend to become foolish. Thousands of dead and wounded as a result
of battle is the kind of hard fact that defies intellectual games’ (Lynn 2003, xx; quoted in
Citino 2007, 1086). Reality inheres in war; mere cultural construction resides at home. But
few things have been as constructed and reconstructed as the meaning of the military dead,
meanings which have had plenty of real effects on battlefields and on homefronts (Mosse
1990; Winter 1995).
However, it is also Citino who points out that ‘society’ was not added to the study of war
by university historians in the 1960s but was very much part of the putatively ‘old’ mili-
tary history (2007). Already in 1797, Lieutenant-​General Gerhard Scharnhorst, Karl von
Clausewitz’s teacher and patron, had written a study situating the new French armies in
their revolutionary social and political context (Paret 1971, 376–​377). Clausewitz generalized
this insight in his philosophy of war and in his many studies of Napoleonic and other mili-
tary operations. Here, again, we find analysis done outside of the academy, in this case by
practitioners, well ahead of the scholarly perspectives of the day. They were in part arguing
against a strategic tradition that conceived war within geometric and mathematical terms,
and they had little trouble in seeing military realities in political and social events.
My discussion is schematic but sufficient to draw some concluding points. Efforts to offer
a progressive or a declinist narrative of the rise of war and society scholarship, or the fall of
operational history, based on work done exclusively in university settings falls apart if we
look outside the academy, especially the North American one. Practitioner analysis properly
 War and History in World Politics    299

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

Battle History

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

those fought at Yorktown (1781), Boyacá (1819), Surabaya (1945), Algiers (1956–​57), or Cuito
Cuanavale (1987–​88).
Of course, the first order ‘theories’ of social agents should not necessarily become schol-
arly concepts. But I have outlined a situation where a primary form of international inter-
action is more in the popular mind than the scholarly mind. The ‘old’ military historians
may have something to teach us in their insistence on battle’s importance if not their means
of studying it. At this juncture, it becomes significant that battle has a tendency to produce
its own historians. Veterans’ history writing comprises a major public and amateur his-
toriographical tradition in the West extending back to the ancient world (Fehrenbach 1991;
Xenophon 1949). Soldiers return from war to write or participate in the production of battle
histories, an overlap and interaction between history1 and 2. Widely read in modern times,
especially in the Anglo-​American West, battle histories are a principal site where citizens
make sense of war, especially when their wider role in informing official and public com-
memoration is taken into account. They also shape wars to come through their usage in
training and in informing the mindsets of new generations of officers and soldiers. Battle
histories constitute an important form of mediation between war front and home front, in
ways that flow over time and space.
I noted the military history review essays were concerned with the legitimation of mili-
tary history as a university subject, and therefore paid relatively little attention to non-​
academic historiography. Michael Howard’s category of ‘nursery history’ is an exception
(Howard 1983, 189). By this he meant the kind of popular military history, often written by
veterans, that recounts the exploits of military units and their heroes and great captains. An
eminent developer and advocate of the university war and society tradition, Howard’s term
for this kind of history indicates his view of its intellectual qualities. But Howard was also a
decorated infantry officer. For him, ‘nursery history’ had its place, a legitimate ‘use’ of mili-
tary history to prepare potential recruits and soldiers for military service and combat, and
to build morale in fighting formations. When you add in staff college history, designed to
train commanders’ judgement, the more or less direct implication of history writing in the
reproduction of war becomes clear. History2 participates in the making of history1. Military
histories serve Nietzsche’s ‘monumental’ and ‘preservative’ functions, uses of history for life,
enabling military formations and commanders to replicate and build on past battlefield feats
(1997, 67–​75).
Just what such uses of military history look like historically, and in practice, is a topic on
which there is surprisingly little work (Reardon 1990). Anders Engberg-​Pedersen’s ground-
breaking study (2015) of the epistemic shift occasioned by the Revolutionary and Napoleonic
wars is exemplary. He situates military history alongside other genres that try to make sense
of war, like novels and maps. Engberg-​Pedersen’s analysis ranges across representations of
battle and war consumed by military officers as well as wider publics. If we situate popular
military history alongside other ways stories of wars, battles, and combatants circulate in
myth and memory, we can see that war stories and histories have wide ranging social, cul-
tural, and political effects (Nguyen 2016). In New Zealand and the Yucatan, passing down
stories even of defeat shaped postcolonial identities and social relations decades or centuries
later (Belich 1986, 298–​310; Clendinnen, 2003, Part II). Accounts of the Ethiopian victory at
Adwa in 1896 circulated among African-​Americans as well as later generations of Ethiopians,
while those of the Japanese victory at Tsushima Strait in 1905 inspired imperialized peoples
across Asia (Aydin 2007, 71–​92; Jonas 2011, 267–​284). For post-​1945 Anglophone readers,
 War and History in World Politics    301

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

Conclusion: White Supremacy at War

in World Politics

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

insights not only into war, but into how histories of it are conceived and written. Surviving
soldiers and commanders come home with certain tales to tell and grievances to nurse,
having absorbed some combination of shocks, triumphs, and losses. Later, some of them will
write histories about these matters, often duelling and conflicting ones.
A battle or war can function narratively as a trial by force which establishes or contests
political truths and identities, including racial ones. For Yuval Noah Harari, battle histories
provide ‘representative tests for the strength of competing cultures or polities’, supplying
supposedly ‘decisive proofs’ of superiority and inferiority (2007, 259, 262). Much popular
representation concerning military conflicts between the West and the non-​European
world focus on the military qualities of Western soldiers and their way of war over Asian and
African opponents. This military orientalism typically divides the world by race and extols
the virtues of white soldiers. Both battle histories and Hollywood war films often reproduce
narratives of how a few Western soldiers successfully fight much larger numbers of brown or
Black soldiers.
One consequence of such military orientalism in history writing and other genres is a
tendency towards underestimation of non-​ European opponents by Western soldiers,
statespersons and publics. Here, we can begin to see how the historiographical and popular
cultural construction of past wars might set the stage for future ones, and shape their con-
duct and course. Invading Iraq in 2003 with small but highly capable forces might have
seemed rational to officials, and acceptable to publics, because of a military-​orientalist sens-
ibility, one historically reproduced through war stories and battle narratives across a range of
media and genres. This is the kind of research question that arises from a combined focus on
war and society.
In popular Western military histories of wars in the non-​European world, certain
iconic battles and engagements garner a great deal of attention, sometimes out of propor-
tion to their strictly military importance. What are the wider effects of such a focus? What
kind of identity politics might they reveal? Rorke’s Drift in 1879 is one such example, oft-​
memorialized in history and popular culture. A company of British infantry successfully
held off a much larger force of Zulus. For Harari, such focus on a ‘tiny skirmish’ is a perfect
example of the use of battle history to sustain a sense of civilizational (and racial, I would
add) superiority (2007, 260). But Rorke’s Drift does more than this. The fight there came
in the wake of a major Zulu victory inflicted on a poorly led and divided British force that
had just invaded Zululand. While the victory at Isandlwana is memorialized by Zulus and
other Africans, it has much less purchase in Anglophone memory (Beckett 2019). Retelling
histories and stories of Rorke’s Drift recoups the challenge to white supremacy that Zulu
arms inflicted on the actual field of battle.
Here, we can see the utility of knowing campaign and battle history for critically assessing
the popular cultural artefacts generated by war. In the actual war, the British invaded; they
were the aggressors. But in the specific tactical circumstances of Rorke’s Drift, it was the
Zulus who attacked. In filmic and other representations, Zulus are seen assaulting the tiny
cantonment in great masses, held off by the heroic efforts of a small band of white men.
Rorke’s Drift exhibits magical properties in historical memory, turning invasion and attack
into defence. There are other examples of the ability of battle stories to reverse signs like this.
That the US invaded North Korea during the Korean War is a fact which hardly registers
in popular memory of that war in America, a forgetting sustained by accounts of combat
actions involving communist Chinese and North Korean human wave attacks. In popular
 War and History in World Politics    303

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

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

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

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 chapter 21

Nationa l i sm
James Mayall

International Relations (IR) cannot be studied sensibly without an understanding of

how history has shaped the evolution of the international system. The same goes for the
study of nationalism. Both are largely defined by their origins and so far as practitioners are
concerned—​that is diplomats and politicians—​by their future destiny. It follows that their
mutual impact can also only be understood historically. This is a complex task for reasons
that this chapter will attempt to unravel. Most of them arise from the tension between the
exclusive demands of popular sovereignty, itself a product of the rise of nationalism, and
the economic, technological, and sometimes ideological necessity for international cooper-
ation. For the moment it is sufficient to note one aspect of this complexity, which echoes
the two organizing themes of this volume—​modernity and granularity. The contemporary
international system is a product of the long period of Western hegemony, which is now
arguably fading. Its principle characteristics and institutions—​positive international law,
diplomacy, the enormous expansion of international organization, were all responses to
Western ambitions, needs, and interests. Those who established these institutions were
doing what people always do when confronted with intractable problems: they were trying
to resolve them, to find a way of moving forward, somehow or other to ‘keep the show on the
road’. Very few can have had any idea that their efforts were helping to define an epoch, a new
condition of humanity, which we have come to think of as modernity. Nonetheless, we can
now see that is what they were doing.
The modern international system was crafted by dynastic and often absolutist statesmen
but during the long nineteenth century, nationalist ideas and values first infiltrated inter-
national thought concerning the society of states and after 1918 came to dominate it (Mayall
1990, 18–​25). Defining the nation is notoriously contentious; reaching a consensus on the
political doctrine of nationalism—​roughly one culture one state—​less so. There is little ar-
gument that the nation is a political community, at least potentially. But is that community
based merely on common citizenship, or must it also reflect a common ancestry, faith, lan-
guage, or other cultural attribute? On this there is no agreement.
The discussion falls into four sections. The first deals with the legacy of Western he-
gemony; the second with the way history is used by those who see nationalism as a modern
phenomenon and by those who insist that the nation has primordial roots, while the third
section examines the intertwining of the spread of nationalism with the development of
 Nationalism   307

international society. The chapter concludes by shifting the focus onto the nature and con-
tent of nationalist thought.

The Legacy of Western Hegemony

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

reactionary and chauvinistic take-​over of the national idea. Nonetheless, the defeat of exclu-
sive nationalism in the Second World War seemed to have established, at least at the time,
that a world of nation-​states only made sense within an international society.
Much the same conclusion emerges when the spread of nationalism is viewed from
a global perspective. In the twentieth century, nationalism divided into two streams. The
dominant stream was made up of the major European powers—​predominantly by Britain
and France—​which happened to be liberal democracies. But while the roots of their liber-
alism were different—​in the British case commercial and in the French political—​their na-
tionalism developed in an expansionist and imperial direction. Since both countries claimed
that their right to rule beyond their own borders was based not just on power but on the
superiority of their modern scientific civilization, which they propagated through their co-
lonial education systems, it is hardly surprising that Western values were eventually tuned
against them by those they ruled.
In the majority of cases this second and subordinate stream of nationalist development
was framed in the language of modernity. Nationalism was about transforming traditional
agricultural and hierarchical societies into modern states with diversified economies, al-
legedly based on the universal values that had formed part of the ideological baggage of the
European imperial powers, and in terms of which colonial elites had been educated. The
need to express the uniquely distinctive history and nature of national cultures was of course
acknowledged, either by inventing a nationalist past that was lacking, as in Estonia, or by
appropriating for symbolic purposes the past of other groups whose history, identity and
even geographical location had little to do with the modern ‘nation-​state’. Thus, Kwame
Nkrumah, who led The Gold Coast to independence in 1957 appropriated the name of an
African empire, Ghana, which no longer existed and in any case lay several hundred miles to
the north of the territory over whose fortunes he presided. But overwhelmingly, in the era of
decolonization, the point of anti-​colonial nationalism was not to invoke a long-​dead golden
age but to transform and modernize society. Anti-​colonial nationalism was about a future
Utopia not an ancient Arcadia. There were three additional reasons that channelled anti-​
colonial nationalism along a modernizing course. The first was that the two non-​Western
countries that could act as models for states seeking to break with their colonial past, Japan
and Turkey, had viewed nationalism from this perspective. After the Meiji Restoration of
1868, the Japanese had deliberately deconstructed their feudal society and built in its place
not only a highly effective centralized industrial state, but one that was capable of first
defeating Russia, one of the great powers of the day, but then going on to develop an empire
of its own. The Japanese adopted nationalist ideology to preserve their independence; they
interpreted it as requiring them not only to emulate the Western great powers but if neces-
sary to beat them at their own game (Gluck 1985). Fifty years later—​after the collapse of the
Ottoman Empire, Atatürk created modern Turkey as a Westernized secular state, complete
with a Romanized alphabet and the exclusion of religion from the public sphere. By this time
formal empire was in retreat, but the achievements of Western societies, based on science
and liberal education, were not (Kinross 2001).
Second, unlike Japan and Turkey, which might plausibly be described as proto-​nations
before the nationalist era, many former colonies lacked a ‘useable’ past. The mass parties
that were formed to campaign for independence from European rule, were generally loose
alliances between groups, whose relations with one another in other respects were often
 Nationalism   309

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

which the League was the precursor, as instruments of continuing Western hegemony, a way
of extending, under American leadership, the epoch of capitalist imperialism.
There is no doubt that there were many in the West who saw the multilateral framework
of world order in ways that can be reconciled with this analysis. Realists, such as the French
sociologist Raymond Aron, regarded the Bretton Woods institutions, the International
Monetary Fund (IMF), and the World Bank together with the General Agreement on Tariffs
and Trade (GATT) (the rump survivor of the Havana Conference), as the infrastructure
of a new global imperial order that would take over from the defeated dynastic empires of
old Europe and the anachronistic liberal empires that were in headlong retreat (Aron 1973).
Opposing them were the liberal internationalists, who had played a major part in framing
the new international order envisaged by the League, and who understood intuitively that a
way had to be found of reconciling a world of nation-​states and nationalism with coopera-
tive values of mutual respect, tolerance, a commitment to trade and development, human
rights, and constitutional government (Mazower 2009). Theirs was a vision of an ‘empire of
the mind’, a phrase that seemed to echo Immanuel Kant’s 1795 proposal for perpetual peace,
but which was coined, rather implausibly, by Winston Churchill (1943) when he accepted an
honorary from Harvard in 1943.
Those who regard the post-​1945 order as little more than ‘the continuation of imperialism
by other means’ fail to acknowledge the extent to which nationalists who campaigned for the
disintegration of the European empires bought into it. Maybe their enthusiasm reflected the
hegemony of Western ideas and values in the way suggested by Antonio Gramsci (Gramsci
1999). For example, no Third World leader was prepared to follow the advice of the Latin
American dependencia economists, who argued that the only way to achieve true independ-
ence, which would combine economic autonomy with the purely theoretical sovereignty
they had achieved with decolonization, was to decouple from the capitalist world economy.
Instead, they borrowed the political symbolism of dependency theory, while rejecting its
economic analysis, and formed a new international organization, the United Nations
Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD), whose objective was ‘to level the
playing field’ of the liberal economy. The Group of 77—​the Third World caucus within the
UNCTAD—​quickly expanded to include well over 100 states as the original ‘new nations’
both accepted the United Nations (UN) as the guarantor of their independence and used it
as a platform from which to press their collective and separate interests.
The Group of 77 became a widely accepted short-​hand for describing the collective anti-​
colonial nationalism of the previously colonized world. There was never much attention
devoted to the importance of cultural diversity and the particular historical experiences of
individual countries beyond a strong emphasis on the importance of sovereignty and terri-
torial integrity. The need to take account of ‘national circumstances’, the phrase used in the
Commonwealth’s 1991 Harare Declaration (Srinivasan 2010) is the closest to an endorsement
of granularity as is possible to find in any major international document. The idiom of Third
World nationalism was overwhelmingly technological and developmental. From the start, it
was both a modernist and an internationalist project.
Much more could be written about the complex and intertwined history of the rise and
spread of nationalism and the two-​way impact of international society on nationalism and
its impact in turn on international relations. Even from such a brief overview, it is possible
to draw one relatively uncontentious conclusion. On the one hand, history is a necessary—​
indeed an indispensable—​part of any analysis because national stories nearly always look
 Nationalism   311

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

Explaining the Evolution of Nationalism

and International Society: Modernists
and Primordialists

The question of the origins of nationalism as a general phenomenon—​as distinct from

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

Seton-​Watson’s magisterial Nations and States, an Enquiry into the Origins of Nations and the
Politics Of Nationalism (1977, 507–​544).
It was Elie Kedourie who first challenged this conventional wisdom (Kedourie 1960, 9).
His book opens with a celebrated and much-​quoted salvo.

Nationalism is a doctrine invented in Europe at the beginning of the nineteenth century. It

pretends to provide a criterion for the determination of the unit of population proper to enjoy
a government exclusively its own, for the legitimate exercise of power in the state, and for the
right organization of a society of states.
Briefly, the doctrine holds that humanity is naturally divided into nations, that nations are
known by certain characteristics which can be ascertained, and that the legitimate type of gov-
ernment is national self-​government. (p. 9)

Ernest Gellner had no difficulty in accepting the modernity of the nation—​indeed he shared
Kedourie’s view on this if nothing else—​but he found it impossible to believe that the claims
contained in the doctrine could have had such a massive impact on the modern world if
they did not reflect some fundamental shift in the evolution and organization of human so-
ciety. His position was set out first in Thought and Change (1964) and refined in two fur-
ther volumes, Nations and Nationalism (1983) and the posthumously published. Nationalism
(1997). Gellner’s essential thesis was that the form of life dictated by the circumstances of
modernity had put a premium on political and cultural boundaries running congruently
together for the first time in history. It was not that this had never happened in the past,
but that where such ‘nation-​states’ had existed it was largely a contingent matter, which may
have sometimes given rulers an advantage in the world of realpolitik, but was in no way a
trump card.
Traditional societies were mostly politically and socially hierarchical and econom-
ically agricultural. The political landscape combined city states like Venice and multi-
cultural, multifaith dynastic states. Where culturally homogenous states existed, the
majority of their inhabitants would not have had any political rights and would not have
thought of themselves in terms of their national identity. Nationalism, Gellner argued,
arose because even a nascent modern economy required a minimally literate and nu-
merate work-​force, and, therefore, a common education system. In traditional societies
not only were most people objects rather than subjects of politics, but from the point of
view of the rulers there might even be advantages in having a mixed population since
peasant revolts—​a recurrent event in most parts of the world—​could be fairly easily
contained and the status quo ante restored. In the nationalist era, when peasants left the
countryside for the city and more and more people shifted from agricultural pursuits to
factory work, this was no longer so.
Gellner’s modernist account of the origins of nations and nationalism was certainly
grounded in history but his was the grandest and least granular of narratives. He was a be-
liever in ‘the great ditch’ theory of history, according to which there are only a few key events
marking human evolution (Gellner 1988). Another modernist thinker, Benedict Anderson,
shared many of Gellner’s assumptions, but placed the origins of nationalism in a more his-
torically specific setting, which arguably made the argument more appealing to those who
favour a more contextual approach to social science. Whereas Gellner believed that where
nations did not exist in the modern world, they could be invented, Anderson insisted that all
nations were imagined (Anderson 1983).
 Nationalism   313

He traced the possibility of nationalism to the development of print capitalism, which

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

Nationalism and International Society

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

which ties citizenship to an exclusive group into which one has to be born, has led to nu-
merous minority, secessionist and irredentist conflicts. On the other side, attempts to im-
pose the civic definition by force in the name of liberal internationalism have often come
unstuck in the face of a recalcitrant human nature, and may sometimes have done more
harm than good. One of the most vivid examples from recent history was the extraordinary
lengths to which the American government went in negotiating the Dayton, Ohio, Accords
in 1995, to maintain the fiction of a unitary Bosnian state while partitioning it along ethnic
lines (Holbrooke 1998).
How should we explain this ambiguous legacy of modernist nationalism to international
relations? So long as sovereignty could be attached to a monarch or even to the state itself
rather than its people the character of the nation and the basis of national citizenship did
not seriously compromise such inter-​state cooperation as was necessary in the system of
alliances and counter-​alliances that dominated the European political landscape after the
defeat of Napoleon. International society continued to be a mixed regime in which absolutist
dynastic states co-​existed with partial democracies, or at least, constitutional monarchies, as
well as empires. The so called ‘liberal’ empires incorporated most of the world into a single
system during the nineteenth century. But since they located sovereignty in the metropol-
itan state, they also disenfranchised huge swathes of humanity. The world beyond Europe
was incorporated in the Western society of states, economically and through the establish-
ment of far-​flung territories of Western settlement, but in a subordinate way that left colo-
nial territories without rights under international law. With historical hindsight it is difficult
to avoid the conclusion that having claimed the state for the people, the Western powers
had set in motion a chain of events which would eventually bring all the complications
and contradictions of nationalist ideology into day-​to-​day IR and shatter the comforting
assumptions of a permanent Western hegemony.
This conclusion was not obvious to liberal internationalists at the time. Many would
have agreed with Mazzini in seeing no contradiction in his belief in universal human
emancipation and his support for the self-​determination of all Italian speaking people
within a single sovereign state. Those progressive thinkers and diplomats such as
Benjamin Constant3 and Charles Maurice Talleyrand, who had escaped but nonetheless
experienced the brutal excesses of popular sovereignty during the French terror looked
to constitutional monarchy of the British kind as the way to build a rational liberal fu-
ture. Talleyrand’s last diplomatic mission—​his appointment as French Ambassador to the
Court of St. James—​was engineered to head off a French land grab for Belgium and to
install a King of the Belgians rather than a King of Belgium (Kelly 2015). The attempt to
build an international order based on constitutional monarchy was a holding operation
designed to slow down the advance of popular sovereignty while recognizing the demands
for national self-​determination. As we saw in the previous section, the final contribution
of nationalism to the building of modern international society had to wait for the destruc-
tion of the First World War and the arrival of President Woodrow Wilson at the Versailles
Peace Conference in January 1919. Wilson’s fourteen point program combined three
powerful liberal ideas: that the state belonged to the people and that the international
order should therefore be organized as a league of democracies; that these democracies
should be based on the principle of national self-​determination to ensure that their na-
tional aspirations would be satisfied; and that world peace should be guaranteed by a
system of collective security (Mayall 1990).
 Nationalism   315

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

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

Success and Failure in Nationalist Thought

One question remains for both History and IR. How is a world ostensibly made safe for na-
tionalism and national self-​determination to differ from the Ancien Régime? The states might
now belong to the people, but what were they to do? Nationalist ideology could not tell them.
If nationalism was a modernist project it could not fall back on custom and tradition—​it
would have to merge with a more activist doctrine.
In a way the question answered itself since the nationalism of the leading states was an
off shoot of the liberal enlightenment. This tradition, whether in its British economic or
French political manifestation was focused on the rights and identity of the individual. The
eighteenth-​century world of balance of power realpolitik had provided a nearly perfect fit
for what Adam Smith called Mercantilism (Polanyi 1944, numerous editions). Both systems
of thought rested on zero-​sum assumptions. What one side won the other lost, an allegedly
iron law illustrated by Colbert’s celebrated report to Louis XIV that France had enjoyed a
particularly satisfactory year when it succeeded in enriching itself and impoverishing its
neighbors. Throughout the nationalist era echoes of this position could be found in the
policies of authoritarian and right-​wing nationalist governments. The legacies of mercan-
tilism were prominent in fascist and National Socialist Europe in the interwar period, but
they have reappeared from time to time ever since in all parts of the world. For example,
the ‘Sinhala alone’ demands of Sri Lankan Buddhist nationalism effectively dominated the
country’s politics from the mid-​1950s and drove it into a prolonged and disastrous civil war
from which it has still not recovered.
This example provides a useful insight into the psychology of many nationalist
movements. A sense of failure or victim hood is often a more potent force behind their
 Nationalism   317

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

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

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

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 chapter 22

Interp ol i t y L aw
Lauren Benton

Scholars researching the legal history of empires and the history of international law have
broken new ground in recent decades in analysing the role of law in the history of inter-
national relations. Studies of empires in world history have documented the layered and un-
even qualities of imperial sovereignty, and historians of international law have deconstructed
European claims of universalism and placed them in historical perspective (Anghie 2005;
Benton 2002, 2010; Burbank and Cooper 2011; Pitts 2018). The new research has prompted
a return to the challenge posed several decades ago by Charles Alexandrowicz, who insisted
on recognizing the legal qualities of non-​Western interpolitical relations before the rise of
a European-​centred interstate order (Alexandrowicz 2017; Armitage and Pitts 2017). How
can we write a history of global law that extends beyond the West and that also places pre-​
modern and modern legalities in the same analytic framework?
This chapter draws on recent research on the legal history of empires and the history
of international law to outline one answer. The perspective introduced here centres on
the formative role of widely distributed conflicts and takes as its subject ‘global legal pol-
itics’, a phenomenon and field of research defined as encompassing both strategic action
and expressions of political and legal thought (Benton 2019). Global legal politics framed
‘interpolity law’, a term more useful and accurate than ‘international law’ in referring to eras
before the late nineteenth century since it recognizes the legal character of relations among a
range of political communities, including empires, micro-​states, and corporate communities
such as merchant diasporas, trading companies, and municipalities (e.g. Stern 2013). In the
centuries before the rise of the interstate order, historical actors guiding relations across pol-
itical communities routinely referenced a set of widely distributed categories of legal action
and discourse. We can use these modalities to identify political interactions and clusters of
conflicts—​struggles that the editors of this volume might describe as ‘granular’ components
of social change—​that in turn shaped patterns of regional and global ordering.
The early modern period teemed with pluri-​political formations reflecting this process.
Recent research identifies interpolity zones, or regions marked by interpenetrating power
and weak or uneven claims to territorial sovereignty (Benton and Clulow 2017a). Such
zones often developed within one or more imperial spheres of influence, including some
under the sway of non-​European empires, and these formations (sometimes referred to as
‘borderlands’ by historians) were both fluid and surprisingly stable over time. In the long
 Interpolity Law   321

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

Jurisdictional Politics

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

The first generalization is that the accelerating long-​distance trade and the global exten-
sion of empires tended to exacerbate existing jurisdictional tensions. As composite polities,
empires were characterized by jurisdictional complexity. In European empires, historians
have traced the signal importance of jurisdictional tensions of two types on the eve of
European overseas imperial expansion: between ecclesiastic and secular jurisdictions and
between local and imperial jurisdictions. European powers were ‘composite monarchies’ in
which royal jurisdiction extended unevenly and in contested ways to subjects of its many
territories (Elliot 1992). Ecclesiastics claimed jurisdiction over certain activities, spaces, and
subjects, and Europeans both built on these arrangements by analogy and sought to stream-
line them in overseas imperial settings. For example, ecclesiastic and royal jurisdictional
conflicts pervaded the early Spanish empire as the crown made inroads on ecclesiastic au-
thority in the New World, and the British empire’s East India Company deployed analogies
to ecclesiastic jurisdiction in designing a plural legal order that applied Hindu and Muslim
law—​in truth British representations of Hindu and Muslim law—​to South Asian subjects
who were not company agents. Where Europeans had no decisive power advantage, they
relied on longstanding routines for dividing jurisdictional authority—​for example operating
like other merchant diasporas in asserting limited authority over their own community
members. Imperial agents routinely improvised, adjusting to other powers’ demands for jus-
tice by helping to devise legal procedures that showed imperfect deference to any one juris-
diction (Benton 2002).
Jurisdictional jockeying extended across land and sea. On the sea, ships operated as both
islands of law—​floating territories of the realm—​and as vectors of law, carrying sovereigns’
legal authority into the ocean world. Ship captains and military commanders had the au-
thority to conduct inquiries in ships and forts under their command and to mete out cer-
tain kinds of punishment. Maritime pass systems thrust jurisdiction into ocean spaces, and
privateers recognized the fluidity of jurisdiction at sea by claiming sponsorship of one or
another legitimate sovereign depending on the circumstances, often utilizing dubious or
even fraudulent documentary support. Even in highly militarized ocean spaces, the mari-
time legal order was a tangle of jurisdictional nets—​long and thin corridors conforming
roughly to sea lanes (Benton 2010). Although Hugo Grotius famously argued in Mare
Liberum (The Free Sea) in 1609 that the sea could not be occupied, he also recognized that
the presence of ships could allow their sponsors to assert jurisdiction on the seas (Grotius
2009; Benton 2010).
On land, typical jurisdictional arrangements in empires recognized the limited legal au-
thority of subordinate political communities. Merchant communities continued to regulate
their own affairs, showing deference to host societies for the trial and punishment in cases
of serious crimes or threats to order. Such arrangements were on bright display in multi-​
ethnic port cities of the Indian Ocean world, where an array of foreign trading communities
retained some juridical power over their own members, creating a jurisdictional patchwork.
Even in places like colonial North America, where settlers in coastal colonies moved rela-
tively quickly to dispossess or displace Native American communities, we find evidence of
persistent legal pluralism (Benton and Ross 2013).
Jurisdictional lines in all such situations were notoriously fluid. They were subject
both to pressures brought to bear by distant sponsors and to the effects of legal strategies
adopted by actors imbued with considerable sophistication about how to maneuver through
multi-​jurisdictional orders. We have many well-​documented examples of these sorts of
 Interpolity Law   323

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

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

The Politics of Protection

The deep influence of jurisdictional politics is matched in global history by the structuring
effects of a pervasive politics of protection. References to protection (or similar terms)
appear in the records of treaties and interpolity negotiations in every world region. Many
such references involved pacts or mutual protection from shared enemies and reflected
efforts to protect subjects travelling in or through foreign territories. As with multi-​centric
jurisdictional orders, the first general observation about protection arrangements is their
widespread occurrence across the early modern world (Benton, Clulow, and Attwood 2017;
Benton and Clulow 2015).
Protection arrangements had some common features. Pledges of protection were often
secured by the payment of tribute, as for example in the Qing empire’s relations with periph-
eral polities. The proffer of protection by empires produced fluid networks that could readily
expand and contract. Strong rulers enhanced their prestige and legitimacy by positioning
 Interpolity Law   325

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

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

Regulating Violence

The search to establish lucrative protection arrangements depended on the credible threat
of violence. Highlighting protection helps to bring into focus legalities of violence as a third
regulatory dimension of interpolitical relations. The regulation of violence encompassed
much more than a referencing of the laws of war. A great deal of imperial violence involved
small wars, from chronic raiding on land and sea to isolated acts of spectacular violence such
as civilian massacres (Benton, forthcoming). As with jurisdiction and protection, findings
about the legalities of small wars (broadly defined to include not just asymmetric conflicts
but a wide range of so-​called quiet wars) support some broad and useful generalizations. The
first is that, once again, we find parallel patterns in an array of polities and regions flowing
from globally distributed regulatory practices and clusters of conflicts.
Across the Eurasian world, one typical pattern of interpolity violence centred on stac-
cato raiding and serial truces. Both sets of practices framed strikingly similar threats and
rituals of capitulation involving the choice (if we can call it that) between submission and
subjection to extreme violence. Frequent raiding for plunder occurred in the context of long
 Interpolity Law   327

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

enslaving Indigenous groups who refused to submit to their authority. The statement warned
Indigenous communities that if they submitted to Spaniards, their lives would be spared and
they would not be enslaved, but if they did not submit, the Spaniards could punish them
as rebellious vassals. In the context of Afro-​Eurasian warfare and peacemaking practices,
the requerimiento appears to be not an Iberian oddity but a familiar variant of an offer of
truce laced with the threat of violence. Across the Americas, other acts of spectacular vio-
lence were narrated using the language of truce and betrayal, with conquerors represented as
peacemakers and the victims of violence as peace breakers. The structure of conquest as a se-
quence of explicit or implicit, then broken and rejected, truces was so pervasive in the early
modern world that we can comfortably call it a global pattern.
A second, related generalization about the regulation of war and peace was that it merged
vernacular and written justifications for violence. Participants in violence, in other words,
looked to pervasive practices for guidance while selectively referencing written traditions of
the laws of war. The history of truces again helps to illustrate this point. Medieval and early
modern jurists defined truces as acts to suspend war. In his discussion of truces in Book III
of De Jure Belli ac Pacis (The Rights of War and Peace; Grotius 2004), Hugo Grotius quoted
commentaries on Roman law arguing that a state of war continued under a truce. If war
continued, but was just suspended, then new declarations of war were not required if one
party discovered that a truce had been broken. War simply continued under the rationales
for its initial outbreak. But Grotius also observed that Romans had typically gone out of their
way to show ‘how much they loved Peace, and how careful they were not to engage in War,
unless for just causes’ (Grotius 2004, 717). Combatants breaking a truce thus called on the
just war tradition, even though technically they did not have to, to support their decision
to resume war. In practice as in theory, there was no clear juridical script to follow. In just
war theory and in colloquial commentary, rationales for violence had to be creatively spun
each time.
With the global militarization of empires in the long eighteenth century, we find a pattern
emerging in which imperial forces were operating with blanket authorization for small acts
of violence by captains and military commanders far from the centre of power. For example,
British naval captains sailed with standing authorization to perpetrate violence to protect
British subjects. At the same time, captains were instructed to keep wars small and to pre-
vent the outbreak of major inter-​imperial violence (Benton, 2021). Although not strictly
required to do so given their pre-​authorization, military commanders routinely recorded
rationales for particular acts of violence. The most common rationale, familiar from just war
theory, was self-​defense. An old pattern of regulating imperial violence was turning into a
more formal feature of the international order: an emerging idea of limited intervention
that underpinned the operation of perpetual wars, including, much later, the ‘war on terror’
(Benton forthcoming).
The third generalization about legalities of violence to mark is that, along with jurisdic-
tional politics and protection, the regulation of war and peace became an increasingly ex-
plicit part of global ordering with the rise of international law at the end of the nineteenth
century (Koskenniemi 2005). The late nineteenth century saw the codification of laws of
war in the context of the US Civil War, for example, a process of formalization of the laws
of war that continued with mid-​twentieth century international efforts to outlaw war (Witt
2012; Hathaway and Shapiro 2017). Yet, as with jurisdiction and protection, we should not be
looking for a linear connection between interpolity and international law. Instead, the earlier
 Interpolity Law   329

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

Spaces of Interpolity Law

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

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

Conclusion

The study of interpolity law helps to move international relations beyond its past
Eurocentrism to encompass a wide variety of political communities and the analysis of their
legal interactions. The approach broadens the scope of what we are defining as ‘law’ beyond
sets of rules or normative orders by featuring the effects of a wide-​ranging legal politics
centred on representations and assemblages of legal authority. As an amalgam of the pol-
itics of jurisdiction, protection, and violence, interpolity law reflected patterns of conflict
while also generating new pluri-​political formations, including new regional legal regimes
and emerging visions of global order.
The study of interpolity law and its changes poses as many new questions as it answers.
We have hardly reached the end of the project of uncovering the unstable and variegated
histories of sovereignty. Nor have we yet constructed sufficiently nuanced narratives relating
regional legal regimes to global ordering. And although recent research has probed the de-
gree to which European political and legal thought reflected knowledge and experience of the
world beyond Europe, much of the history of international law remains narrowly focused on
European juridical tracts in isolation from wider circles of discourse and practice. Important
questions remain, too, about the transitions and interpenetration of interpolity, imperial,
and international law. Legal histories of the last two decades have framed these questions in
new ways and also helped to make answers possible. A new field of global legal history has
become central to the history of international relations and international order.
 Interpolity Law   331

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 chapter 23

Regul ating C omme rc e

Eric Helleiner

We live in an era when free trade ideology is being deeply contested around the world by
neomercantilists who seek to promote their country’s wealth and power through strategic
trade protectionism (and other kinds of government economic activism). This ideological
contestation over the regulation of international commerce is arguably more extensive than
at any time since the end of the Second World War, when a relatively liberal international
trading regime was established. To understand contemporary debates between free traders
and neomercantilists around the world, it is important to recognize that each side draws on
historical lineages of thought.
These debates have their origins in the emergence of free trade thought in late eighteenth
and nineteenth centuries, and a subsequent reaction from thinkers who pioneered core ideas
in contemporary neomercantilist thought. International Political Economy (IPE) scholars
usually depict this historical debate as one between economic liberals such as Adam Smith,
David Ricardo, and Richard Cobden and neomercantilists such as Alexander Hamilton and
Friedrich List. But recent work by historians has broadened the picture to show how this his-
torical debate had a more global character, including the involvement of many thinkers from
regions beyond Europe and America.
In this chapter, I build on this recent historical work to provide an overview of global na-
ture of the emergence of the free-​trade-​versus-​neomercantilism debate. I begin with a dis-
cussion of the global reach of the early free trade doctrine, showing how this resulted from a
complex combination of processes of diffusion, resonance, appropriation, and a multidirec-
tional flow of ideas. I then examine the neomercantilist reaction to free trade thought around
the world in more detail because this history is less well known and because of its relevance to
the current moment (Helleiner 2021). The analysis reveals many similar processes involved
in the global emergence of neomercantilism, but it also highlights that this phenomenon was
a more decentralized process.
Underlying the free-​ trade-​
versus-​neomercantilism debate were contrasting views
about how countries best modernized their economies in the emerging industrial age. In
this sense, the subject of this chapter speaks directly to one of the two core themes of this
volume: the modernity problematique. Modernization was interpreted in many different
ways in these debates, with disagreements including not just those between free traders
and neomercantilists but also within each of these ideological camps. To understand these
 Regulating Commerce   335

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

The Global Reach of Free Trade Thought

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

Club, created after the British thinker’s death in 1866 (Palen 2016). Historians have also
highlighted the role of specific individuals who took leadership roles in promoting the new
free trade ideas internationally, such as John Bowring who embraced this task with enthu-
siasm between 1830 and 1860 across several continents (e.g. Todd 2008).
Historians have also shown that the global rise of free trade thought was much more than
just a story of diffusion. For example, David Todd (2015, 236) suggests that it would be better
to talk of the global ‘resonance’ of free trade ideas after their triumph in Britain. As he puts it,
‘instead of trickling down, concepts are echoed and refashioned, in a constant dialogue with
local, regional and national preoccupations’. Alexandre Mendes Cunha and Carlos Eduardo
Suprinyak also highlight the need to go beyond the concept of diffusion in order to recognize
the ‘profoundly creative process that lies behind the successful adaptation of ideas to histor-
ical contexts different than those in which they were conceived, therefore posing problems
they were not originally designed to address’. In their words, ‘what is at stake is an act of ap-
propriation, where active and purposeful subjects identify ideas that could serve their intel-
lectual aspirations, and subsequently infuse them with a host of meanings that were not part
of their original mark-​up’ (Cunha and Suprinyak 2017, 8–​9).
These arguments intersect in important ways with IPE scholarship on the international
diffusion of Keynesian and neoliberal ideas. For example, Peter Hall’s (1989) classic volume
highlighted how Keynesianism was modified in creative and important ways in various
local contexts as it spread from the Anglo-​American powers in the mid-​twentieth cen-
tury. Cornel Ban (2016) has also shown how global neoliberal scripts in the more recent
era have been adapted by local ‘translators’ to generate distinct local varieties or ‘hybrids’ of
neoliberalism. Johanna Bockman (2011) and Oddny Helgadóttir (2016) have also explored
how neoliberalism emerged endogenously outside the Anglo-​American sphere and spread
transnationally in ways that fused global neoliberal intellectual currents. These literatures
reinforce broader IR scholarship on global norms examining their ‘localization’ and the
multidirectional nature of ideational flows (Acharya 2011, 2016).
In the case of the nineteenth century free trade movement, historians have provided some
important examples of these dynamics. One example of ‘resonance’ comes from the Latin
American context where Cunha and Suprinyak show how early commitments to free trade
at the time of independence often emerged as much as a local reaction against the mercan-
tilism of the Spanish and Portuguese colonial powers as the importation of European theory:

the relaxation of trade restrictions had actually been one of the main sources of dispute
and unrest in the Iberian colonies during the decades leading to their independence. The
teachings of British political economy seemed to corroborate these aspirations. Adam Smith,
after all, had offered a thorough critique of all misguided forms of mercantile restriction and
economic privilege, of which colonial rule was a glaring example . . . . Under the influence of
both colonial experience and political economy, trade restrictions and monopolistic practices
came to be naturally associated with the obnoxious remnants of the ancien régime. (Cunha
and Suprinyak 2017, 20)

Latin American free traders also often adapted—​or ‘appropriated’, to use Cuhna and
Suprinyak’s term—​European liberal economy theory in interesting ways. For example, some
combined their embrace of liberalism at the border with support for non-​liberal forced la-
bour regimes domestically in repressive haciendas involved in export commodity produc-
tion (Rojas 2002). In other instances, free traders backed a very activist domestic economic
 Regulating Commerce   337

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

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

Hamilton, List, and the Listians

Historians have also been widening our understanding of the neomercantilist reactions to
the rise of free trade ideology. In the same way that the latter was a global process, they have
shown how the neomercantilist reaction to free trade also involved thinkers from around
the world. Many of these thinkers were familiar with pre-​Smithian mercantilist thought and
drew upon it for inspiration. They deserve the label ‘neomercantilist’, however, because they
were reacting to liberal thought in ways that led them to develop new rationales for strategic
protectionism and other forms of government economic activism to promote state power
and wealth (Helleiner 2021).
Although historians have been improving our understanding of the global emergence of
neomercantilist thought, the topic remains less well studied than that of the free trade doc-
trine. Scholars usually begin with the ideas of Alexander Hamilton, whose 1791 report for
US Congress developed one of the first sophisticated and politically prominent critiques of
Smith’s arguments about trade. Hamilton was concerned that free trade policies could in-
hibit the growth of US manufacturing because of the difficulties of creating new firms in a
context where they faced tough competition from established foreign firms that were often
supported by their home governments. Confronting Smith’s arguments directly, Hamilton
argued that government assistance was needed to foster manufacturing, whether it took the
form of temporary subsidies (which he actually preferred) or moderate tariffs. Hamilton
argued that the US needed a strong manufacturing sector to secure the ‘independence and
security’ of the country in an uncertain world (Hamilton 1964 [1791], 161). He also noted eco-
nomic benefits that would result from a more diversified economy, such as increased prod-
uctivity, reduced transportation costs, more jobs, and more reliable domestic markets for
local producers.
The figure who usually receives the most prominent place in histories of neomercantilist
thought is Friedrich List because of his 1841 book The National System of Political Economy.
Like Hamilton, List (1885 [1841], 271) engaged directly with the new Smithian school of
political economy, arguing that its critiques of mercantilism were ‘partly correct’ while
developing a detailed defense of the need for tariff protection of the manufacturing sector
in some circumstances. List outlined similar reasons as Hamilton for why countries needed
a strong manufacturing sector, but he wanted to see the industrial sector assume more of
a leading role in the economy as part of boosting what he called the deeper ‘productive
 Regulating Commerce   339

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

It is a very common device that when anyone has attained the summit of greatness, he
kicks away the ladder by which he has climbed up, in order to deprive others of the means
of climbing up after him. In this lies the secret of the cosmopolitical doctrine of Adam
Smith. . . (List 1885 [1841], 368)

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

difference, however, is that the diffusion of Listian ideas was not backed by a dominant state.
The various case studies that have been produced of the importation of Listian ideas suggest
that his ideas were instead usually embraced because they ‘resonated’ with existing local
concerns, particularly nationalists’ concerns about their country’s relative power position
vis-​à-​vis the more advanced industrial states (e.g. Metzler 2006, Goswami 2004).
The case studies also highlight a number of creative ways in which List’s ideas were
appropriated and modified in both Western and non-​Western contexts. Because of List’s
emphasis on national distinctiveness, some of these adaptations were not necessarily in-
consistent with his general philosophy. But some did challenge his core views. For example,
many Listians chose to overlook the fact that he had explicitly argued that his protectionist
advice was meant to be relevant only to countries with a ‘temperate’ climate (instead of a
‘tropical’ one) (List 1885 [1841], 162). Listians in ‘tropical’ countries simply ignored this as-
pect of his argument as well as the fact that he praised colonialism as a vehicle for the ‘re-
generation’ of many societies, including those in ‘the whole of Asia’ (List 1885 [1841], 419; see
Goswami 2004).
There are many other examples where more specific aspects of his ideas were modified. For
example, supporters of List in many countries went beyond his focus on industrial protec-
tionism to endorse tariffs on agricultural imports—​a move that List had explicitly opposed.
List’s views about the positive links between industrialization and the growth of political lib-
erty were also swept under the rug by some of his prominent followers, such as Sergei Witte
(who implemented Listian policies in his role as Russia’s finance minister between 1893 and
1902), Ziya Gökalp (whose Listian ideas inspired economic policy in Turkey after its cre-
ation) and Alfredo Rocco (who promoted List’s thought in early twentieth-​century Italy in
ways that influenced the Italian fascist movement) (Van Laue 1963; Parka 1985; Gregor 1979).
Both Gökalp and Rocco also urged the state to promote industrialization with much more
extensive state activism in the domestic economy than List had endorsed.
List’s views were also modified in important ways in colonial settings, most notably in
India where his writing was invoked prominently by Mahadev Govind Ranade, one of the
founders of the Indian National Congress. While citing List’s views about the need for state-​
led industrialization, Ranade decisively rejected the German thinker’s rosy view of colo-
nialism, noting how in India it had led to deindustrialization, forced ‘ruralization’, foreign
dominance of internal and external trade, a drain of capital, and a broader ‘dependent’ status
(quotes from Goswami 2004, 211–​212). Recognizing that British colonial authorities were
unlikely to introduce tariff protection for India, Ranade (1906, 34–​36, 103, 202–​203) urged
British colonial authorities to support the growth of Indian industry through other means,
such as launching enterprises themselves, using government procurement, and borrowing
funds from abroad to be lent on at low interest rates to local entrepreneurs.
The most comprehensive modification of List’s ideas was undertaken by Mihail
Manoilesco, a Romanian thinker whose 1929 book The Theory of Protectionism became the
best-​known protectionist tract of the interwar years. Manoilescu appreciated List’s emphasis
on the deep productive powers of the nation and the national interest, but he thought pro-
tection had ‘a much wider extension than List believed’ (Manoilesco 1931, 240). In particular,
he argued that trade protectionism could be justified in any country, and even if it was
longstanding and extensive. At the core of his theory was the idea that national economic
progress depended on boosting overall labour productivity in the national economies by
shifting workers from agriculture to industry. If trade barriers could encourage the growth
 Regulating Commerce   341

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

Wider Neomercantilist Reactions

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

protectionism and the view that free trade was consolidating British economic power, his
views were quite distinct in other areas (Helleiner 2021, ch.5).
Particularly significant were Carey’s concerns about the domestic distributional and so-
cial consequences of free trade, an issue that was addressed very little in List’s 1841–​44 book
(or by Hamilton). In every country where free trade was introduced (including Britain),
Carey argued that it empowered a social class of ‘traders’ who found opportunities to en-
rich themselves at the expense of other domestic groups by manipulating prices, creating
monopolies, and putting communities across the world in competition with each other
(Carey 1858–​59 Vol. 1, 210–​213). In his view, workers’ wages were pushed down by global
competitive pressures, resulting in a system of ‘slavery’ in which the laborer became ‘that
mere instrument to be used by trade’ (Carey 1858–​59 Vol. 3, 382). Farmers also lost out as
they became more subject to the power of traders and as soil nutrients were depleted by
monocrop export agriculture.
Carey argued that protectionism would enable a ‘harmony’ of interests to be re-​
established within the country. With infant industry protectionism, manufacturing could
grow, and workers’ wages could be raised rather than cut. As manufacturers and farmers
were brought closer together, their association would also undermine the power of traders
and enable these two groups to realize mutual economic benefits arising from reduced
transport costs, reliable domestic markets for their products, and a more diversified and
productive economy. Farmers could also restore nutrients to their soils more easily from
the human waste of nearby urban manufacturing centers and from cattle manure on more
diversified farms that served local markets. Carey’s ideal world was one of small independent
proprietors operating interdependently in decentralized markets organized around what
he called ‘local centres of attraction’ (a view that contrasted with List’s endorsement large
factories and farms) (Carey 1858–​59 Vol. 1, 48).
In outlining this case for protectionism, Carey did not follow List’s lead in emphasizing
that trade barriers had to be very targeted and limited. In contrast to List, he also argued that
all countries should embrace a protectionist program, including even Britain. In addition,
Carey was a fierce critic of colonialism in contrast to List’s more favourable views on the
subject (Carey 1858–​59 Vol. 1, 256, 295–​296, 367, 375; Vol. 3, 223, 335). Carey also did not share
List’s interest in working towards a long-​term ‘universal confederation of nations’.
Carey’s ideas were extremely influential in his own country (much more so than List’s),
serving as a key rationale for the introduction of high tariffs during America’s civil war and
their maintenance in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (Goldstein 1993,
­chapters 2–​3; Conkin 1980; Huston 1983; Lee 1957). His work was also translated into a
number of languages, and he acquired prominent and influential followers in the late nine-
teenth and early twentieth centuries around the world (Helleiner 2021, ch.6). Supporters of
Carey could even be found in List’s home country, such as the German businessman and
politician Wilhelm von Kardorff who was a close colleague of Otto von Bismarck. Kardorff
popularized Carey’s views in Germany with an 1875 pamphlet that helped to mobilize
support for higher German tariffs. Historians argue that Kardorff ’s ideas were more im-
portant than those of List in encouraging Bismarck’s decision to introduce protectionist
policies in Germany in 1879 (Lambi 1963, 8–​9, 91–​94, 116, 129, 164–​165, 178, 226; Pflanze 1990,
311, 315, 454–​455, 465–​466, 483).
Another example of Carey’s influence came from Canada where his ideas were invoked by
Isaac Buchanan, the leading Canadian protectionist thinker in the lead-​up to that country’s
 Regulating Commerce   343

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

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

Conclusion

Contemporary debates between free traders and neomercantilists have intellectual roots
in older ones from the late eighteenth, nineteenth, and early twentieth centuries. Although
the history of these older debates is usually discussed in a Western-​centric way within the
field of IPE, I have built on the work of historians to show how this story can be told from a
 Regulating Commerce   345

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

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 chapter 24

Devel op me nt
Corinna R. Unger

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

Development toward Modernity: The

Importance of Difference

The notion of modernity is deeply anchored in the idea of development. Ideas about de-
velopment as progress and the possibility of building a better future can be traced far back
in history. The expectations as to what would be better about this future varied: it could
 Development   349

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

was Central Eastern Europe, which, to contemporary observers, appeared underdeveloped

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

Development Globalized: The

Postwar Period

It was no coincidence that the notion of development gained prominence before and during
the Second World War, which was fought over resources as much as over ideologies. After
the war, the United States and the Soviet Union began a competition for spheres of influence
across the globe, with the former colonies as a key target. The concept of the ‘Three Worlds’
that emerged at the time reflected the new situation. The hierarchical notion the concept
entailed mirrored both the dramatic changes in the international order and the political im-
portance contemporary observers granted to the differences in economic development on a
global scale. Some used the concept to critique the division of the world and the inequality
it epitomized. Others applied it in an affirmative way to make sense of a new reality, even if it
meant lumping together societies that had little in common (Pletsch 1981, 567–​572, 575–​578;
Westad 2013, 208–​213).
To secure allies and to prevent the enemy from gaining in strength, the two superpowers in
the postwar years promoted the rapid development and modernization of allegedly under-
developed regions and countries by presenting their own socioeconomic orders as models:

One, symbolized by the United States, promised intensive urban-​based growth in both the
private and the public sectors, the import of advanced consumer products and the latest tech-
nology through joining the global capitalist market, and an alliance with the world’s most
powerful state. The other, that of the Soviet world, offered politically induced growth through
a centralized plan and mass mobilization, with an emphasis on heavy industry, massive in-
frastructural projects, and the collectivization of agriculture, independent of international
markets. . . . Both [models] . . . offered a road to high modernity through education, science,
and technological progress. (Westad 2005, 92)

The common denominator in the Cold War competition over modernization was the question
of levelling the massive socioeconomic differences that existed between different parts of the
globe. The strategic need to address inequalities accelerated the establishment of development
assistance as a foreign policy approach and as international practice in the postwar period. The
government of the United States was the most influential actor in this context.
 Development   351

American Visions of Development

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

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

‘Western’ or ‘European’ Development?

The difficulty of carrying out development work in a genuinely democratic way weighed
especially heavily on those who were, under Cold War terms, part of the Western alliance,
which prided itself in being representing the democratic alternative to socialist authori-
tarianism. Yet the concept of ‘the West’ is much too broad to do justice to the plurality of
development interests represented by the countries in the Western sphere of influence. It
also hides the tensions between development actors in Washington and Paris, Oslo and
Bonn, Lisbon and Brussels about what development was supposed to mean and achieve.
Most of the European colonial powers used development assistance to maintain influence
on their (former) colonies during the late colonial period and in the aftermath of formal
decolonization. Those countries that had lost their overseas colonies much earlier (like
Germany and Denmark) or had never had them (like Sweden and Norway) valued the po-
tential of development assistance to establish trade relations with other parts of the world
and to improve their international standing. US representatives tried to streamline de-
velopment assistance approaches and budgets within the Western alliance by establishing
the Development Assistance Committee (DAC) and by pushing for the set-​up of devel-
opment consortia for strategically important countries under the auspices of the World
Bank. Yet although officially the Western European members of these groups shared Cold
War concerns, in practice they prioritized their national interests (Das Gupta 2009; Kröss
2019, ­chapter 3).
Financial and economic interests were at the heart of most Western European
governments’ development assistance policies. For example, the United Kingdom, in order
to maintain its sterling balance, until the late 1950s denied assistance to its former colony
India. Only when India’s foreign exchange crisis began to cause geopolitical concern did the
British reluctantly change their position. How much aid London granted to New Delhi in the
following decades and under which conditions remained dependent on the financial situ-
ation of the United Kingdom (Wilven 2019). Furthermore, development aid often served as
a door-​opener for European companies trying to sell their products internationally, thereby
linking development policy and foreign trade policy. To Western European governments, the
corporations’ demands for financial support in investing in so-​called developing countries
presented a welcome opportunity to legitimize the use of public funds abroad (Kleinschmidt
and Ziegler 2018; Bugow 2019).
 Development   353

In terms of foreign policy, many Western European countries employed develop-

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

Socialist Visions of Development

For a long time after 1989, the international development work of the socialist countries
was buried along with other elements of socialist history that seemingly had lost their
354   Corinna R. Unger

relevance. However, as the triumphalist narratives of the 1990s are being historicized
and challenged, many historians are rediscovering and reassessing the legacies of
‘global socialism’. Their work has made clear that the socialist world was much more
present in the international development arena than previously assumed, and that it
would be simplistic to think of socialist assistance as being designed and carried out by
Moscow alone.
To be sure, the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR) was central to defining and
coordinating socialist development aid policies. Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev early
on recognized the process of decolonization as an opportunity to spread and secure its
influence in the world. Drawing on earlier experiences with Soviet development projects
in Central Asia, development assistance in the late 1950s and 1960s served as a tool for
the USSR to promote the establishment of governmental, administrative, and economic
structures in line with socialist beliefs. In many ways, the promise of socialist mod-
ernity was similar to its Western equivalent, both conceptually and in terms of presenta-
tion. Delegations from the newly independent countries were invited to visit the USSR,
travelling exhibitions informed populations abroad about socialism’s technological and
cultural achievements, and youth groups established solidarity networks. Whereas the
capitalist version of modernity emphasized individual improvement through ambition
and achievements, the socialist version prioritized social equality guaranteed by the state
(Mark et al. 2020).
Socialist development actors systematically drew on the weak spots of Western develop-
ment assistance while simultaneously advancing their own ideas and models. Criticizing the
allegedly neo-​imperial fashion in which Western actors tried to use aid to secure markets
and resources, they argued that the development problems the former colonies faced had
been caused by the imperial powers. Therefore, the socialist countries would support them
in a way that was free of hierarchy and racism (Marung 2017; Lorenzini 2019, c­ hapter 3;
Iandolo 2018, 211–​216). To underline this point, they required their aid workers to become
acquainted with the recipient countries, to learn the respective languages, and to live and
work side by side with the local population—​a stark to contrast to many Western develop-
ment experts who openly professed to not knowing much about the countries they were
working in and who lived in secluded communities.
Furthermore, the provision of assistance from socialist countries was not tied to
conditions to the degree that Western aid was. At least initially the USSR gave out loans ra-
ther than grants to show that development assistance was a transaction between equals, not
a paternalistic act of generosity (Rudner 1996, 14; Boden 2008, 122; Lorenzini 2014, 185). Aid-​
in-​kind and barter deals were common practice in socialist development assistance, too.
For example, under a credit agreement between the GDR and Guinea signed in 1959, the
GDR would carry out construction work and deliver specialized technologies to Guinea, the
expenses of which Guinea would repay by delivering fruit to the GDR at prices above world
market prices (Lorenzini 2019, 48–​49). For many of the socialist countries, agreements of
this type offered an opportunity to circumvent, at least in part, the system put in place by
COMECON (Council for Mutual Economic Assistance, also CMEA), the organization that
coordinated economic activities within the socialist bloc (Calori et al. 2020). Being able to
negotiate bilateral trade agreements was a clear advantage to the socialist countries—​and
notably similar to the ways in the Western European countries used development assistance
to promote their economic interests.
 Development   355

Adjusting Development to a Changing

World Order: The 1970s

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

of the global economic system. This idea was at the heart of the call for a New International
Economic Order (NIEO). Using the United Nations Conference on Trade and Development
(UNCTAD) as their basis, the members of the Group of 77 (representatives of so-​called
developing countries, many of which were part of the Non-​Aligned Movement) demanded
sovereignty over their natural resources, improved terms of trade, better access to global
markets, and large-​scale development assistance to help the ‘peripheral’ economies to indus-
trialize. Importantly, all of these measures were supposed to take place within the framework
of the capitalist world economy, as the concept of the NIEO was not about overthrowing the
capitalist system but about reforming it (Gilman 2015; Garavini 2015).
For a few years, the demands voiced by UNCTAD and others were debated widely. The
Soviet Union supported the so-​called developing countries in their critique of Western
governments and international organizations for strategic reasons but came to realize that
the NIEO was not in line with ideas about a socialist world economy. Meanwhile, most of
the Western governments were explicitly opposed to compromises in terms of income, trade
conditions, and standards of living. Some, however, argued that the call for a new order was
an opportunity to consider alternative ideas of and approaches to development. The enthusi-
astic ambition that had characterized development work in the previous decades made room
for more pragmatic approaches. Critics of mainstream development thinking argued that
solving everyday problems should have precedence over grand schemes to build ‘modernity’.
Instead of serving the interests of an elite minority, development should be geared at the ma-
jority by providing education, health care, and anti-​poverty measures, they believed. The so-​
called basic needs approach that became prominent over the course the 1970s reflected this
thinking. According to its proponents, poverty was not merely the expression of a lack of de-
velopment but the obstacle that kept development from happening. Only if individuals had
access to basic resources (material as well as immaterial) could they participate in and con-
tribute to development in a meaningful way. In practice, this meant creating employment
opportunities, improving living conditions in rural areas, and paying attention to women,
who, for the longest time, had not been regarded as development actors in their own right
(Macekura 2020).
Concepts such as ‘basic needs’, ‘integrated rural development’, and ‘women in develop-
ment’ emerged from these efforts. For all their promise, they proved difficult to realize in
practice, as they depended on the existence of flexible and responsive administrations, the
availability of resources, and the willingness of all parties involved to participate. As long as
financial resources were available this was at least a theoretical possibility, but when many
of the industrialized countries experienced recessions in the context of the oil crises, devel-
opment assistance budgets were heavily reduced and ambitious plans shelved. Meanwhile,
many of the so-​called developing countries that had acquired cheap credits in the early 1970s
in the second half of the decade faced a mounting debt crisis, and authoritarian regimes
took power in several African countries. These developments fed the stereotype of corrupt
postcolonial elites and added to the notion of ‘failed states’, which implied a normative model
of the ‘modern’ state along Western lines (Unger 2018, 144).
Under these circumstances, the political support for alternative approaches to devel-
opment decreased, and those voices gained in strength that called for macro-​economic
approaches to dealing with structural inequalities. It was in this context that structural ad-
justment lending (SAL) rose to prominence in organizations like the World Bank and the
International Monetary Fund (Kröss 2019, chapters. 5 and 6; Babb 2009). Importantly, the
 Development   357

macroeconomic interventions were to be carried out by international financial organizations

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

Conclusion

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

goal. When the superpowers tried to secure their new spheres of influence, they drew on de-
velopment. At the same time, development shaped the way in which the international system
looked and functioned, and in some cases challenged and changed existing structures.
Development projects in the late colonial period were supposed to stabilize imperial rule
but in practice increased resistance against the colonial powers and contributed to the rad-
icalization of anticolonial politics, thereby at least indirectly accelerating the process of de-
colonization. Similarly, the superpowers’ efforts to draw the new nations into their alliances
by providing development assistance often undermined the power claims of the two sides,
which, in the long term, strengthened the polycentric tendencies the Cold War, as a global
conflict, had always contained.
By looking not only at the political agendas tied to development aid but also at the ways
in which those agendas translated into practice it becomes clear that categories like ‘im-
perialism’, ‘Cold War’, or ‘the West’ do not suffice to explain complex phenomena because
they tend to hide the variety of interests, actors, and effects involved. This point relates
to the volume’s interest in granularity: Only if we take into account a variety of levels of
interaction—​by looking not only at the providers of aid but also at the recipients, not only
at the superpowers but also at their (dissenting) allies—​can we arrive at an understanding
of the international situation at a given time that does justice to the complexity it was
characterized by.
Something similar is true of the emergence of the field of development over time, which
reflected and, simultaneously, contributed to the pluralization and diversification of inter-
national politics. This tendency concerned not only the growing number of nation-​states
but also the growing influence of non-​state actors, which underlines the need to understand
the prominence of the nation-​state as a historical phenomenon. As the history of develop-
ment shows, national governments were decisive in establishing the international develop-
ment system in the early postwar decades, and they remained influential in the following
decades. Yet they were never the only type of political actor involved, nor had they ever been.
International organizations and NGOs as well as private actors played an influential role in
shaping the international development field. To understand the system of development as
part of the international system, all of the actors involved need to be accounted for. Doing
so is not always easy, given the unequal availability of archival material and the detours this
makes necessary in terms of research. Yet the seemingly onerous detours often produce the
most valuable insights because they challenge established assumptions and open up fresh
perspectives.
With regard to the notion of modernity, the study of development in international his-
tory and International Relations offers two interrelated insights: It shows how ideas about
modernity evolved over time, often in line with or in response to changes in the inter-
national order, and it highlights the power of ideas. From today’s point of view, it might
seem difficult to understand that the promise of modernization in the mid-​twentieth cen-
tury could rally voters, politicians, and the public alike, and that extensive administrative
structures were set up and immense amounts of expertise and money invested to realize
this promise. This was no singular case of real-​existing idealism but a political situation
like many others. Yet historically speaking it is notable that the trust in the power of tech-
nology, planning, and public commitment to progress and modernization was so large
that it became a reality whose structures are still in place today. The rhetoric of and the
approaches to development have changed (or at least they are presented as being different
 Development   359

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

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 Chapter 25

Governing Fi na nc e
Signe Predmore and Kevin L. Young

Introduction

The international governance of finance is a type of historically unique social relation. If

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

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

Three Phases of International

Governance Development

To narrate the history of financial governance as an escalating public-​private dialectic begs

the question: which form of governance emerged first? Many public-​sector governance
arrangements have developed through the transformation of existing private governance
arrangements. For instance, historically central banks did not emerge as state-​governed
entities that control the monetary supply, but rather often came out of private sector col-
lective governance models that reach back into the Middle Ages (see Munro 2003). In city-​
states such as Venice that were controlled by a merchant oligarchy in the Middle Ages, the
payments system was organized through private channels, until around 1282, when con-
trol was centralized by what we would now recognize as public authorities. London in the
late seventeenth century featured a network of goldsmith bankers who formed a system of
mutual acceptance and interbank clearing and monitored one another’s behaviour (Quinn
 Governing Finance   365

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

The Origins of International Cooperation

in Financial Governance

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

The lack of multilateral cooperation in general influenced this dearth of international gov-
ernance. The interwar period disrupted not only British hegemony in finance, but also the
largely informal foundations of liberal imperial order in general. Through new formal multi-
lateral institutions such as the League of Nations, there were initiatives at work to address
global financial governance systematically for the first time. This can be seen as a first stage
in the private-​public regulatory dialectic: while the League’s Covenant made no reference to
economic management, and was concerned with international security issues, it did create
Economic and Financial Committees to explore this option. Because countries were unwilling
to delegate responsibilities to an intergovernmental body, these committees were made up
of private individuals (often, senior civil servants) selected by the League Council (Hale
and Held 2012; Clavin and Wessels 2005). As novel as the League’s Economic and Financial
committees were at the time for generating some standards, keeping statistics and sorting
through international payments systems, they did not generate policy for international eco-
nomic issues beyond coordination. This weakness was made more evident following the
collapse of the League, and thus the transformation in the United Nations endeavored to
create new, and stronger, institutions once the opportunity arose (see Hale et al. 2013).
After the Second World War and the collapse of the League, the private-​public dialectic
witnessed an escalation. Disruption to the institutional frameworks of the liberal inter-
national order through both the Depression and the Second World War, combined with
enhanced democratic participation under conditions of early welfare states meant that social
demands for financial regulation were matched with new organizations that were aligned
with these demands. The post-​Second World War settlement through Bretton Woods meant
that systems of global financial governance were built up in a specialized, bureaucratic
multilateral setting, to encourage the ‘embedded liberal’ approach of that period (Ruggie
1982). Dominant ideas about economic management—​and in particular about the wisdom
of free movements of finance—​were emerging. The decolonization efforts under way during
the Second World War and in the two decades that followed also called for new, much more
interventionist, government policies.
As Allied war victory approached, world leaders sought to organize new forms of formal
multilateral cooperation that were both an extension of Keynesian ideas to the international
realm and part of a wide recognition that better, more formal, multilateral economic govern-
ance was necessary to rebuild the postwar economy. The enthusiasm for internationalism
and formal rules that would undergird economic management reflected the widespread
recognition that multilateral economic cooperation was superior to the kind of interstate
disorder and regressive nationalism characterized by the interwar period (Sundaram and
Rodriguez 2011).
The Bretton Woods conference, formally the United Nations Conference on Monetary
and Financial Affairs, was set up in 1944 to establish such a system (Helleiner 2016). Over
700 delegates from all of the Allied countries attended what was an ambitious multilateral
move to secure the postwar global economic order on firmer footing. A compromise was
struck between liberal economic institutions such as free markets and social protection—​
an ‘embedded liberalism’ (Ruggie 1982) that was to be pursued not only through national
economy policies but, importantly, through an international economic policy environment.
The effort was not just one of powerful hegemons, the UK and the US, arranging the new
global economic system. As Helleiner (2016) has shown, the Bretton Woods architecture was
 Governing Finance   367

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

The Historical Evolution of Transnational

Governance Organizations

Precisely at the time when the IMF and World Bank were transforming to encourage eco-
nomic liberalization and increased capital mobility, other, new institutions emerged to fill
in the ‘governance gaps’ that were created by the resurgence of global finance in the post-​
Bretton Woods period. While these emerged in a relatively ad hoc way, many of them were
coordinated through the Bank for International Settlements (BIS), which meant that these
governance responses were tethered to the historically conditioned choices to keep an inter-
national club of central bankers in operation. It was in this way that the private-​public dia-
lectic was ratcheted up again, in the 1970s and 1980s.
368    Signe Predmore and Kevin L. Young

Over the course of this period, highly informal ‘transgovernmental’ bodies such as the
Basel Committee on Banking Supervision (BCBS) and the International Organization for
Securities Commissions (IOSCO) emerged—​new forms of international cooperation that
sought to govern financial flows and financial institutions through forms of standard-​setting.
In contrast to the large bureaucratic multilateral organizations like the IMF and World Bank,
these are often considered ‘transnational’ or ‘trans-​governmental’ (see Keohane and Nye
1977) in character, in the sense that they are rule-​making institutions which are organized
above the level of the state but which are not strictly composed of state representatives, and
do not possess coercive authority (see Kahler and Lake 2009, 269–​270). These institutions
are often relatively small administrative bureaucracies but coalesce as a kind of organized
professional network adjacent to formal state authority.
These developments of ‘regulatory globalization’ (Macey 2003) meant that governmental
authority was extending itself in new ways to ‘match’ what was happening in private finan-
cial activity. The increased international banking in the 1970s and 1980s was met by new
international banking financial standards. Indeed, international standards—​such as regula-
tory standards for banking, and sets of procedures for how cross-​border financial calamities
were to be worked out—​became an important cornerstone of financial governance (Young
2014). Many transnational bodies have also morphed over time—​most significantly many
increased their memberships to include the full Group of 20 (G20) after the North Atlantic
financial crisis of 2008–​09, while previously their memberships were restricted to the more
exclusive ‘G10’ (actually 13 countries, composing US, Canada, Western Europe, and Japan).
The most dramatic reconstitution also reflects regulatory escalation in the form of the
Financial Stability Forum (FSF), which was established in 1999 in the aftermath of the East
Asian financial crisis as a deliberative forum for big agendas concerning global financial sta-
bility. After the North Atlantic financial crisis of 2008–​09, the FSF was reconstituted as the
Financial Stability Board (FSB) with a stronger mandate from the G20, and changed com-
position to reflect the G20.
The globalization of regulatory public authority was not the only force that emerged in this
period. Private financial activity responded to the new environment, as the private-​public
dialectic continued. As regulatory globalization escalated, new private financial sector
associations sprang up that worked to track and influence the new transnational regulatory
organizations that emerged. A prominent example of this is the Institute of International
Finance (IIF), which began in 1983 as a result of the international debt crisis of the year be-
fore, and sought to develop a specialized business association for internationally active
financial institutions, in particular banks. Since then, it has worked to become a major inter-
locutor with both multilateral institutions such as the IMF and with transnational regulatory
authorities such as the BCBS. Another example is the International Swaps and Derivatives
Association (ISDA), which formed in 1985 in direct response to the need for standards and
advocacy in derivatives contracts. Aside from acting as a major advocate on behalf of in-
dustry, it has also generated its own systems of private governance for the working out of
derivatives contracts, called the ISDA Master Netting Agreement. Both the IIF and ISDA
have played major roles in financial governance (Young 2012; Underhill and Zhang 2008;
Tsingou 2008). The International Accounting Standards Board (IASB), formed in 2001, is
effectively a private international club of professionals which operates in such as a way as to
generate international standards for the industry. All of these private organizations—​the IIF,
ISDA, and IASB—​advocate for international standards and attempt to ‘match’ the regulatory
 Governing Finance   369

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

Informal Social Institutions

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

Anglo-​American relations as tethering continuities through longer stretches of the history

of global financial governance.

Anglo-​A merican Relations

Anglo-​American relations are an informal social institution of collective identity. The

bond between the Anglo-​American countries of the US, UK, Canada, Australia, and New
Zealand, is part racialized cultural identity, part cooperative alliance, part infrastructure and
distributive flows (Vucetic 2011; Fichtner 2017). Some aspects are formalized, but the full
scope is informal. Much security-​oriented scholarship finds the roots of the US-​UK ‘spe-
cial relationship’ in the Second World War experience and its aftermath, yet the broader
Anglo-​American connection is rooted in the earlier period of imperial and settler colonial
expansion of Great Britain (Belich 2009). The shared heritage of these five countries begets
similar legal and socioeconomic systems, as well as a unique and extensive shared global
security alliance. Anglo-​American relations constitute the broader context for the postwar
transition of hegemonic order between the UK to the US. Some narratives portray periods
of financialization and financial crisis as historically interwoven with a linear series of power
transitions between single states (Arrighi and Moore 2001; Lee 2014). However, recent work
on Anglo-​America encourages a more transnational and relational view of contemporary
US hegemony in finance.
Anglo-​American relations are a social institution governing finance that tethers these
states to a present position of financial dominance in the global system. This dominance
is evident through Fichtner’s (2017) examination of structural power indicators such as the
proportion of shares in different financial markets. Key indicators that challenge preva-
lent decline narratives are the currency composition of foreign exchange reserves, and the
share of total global wealth. There are distinct Anglo-​American corporate communities of
board interlocks as well as distinct Anglo-​American investment networks (Fichtner 2017, 27;
Heemskerk and Takes 2016). The Anglo-​American domination of the financial community
imprints also onto the professional habitus of those who work in investment banks and fi-
nancial firms (Schwartz 2019, 8).
The historical institutions of imperialism are an important part of the back-
ground conditions that have translated into Anglo-​American financial relations today.
Consequently, the situation of dominance described previously does not imply any intrinsic
cultural superiority, but rather derives from aspects of historical development of the global
economy and its governance. Connections can be made to imperial institutions through a
significant body of scholarship on Anglo-​imperial history which takes note that “Finance
was a vital element in the power relations that developed between settler societies and the
metropole” (Attard and Dilley 2013, 3; others include Belich 2009; Cain and Hopkins 2016;
Dilley 2012; Magee and Thompson 2010). Belich (2009) offers a ‘rhythmic’ explanation
of cycles of British colonial expansion into the Dominions and the US, followed by eco-
nomic busts that retrenched ties to the imperial homeland through ‘export rescues’. These
ties encompassed what he describes as the economic and cultural unity of Greater Britain,
which included a marked degree of US stock availability in London markets, a prevalence
of American banks in London, and a society of Anglo-​Saxon elite uniting ‘titled British
 Governing Finance   371

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

multilateral form of governance, which relies on more formal interactions and a heavier em-
phasis on administrative bureaucratic procedures.

Gender in Financial Governance

Within the Anglo and European contexts that gave rise to modern financial activity,
gender is another informal social institution significantly tethering governance. Women’s
exclusion from financial markets since at least the seventeenth century to some extent
mirrored a broader historical exclusion of women from public life in Europe and later in
the US, but finance has also been exceptional in both the extremity and resilience of its
underrepresentation of women. This extends also to both the multilateral and trans-
national governance institutions discussed previously, where in 2011, women’s represen-
tation within most organizations was below 10% (Schuberth and Young 2011).5 Exclusion
became ‘common sense’ through the strong identification of masculine norms with financial
practices embodying sometimes contradictory characteristics, such as risk-​taking and ra-
tionality (De Goede 2005; Assassi 2009; Griffin 2013). To analyze gender as a governance
institution in finance additionally reveals the ways that financial activities are enabled by a
broader social order, and produce social meanings and inequalities within that order.
Gender institutions deeply inform the character of capitalist modernity. The centrality
of finance within capitalist development thus means that gender has helped establish the
norms and routines by which financial operations function. On a very fundamental level,
gender difference is integral to the modern separation of public spheres of production via
markets in partnership with states, and private spheres of reproduction in the domestic
household, as many feminist scholars of social reproduction describe (Bakker 2007; Roberts
2016; Bhattacharya 2017). Assassi (2009, 80) depicts how crucial steps in the development
of modern financial markets were enabled by the commodification and privatization of
property, which itself ‘required changes in women’s earlier common law rights, which were
perceived to be a “clog to alienability” and interfered with the process of capital accumu-
lation through commercial and financial ventures’. Consequently, financial development
proceeded through pathways such as the expansion and evolution of financial instruments
of Dutch origin that preceded the industrial revolution, as well as the creation of the Bank
of England and new avenues linking private credit networks to public paper credit. The lib-
eral political theory that accompanied these transformations advocated equality for some,
yet did not significantly challenge ‘enduring pre-​liberal beliefs’ of women’s naturalized in-
feriority and incapacity for public life (Coole 1986, 139; see also Assassi 2009, 58–​59). Rather,
these beliefs and associated norms were integrated into the everyday practices of economies.
Here the prior legacy of European gender institutions tethered new financial practices and
forms of credit at their inception, and accordingly excluded women across classes.
Hegemonic masculinities, while always contingent and negotiated in context, have
endured as an institution shaping finance to the present day (Connel 1995; Assassi 2009).
Indeed, they have taken some blame for financial crises in the late twentieth and twenty-​
first centuries. This is due in part to the continued associations of masculine power with
accumulation; masculine discourses of success in finance ‘appear to encourage particular
interests and preoccupations that coalesce around pursuing high salaries and bonuses, both
 Governing Finance   373

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

foreclosure during the crisis in American as well as some European contexts (Dymski et al.
2013; Wöhl 2017).

Conclusion

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

Notes
1. Some recent international relations scholarship has sought to understand the conditions
under which formal, organizational global governance responses are pursued either in
formal or informal settings (Roger 2020). Our differentiation in this chapter is one of ac-
tual formal organizations and informal social institutions.
2. Yet others (Tsingou and Seabrooke (2009)) note that the public/​private distinction is not
as significant in a sector such as finance where members of the transnational policy com-
munity move frequently between the two realms.
3. The Financial Action Task Force (FATF) for example produces recommendations for
the regulation of illicit financial activities that are meant to guide the behaviour of both
state policymakers and financial institutions themselves (see Tsingou (2010)). The IASB
produces international accounting standards for listed companies; the BCBS produces
international standards for banking; the International Association of Deposit Insurers
(IADI) generates international standards for the conduct of financial deposit insurance
schemes, and so on. However, the standards that these institutions create are them-
selves utilized as yard sticks of country performance by the IMF. Standards in use are also
evaluated by the FSB, which monitors implementation around the world.
 Governing Finance   375

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

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 Chapter 26

Revolu ti on
Eric Selbin

Revolution

Revolution as most commonly understood is an essentially modernist formulation, one

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

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

Modern Times and Micro-​Analyses

While it can range widely, ‘modernity’ is generally used to capture the past 250 years, a period
which rather neatly contains the advent of the familiar, still extant forms of capitalism, lib-
eralism, and ‘Western’, liberal, bourgeois, democracy. It also tracks with what, borrowing
albeit extending Hobsbawm’s famous and felicitous phrase ‘The Age of Revolutions’, which
includes the revolutions (not to mention rebellions, revolts, wars of national liberation,
uprisings, and related acts of resistance and collective social actions) of the late eighteenth
(the revolution in some of Great Britain’s North American colonies, the French Revolution,
and the Haitian Revolution), nineteenth (Latin American wars of independence, the 1848
revolutions across Europe, and the Paris Commune), and twentieth century (revolutions
in Russia, Germany, Mexico, China, Cuba, Portugal, Grenada, Iran, Nicaragua, Eastern
Europe’s ‘colour’ revolutions, and wars of national liberation and anti-​colonial revolutions
across the globe). Foucault famously argued that Iran’s Islamic revolutionaries were post-
modern (see Mirsepassi-​Ashtiani 1994, 51 and Bayat 2005, 894) and others that Mexico’s con-
temporary Zapatistas usher in the postmodern era (see Lippens 2003 or McGreal 2006); it is
unclear what that means, how much it matters, or why.
What seems clearer is that fundamentally, revolution is a modern concept. Consider what
we associate with modernity: questioning, change, the emergence of society, and collective
behaviour (and action), governmentality and states with institutions, industrialization,
secularism, the idea that people can change the material and ideological conditions of their
daily lives, liberalism, socialism, communism, the rejection of the old and embrace of the
new, and science.
Reflect on that list and in every instance—​and more—​revolution lurks. It is implicit and
explicit in almost every case. And the study of revolution, from its earliest days, has sought
 Revolution   381

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

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

Generations of Revolution

The concept of generations, grouping like-​minded individuals together is itself modern

(Mannheim 1952). The persuasiveness, parsimony, and power of Goldstone’s generational
formulation of revolutionary scholarship (1980; 1982; 2001) reflects a careful and close con-
sideration of the work (see, also, contemporaneous assessments by Goldfrank 1979 and Aya
1979; an earlier example of the genre is Stone 1966). This utility and functionality, beholden
to modernity, may prevent movement. Notwithstanding critiques, Goldstone’s genealogy,
honed over the years by and alongside the other most important transitional third-​(Foran
1993; 2005, 8–​14), and fourth-​generation (Lawson 2016; 2019a, 55–​59) theorists, remains
a useful place to start (but see Beck 2020b; Beck and Ritter 2021). This is not to ignore
oversights and omissions (Beck 2020b, 564–​565 is a superb recent example calling this out),
sacrificed, perhaps, to a compelling narrative.
The genealogy, in brief, is that prior to Russia’s 1917 revolutions (Ellwood 1905 and
LeBon 1913), a first-​generation Goldstone (1982, 189) dubs ‘the natural-​history school’
is discernable, dominated by sociologists (Sorokin 1925; Edwards 1927; and Pettee 1938),
psychologists, and historians (Brinton 1965). A second generation, awash in the behav-
iouralist revolution, pursued broader comparisons around violent collective behaviour
(Davies 1962; Smelser 1963; Johnson 1966; Huntington 1968; Gurr 1970; Tilly 1975, 1978).
A third generation, ‘the structural-​theory school’ (Goldstone 1982, 189), sought more than
aggregations of individual behaviour as well as historically grounded cases (Moore 1966;
Wolf 1969; Russell 1974; Paige 1975; Eisenstadt 1978, Trimberger 1978) and found its paradig-
matic statement in Skocpol (1979), crucially refined by Goldstone (1991), Goodwin (2001)
its excellent coda. Goldstone’s formulation, Beck notes, ‘is so familiar . . ., [it] . . . animates
nearly all contemporary literature reviews in revolution studies’ (2020b, 564). I have not
managed to elude it here.
A more far-​flung fourth generation, per Beck (2020b, 564) a ‘basket of approaches’, is ex-
tant (first proposed by Foran 1993, codified by Goldstone 2001, embedded by Lawson 2016).
This generation is unified primarily by a call for the people, ideology, culture, and more they
discern as lacking from the structuralist approach (largely, Lawson laments, ‘additive’, 2016,
107, he sees their ‘advances’, 2019, 60) and an impressive degree of auto-​critique. For at least
some, this fourth generation, if it even exists (per Beck 2020b: 565, a “ ‘fourth generation”
theory does not cohere as a theory or a generation at all’) has had its run and is done, per-
haps none too soon. This is not unreasonable; in profound ways the field remains in thrall
 Revolution   383

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

(Re)Thinking about Thinking

about Revolution

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

rights and collective and engaged governance with representation and resources available
to all, premised on a radical inclusivity beyond anything yet realised’ (Selbin 2019, 489), we
find ourselves at a moment when and where revolutionary sentiments and moments, even
situations, abound (see, also, Desai and Heller 2020, 1269; Kapustin 2019 is a thoughtful
meditation on this matter). There are so many instances in so many places and a more
granular approach, that takes people and their thoughts and actions seriously, may well be
the best way to capture them.
If revolution no longer necessarily follows the form or function of past instances and
processes—​though to what degree such processes ever did is open to debate—​revolution in a
‘familiar, recognisable sense exists everywhere and anywhere people seek to realise their pri-
vate dreams and desires in public settings, when they confront the spectacle rather than pas-
sively consume it as they fight for social justice and a better world for themselves and others’
(Selbin 2019, 486). Revolution is out there and people are making it, albeit, per Marx (1978,
595) not always under conditions of their own choosing. It is certainly the case that at many
times in many places people have suffered greatly—​been hungry and poor, denied health
care, housing, land—​and struggles for socio-​political change have not emerged. At the same
time, when people’s hopes, dreams, and desires, their anger, resentment, and grievance, as
well as fears, promises, and passions come into play, revolutionary imaginations are fired
which generate revolutionary sentiments from whence revolutionary situations may emerge.
Recent work by historians (Brandon et al. 2021) and the historically minded (Arjomand
2019; Kamrava 2019) has ably rectified earlier omissions and oversights associated with the
largely descriptive (Kasprowicz 2020, 423) early ‘natural-​history school’ (Goldstone 1982,
189) on revolution, recentering people as more than elites and undifferentiated masses as well
as attending to their places and actions. Similarly, albeit with different means and methods, a
focus on nonviolent mobilizations and collective behaviours which may be usefully construed
as revolutionary (Schock 2005, 2015; Chenoweth and Stephen 2011; Nepstad 2011, 2015; Ritter
2015; Chenoweth and Ulfelder 2017) has also helped bring people and their practices back into
focus. Such efforts and others remind us of the people who populate the matters we seek to ex-
plore and explicate; revolutionary imaginaries, assemblages, the inevitable friction and zones
of awkward engagement, and resulting entangled histories are powerful guides.
So, what does revolution look like today? Lawson’s recent, bracing reproach merits
mention: ‘there are two main ways of approaching the study of revolution in the contem-
porary world—​and they are both wrong’ (2015, 453). In his view these two were assemblages
simultaneously ‘popular protest, campaign against inequality, and technological break-
through’ and the ‘apparently contradictory, meme—​that revolutions are irrelevant to a world
in which the big issues of governance and economic development have been settled’. This
seems right. One might add that the days of beards, bombs, and bullets seem (mostly) past
as well, though there are reasons to think otherwise and there are literally people in moun-
tains, fields, and remote jungles organizing, armed, and fighting. Nor does much seem to be
gained by reconceiving ‘failed’ revolutions, reinforcing an unfortunate Eurocentricity/​global
northism that haunts the field(s). This is not to deny Lawson’s (2019, 226) point that contem-
porary revolutions owe a debt to the legacies of 1905, 1848, and 1776 (more, he wagers, than to
1789 or 1917). But there are so many more local legacies that matter more.
What merits our attention are the literally innumerable cases around the world
where people struggle in various manners for their world, many of which we ‘know’ (in-
tentionally or not) little about in our redoubts but are part of (micro)local, regional, and
 Revolution   385

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

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

Revolution Today

There are many definitions of revolution; its ‘return’ to academia reminds me of a question
Nayak and I posed in a related context: ‘Do you ever wonder if the peasants, farmers,
oppressed women, child soldiers, sick and dying, poor—​or others you study, categorize, and
write about—​are sitting around somewhere wondering about you . . .?’ (Nayak and Selbin
2010, 3). Are they subjecting our no doubt puzzling analyses to the calming order of their
world(s)? If revolutions are ‘social facts’ dependent on human consensus and consciousness
to imbue them with meaning (Barnett 2011, 163; Doty 1996, 2), there is a ‘folksonomy’ of revo-
lution, a collective, user-​generated, non-​hierarchical, bottom-​up classification, produced
largely by those seeking to change their worlds (and those resisting). Seeking to avoid the
hierarchy (and patriarchy) inherent in taxonomy, a folksonomic approach embraces the
messiness and complexity of people. The various ‘imaginaries’ which reflect human agency,
collective action, ideology, and culture are socially and collectively constructed. People’s
revolutionary imaginaries provide the means and methods to struggle for control of the ma-
terial and ideological conditions of their everyday lives in a world hostile to their interests.
People’s creativity, verve, and élan—​daring acts of bricolage—​allow them to (re)create
and negotiate their world(s), weaving together symbols, songs, tales, rituals, dates, places,
memory/​ies, and more as they encounter state and society into a legible, working narrative
(Selbin 2010, 75–​76) articulating who they are, what are doing, and where they want to go. It
is imperative we resist overwriting these in our image(s), our narrative, as we seek them out
to understand revolutionary activity.
This sort of formulation at least necessitates a broad definition . . . or perhaps no definition
at all, a sense that we know revolution—​meaningful change in the material and ideological
conditions of people’s everyday lives—​when we see it. Opening revolution to the everyday
and everyone seems fruitful if difficult. By interrogating and interpolating revolutionary
imaginaries, assemblages and the predictable friction(s) and hence zones of awkward
 Revolution   387

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

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

Notes
1. A construction influenced by the modern-​day Zapatistas: ‘it is not necessary to conquer
the world. It is sufficient with making it new. Us. Today’; Marcos, et al. (1998, 19).
2. More modestly, and arguably more accurately, Brown asks ‘If the modality of political
transformation in modernity was revolution, what lies beyond it’ (2005, 113). Kapustin
(2019, 132) fruitfully ponders the link between revolution and modernization.
3. The first-​and second-​generation scholars are all Euro-​white males. Women are in the
third generation, notably Russell (1974); Trimberger (1978); and Skocpol (1979) but Russell
listed her initials (D. E. H) and reviewers used male pronouns while Skocpol’s reviewers
 Revolution   389

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

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 PA RT I V

L O C A L E S ( SPAC IA L ,
T E M P OR A L ,
C U LT U R A L )
 Chapter 27

The ‘ Premode rn’ Worl d

Julia Costa Lopez

Engagements with the premodern world within disciplinary International Relations

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

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

The Religious Premodern: Pluralizing

the Premodern

A first narrative about the dividing line between premodern and modern concerns religion
and secularism, and particularly the characterization of the premodern world as dominated
by religion—​and of modernity as correspondingly secular. The centrality of this narrative
is given by the preponderance of medieval Europe in disciplinary explorations of the
premodern, but is also present in the treatment of other periods and spaces, such as the in-
sistence on the ‘Confucian order’ in the case of premodern China.
The focus on religion in the case of medieval Europe starts with the naming itself: both
classic and more recent takes refer to the period as ‘International Relations in Christendom’
or ‘Medieval Latin Christendom’ (Brown, Nardin, and Rengger 2002; Latham 2011). In
this reading, medieval Europe’s distinctive feature was its religious (Christian) character.
Institutionally, this meant the centrality of the Church in the organization of society, in terms
of religious rites, but most importantly as a governance structure that paralleled, competed
with, and in some cases ruled over secular rulers. This centrality of religion extended also to
ideas and identities. In political thought, Christian texts constituted the basis for thinking
about the organization of society, and thus IR scholars frequently draw attention to the
writings of theologians like Agustin and Aquinas. At the level of identities, Christianity was
the main mode of collective identification, which led to a number of structural antagonisms
and conflict with other confessionalities (Keene 2005; Alkopher 2005; Latham 2011; Costa
Lopez 2016).
The focus on the religious Middle Ages also conditions how the passage to modernity
is viewed, with the Reformation and the Peace of Westphalia being the main benchmarks.
Indeed, the cultural unity of Latin Christendom was shattered at the turn of the sixteenth
century with Luther’s rejection of the role of the Latin Church. This was not only a matter
of theology, but radically altered the traditional legitimating bases of authority upon which
the late-​medieval order rested (Phillips 2010). And even more, it also had a significant im-
pact on political networks and patterns of association and mobilisation. In this reading, the
proliferation of confessions fundamentally altered the dynamics between rulers and ruled in
composite polities, leading to a system-​wide crisis and subsequent transformation (Nexon
2009). While it is still possible to speak of ‘Christian international society’ well into the
seventeenth century (Bull 2012, 26ff.), the Reformation and the Wars of Religion are con-
ventionally seen as a moment of crisis. The resolving moment of this convulse period was
 The ‘Premodern’ World    397

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

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

The Local, Simple Premodern: Globalizing

the Premodern

A second approach to the premodern world is to emphasize its local, simple, and isolated
character. When referring to the period from 3500 bc to 1500 ad, Buzan and Little, for ex-
ample, claim that ‘there is a certain static quality about this whole gigantic era’ (Buzan and
Little 2000, 165). This is not an isolated instance: the claim that premodern—​and especially
medieval—​politics took place at a small, local scale is almost a commonplace (Osiander
2001a). This characterization ultimately draws from a long tradition in social theory that
sees human evolution as a progressively complexifying process. In its Durkheimian
iterations, it puts forward a developmental narrative of societies whereby they evolve from
simple segmentary differentiation via premodern stratificatory differentiation into modern,
functional differentiation (Buzan and Albert 2010). Functional differentiation is in this view
the hallmark of modern society, where progressive specialization creates a variety of sep-
arate spheres that require different modes of social integration. Conversely, the premodern
appears as either segmentary or stratificatorily differentiated: a realm of the local or region-
ally specific, of traditional politics, and static orders—​as it is only in modernity that a larger
scale of politics becomes possible. When taken from an international perspective, this is a
(teleological) story about progressive globalization, whereby societies evolve from localized
modes of existence to have increasingly more interaction, culminating in a globalized world
(Holmes and Standen 2018).
Interestingly enough, there are differing accounts of what constitutes this global mod-
ernity. For some, the Columbian exchange in 1492 marks the breaking point (Dunne and
Reus-​Smit 2017). On the one hand, for the first time it marks the existence of a global-​scale
international system through the opening of sea lanes and the development of a global pol-
itical economy (Buzan and Lawson 2014, 438), but also through the development of new,
specific global imaginaries (Lobo-​Guerrero 2019). On the other hand, it also means the in-
ception of modern colonialism and thus the creation of a series of power structures that per-
sist until now (Inayatullah and Blaney 2004). For other scholars, however, this move into
modernity only took place in the long nineteenth century. In this account, transformations
such as industrialization, along with the emergence of new ideologies, meant a fundamental
 The ‘Premodern’ World    399

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

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

The Complex Premodern: Making

the Premodern Intelligible

Interestingly, the classical narrative in IR about the emergence of the modern state—​
encapsulated in the ‘Westphalian myth’ (Osiander 2001b)—​presents a diametrically opposed
view to those who see the premodern in terms of simplicity. The story is well-​known: the
European Middle Ages were characterized by a heteronomous organizing principle: that is,
not conforming to the norms of sovereignty and statehood, they were organized around a
variety of ‘overlapping authorities and multiple loyalties’ (Bull 2012, 245; similarly, Ruggie
1998). The resulting variety of actors that populated medieval Europe—​from lords to kings,
churches to merchants and monks—​interacted with one another on the basis of funda-
mentally different understandings of social organization; lacking a distinction between
public and private, and between political authority and property, they operated by making
specific claims under the universalist ideologies of the Holy Roman Empire and the Latin
Church. It was not until the Reformation broke the monopoly of this universalisms, and the
Renaissance recovered ancient concepts of politics, that this medieval heteronomy was over-
come and the modern international emerged (Philpott 2001). This involved a fundamental
transformation of the political imagination: political communities were delimited through a
territorialized inside/​outside scheme, and all political authority was seen as emanating from
a single sovereign point (Walker 1993).
Much like in the previous case, this understanding of the premodern, in this case the
medieval, presents an evolutionary narrative about the emergence of modernity. And yet,
this narrative is very much opposed to the standard complexifying one in social theory, for
it sees the transition to modernity as a simplifying move. The change towards an organizing
principle of sovereign equality meant the concentration not only of political authority into
sovereign hands, but also the establishment of a segmentary mode of differentiation by
 The ‘Premodern’ World    401

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

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

The Premodern is Us

A final way of engaging with the premodern world has been taking to heart Wight’s charac-
terization of the international ‘as realm of recurrence and repetition’ (Wight 1966, 26). As
opposed to the previous takes, which were predicated on the notion of a fundamental rup-
ture between premodern and modern, these authors (more or less explicitly) challenge this
by emphasizing continuities or, at the very least, the possibility of thinking about the both
within one same conceptual scheme. This argument has been made with reference to a var-
iety of locales, from the Middle Ages to the Chinese Warring States (Fischer 1992; Zhang
2003; Hui 2004; Hui 2005).
However, it has been most commonly accepted in relation to Ancient Greece during the
so-​called Classical era from about 500 to 100 bc. The region at the time was populated by
a number of small city-​states, which, although having very different forms of political or-
ganization, regularly interacted with one another: they traded, waged wars, or engaged in
diplomacy. On the one hand, scholars have focused on the conflict dynamics, both through
histories of war but also though an overwhelming attention to Thucydides’ infamous Melian
dialogue (Keene 2015). Through this, they have sought to prove how conflict dynamics in
Classical Greece paralleled current international politics (Gilpin 1981). On the other hand,
these city-​states also exhibited a variety of cooperative interaction patterns, from mediation
to third-​party arbitration, that have led some to see this as a first instance of an international
society (Watson 1992; Wight 1977). In both these literatures, Ancient Greece ‘stands as one
of the great analogues of the modern state system, a familiar world of independent states in
which the eternal verities of international politics are thought to have appeared in their most
rudimentary and essential form’ (Reus-​Smit 1999, 40).
 The ‘Premodern’ World    403

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

Conclusion

The previous sections have examined a number of ways in which the premodern is
commonly portrayed through the lens of periodization, that is, by unpacking the
conceptualizations that are ascribed to specific periods. Doing so has revealed not only
common understandings of the premodern as religious, local, complex, and also similar to
us, but also some of the alternatives to doing so. However, the point of highlighting these
different understandings, and their restrictions, is not to arrive at a ‘true’ characterization
of the premodern, nor is it to find the correct periodization. On the contrary, the matter of
periodization is such that any attempts at settling it risk drawing one into an ‘interminable
rabbit warren of nominalist anxieties’ (Strathern 2018, 317). Where do we go from here? In
this concluding section I consider some potential challenges in light of the broad theme of
granularity in this volume. To begin with, we may observe that the majority of studies of the
premodern in IR operate at a high level of generality. This ‘generality’, however, operates in at
least two ways: at the level of research practice, by relying on secondary literature, and at the
level of the type of questions that are asked, by inquiring mostly into system-​level features in
broad sways of time and space rather than about specific events or interactions.
There are some very good reasons for relying on historiography: for one, sources for the
examination of premodern processes are—​in broad terms—​scarcer than for contemporary
ones. Not only do the evolution of record-​keeping and archiving practices mean that it is
comparatively easier to access modern records for a variety of topics, but it is hard to over-
estimate the impact of the passage of time, disaster, and willful destruction for the loss and
damaging of older sources. Thus, more and more frequently, historiographical approaches
to a number of premodern topics make use of sources, methods, and approaches with
which IR scholars are generally unfamiliar: from archaeology to environmental science,
the premodern frequently requires interdisciplinary collaboration. Moreover, the number
of languages and contexts that it would be necessary to master if we were to follow the
suggestions of this chapter and unpack premodern global connections and entanglement
is almost insurmountable not only for IR scholars but also for historians. Similarly, there
is a priori no reason to eliminate certain types of questions about the premodern nor to
discard periodization as a mode of historical knowledge: periodization is always a cre-
ation that constrains our knowledge about the past—​and yet, at the same time we cannot
know the past without conceptualizing it. And conceptualization, while not being redu-
cible to it, necessarily involves a temporal dimension that creates divisions in time, that is,
periodizes.
However, taken together the works examined in this chapter reveal an approach operating
at a level of abstraction and generality that mostly serves to confirm—​and conform to—​
specific grand evolutionary narratives about the emergence of modernity. Indeed, more
than enable specific knowledge, the category of the ‘premodern’ appears to work to pre-
clude any surprises and confirm preconceptions. By creating a division between a previous
time and us, it inscribes this binary as foundational to the inquiry—​or alternatively elides
all differences. While it is impossible to conduct research on any topic without specific
conceptualizations, when this is added to the first dimension of generality—​the reliance on
secondary literature—​this sets up a mode of research that leads to subsuming the premodern
 The ‘Premodern’ World    405

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

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 Chapter 28

Moderni t y a nd
Moderni t i e s i n
In ternationa l Re l at i ons 1

Ayşe Zarakol

Introduction

International Relations (IR) is a relatively ‘modern’ field of study (see e.g. Schmidt 1998,
2013). It has also been a ‘modernist’ field since its inception,2 in the sense that most IR schol-
arship takes the sociological conditions3 associated with ‘modernity’ as given: e.g. the ter-
ritorial nation-​state, the inside-​outside distinction, the purposeful agent (and often their
more extreme cousin, the rational actor), the externalization of violence and risk, and so
on.4 Let us assume, for a moment, that such a global ‘modernity’ in which both the discip-
line and the practice of IR were forged exists, at least in a way that is discernibly different
from what occupied a similar space in previous eras. The first question such an assumption
raises to the fore is: who made that modernity? The next question is how and when that
‘modernity’ became universal, to the extent it did. The reason why these questions are im-
portant to the discipline of IR is obvious: because the assumption of ‘modernity’ determines
the scope conditions of IR theorizing, the way one answers those questions can also dictate
which actors count in IR and who can be safely neglected when theorizing world politics.
Unfortunately, getting modernity wrong in IR has seriously damaged our ability to theorize
not only about the present but also in ways that can shed light onto the future of IR.
This chapter proceeds in three sections. In the first section, it discusses the ways in
which the understandings of modernity in both mainstream but also critical IR fall short.
Mainstream and critical IR scholarship share the flaw of reproducing a ‘modernization
theory’ ontology. This section also argues that unless it is replaced by an alternative (but still
grand) narrative, we are doomed to infinitely reproduce ‘modernization theory’ because it is
a metahistorical narrative that helps make sense of how IR came to exist in the way IR studies
it. These types of metahistorical narratives do not die slow deaths by a thousand cuts. Unless
replaced, they continue to live on as ‘common sense’, no matter how much criticism they
attract. The second section then more concretely illustrates these arguments through the
 Modernity and Modernities in IR    411

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

IR and the ‘Modernization Theory’ Trap

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

former, and that Western actors are always ‘ahead’ of non-​Western actors.6 In that literature,
agents come up with institutional innovations in the core of the system and then teach those
norms to others. It could be argued that much of IR thus has made the teleology of ‘mod-
ernization theory’ even more Western-​centric in that the non-​West does not even follow
naturally along a predetermined path, but has to be always cajoled there (usually via ‘rational
persuasion’) by Western actors. Let’s call that more vanguardist version of ‘modernization
theory’ Wrong Answer 2 to the question of how we have arrived at a global modernity. If the
original modernization theory narrative of everyone following one linear path to modernity
is ‘modernization theory 1.0’, the more vanguardist version where the non-​West follows on
that path only with the West’s instruction and assistance is ‘modernization theory 1.1’.
Perhaps surprisingly, much of the ‘critical’ scholarship in IR also shares a lot of these same
assumptions about ‘modernity’ being a Western export in other parts of the world. Let’s call
this Wrong Answer 3 or ‘modernization theory 1.2’. Where a lot of this scholarship diverges
from the mainstream is seeing the diffusion of modernity outside of the West as mostly a
positive development. Such critical approaches also reject the idea that the West was ration-
ally persuading the non-​West to the benefits of modernity, seeing modernization outside of
the West as violent, coercive, and forced. As warranted as some of these criticisms may be,
however, the critical literature leaves the metahistorical and teleological narrative of ‘mod-
ernization theory’ intact. The West acts; the non-​West is only acted upon. The non-​West
is still dragged into modernity (in this version against its will) and is not an active agent or
participant in its creation. This is not to overlook the fact that decolonial or postcolonial
versions of this camp have pointed out that Western modernity would not have been pos-
sible without ‘the Other’. Even in such accounts, however, the notion that modernity is
owned by the West is not really challenged, partly because modernity is seen as ethically and
normatively suspect.
In sum, what all of these narratives have in common, despite the differences in their polit-
ical stances, is the idea that ‘modernity’ is a unique set of developments that was experienced
first or only by the West. What they differ on is the normative evaluation and the ease
of the journey of non-​Westerners in getting to the same spot. This is why they can all be
categorized under the same heading of ‘modernization theory’, which is still the dominant
understanding in IR about global history, bridging across paradigmatic, epistemological, or
even political divides. If ‘modernization theory’ has been so discredited in developmental
economics for decades, why has a version of it animated so much of our thinking in IR, some
recent interventions notwithstanding? Gilman argues that even in development studies
‘modernization theory’ never fully went away because it provided ‘a metahistorical narrative
that was both easy for the masses to understand and satisfying to elites as an affirmation of
the historical inevitability and moral righteousness of their own role in economic and na-
tional development’ (2018, 134). Adapting this insight to the IR context, we can observe three
things.
First, the ‘modernization theory’ narrative has not been eschewed explicitly in IR be-
cause its IR version is hardly ever explicitly labelled as ‘modernization theory’. The trad-
itional English School account of the expansion of the European society of states—​i.e. that
international society and modern sovereignty was invented in Europe after the Westphalian
Peace and was exported elsewhere in the world—​is the closest we come to an explicit argu-
ment, and that has attracted its fair share criticism in recent years. Yet, most of the field, at
least until recently, has been ahistorical in its discussions of modernity and also coy about
 Modernity and Modernities in IR    413

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

‘Emergence of Modern Sovereignty’ as a

Modernization Theory Narrative within IR

Sovereignty is one of the foundational assumptions of IR (Lawson and Shilliam 2009, 658;
Krasner 2001), because most of our theories see sovereign states (sometimes also called
‘Westphalian states’) as the primary—​if not the only—​building blocks of the system (see
e.g. Krasner 1995–​96, 121). One could even argue that ‘without sovereign states being
present in some guise, there can be no modern international system, and hence no mean-
ingful study of international relations’ (Bartelson 2018, 569). Perhaps surprisingly for a
social science concept, there is also a considerable degree of consensus9 in the field as to
what modern state sovereignty entails: most IR definitions of sovereignty can be reduced
to the components of ‘supreme authority’ and ‘territory’ (Bartelson 2018; see also Philpott
1995). For example,10 Krasner (1995–​96, 115) defines ‘the Westphalian state’ as ‘a system of
political authority based on territory and autonomy; elsewhere he distinguishes between
‘interdependence sovereignty . . . [i.e.] the ability of states to control movement across their
borders’ (Krasner 2001, 19), ‘domestic sovereignty’ which denotes the extent to which pol-
itical authority can ‘effectively regulate behaviour’; ‘Vattelian sovereignty . . . [i.e.] the ex-
clusion of external sources of authority both de jure and de facto’ (Krasner 2001, 20), and
‘International legal sovereignty [which] refers to mutual recognition’ (Krasner 2001, 20).
Yet given enough degrees of abstraction, these are just different ways of answering the
question of ‘Is there an exclusive political authority within a(n unified) territory?’. When we
think about modern sovereignty, we look for the presence of two factors: 1) the centraliza-
tion of political authority, i.e. the elimination of rival authority claims, external and internal,
2) territoriality, i.e. the expectation that political authority is claimed over a unified and
bounded territory (as opposed to personal networks or symbolic sites such as Jerusalem).
Discussions of modern sovereignty also build the assumption of external recognition into
both these factors.
Because the presence of sovereign states, thus defined, determines ‘the scope conditions’
of most IR theories, IR as a field has been at least obliquely interested when and how modern
sovereignty emerged. As Lawson and Shilliam (2009, 660) put it in their introduction to a
forum on sovereignty in International Politics, the IR literature is not short of theories about
when and how ‘sovereignty appeared: in the cuius regio, eius religio (whose the region, his the
religion) clauses instituted at the Treaties of Augsburg (1555) and Westphalia (1648) (Wight
1992); in the inter-​state wars and geopolitical struggles ushered in by the European military
revolution of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries (Gilpin 1981; Mann 1988; Tilly 1990);
in normative shifts associated with shifting understandings of territoriality (Ruggie, 1983),
religious belief (Philpott, 2001, Nexon 2009), and statehood (Reus-​Smit 1999); via funda-
mental shake-​ups to the constitution of modern subjectivity (Walker 1993; Bartelson 1995;
Weber 1995); or in the development of private property rights and other processes associated
with the emergence of industrial capitalism (Rosenberg, 1994; Teschke, 2003)’. Of course, not
all IR paradigms are equally invested in when (or how) the modern system emerged,11 but
most at least agree that the modern state has a (Western) European origin, from where it was
imported to the rest of the world, i.e. they subscribe to yet another iteration of the ‘modern-
ization theory’ discussed in the previous section.
 Modernity and Modernities in IR    415

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

that ‘the big bang of modernity explodes within Europe in 1648, having previously unfolded
through an evolutionary process that is entirely endogenous to Europe, before the sover-
eign state is exported to the East through imperialism and proto-​globalization’ (2012a, 32).
The Eurocentric big bang theory also demarcates the East from the West, relegating the East
‘to a backward ghetto that endures only regressive and barbaric institutions’, condemned to
follow in the West’s shadow, while the West is inscribed with all the progressive properties.
It is true that the IR literature dealing with the emergence of sovereignty (or any historical
matter) has almost nothing13 to say about what was happening outside of (Western) Europe
while the various developments which constitute the subject of their inquiry were unfolding
in Europe. In the ‘great powers’ literature, for instance, it has been entirely commonplace to
discuss the Holy Roman Empire (or Spain), as a historical example of a ‘great power’, but to
do so without even mentioning the Habsburg-​Ottoman-​Safavid rivalry which dominated
the sixteenth century.14
As for theorizing the emergence of modern sovereignty, the literature does not make ex-
plicit claims about the emergence of sovereignty (or even lack thereof) outside of Europe; it is
simply silent about what was going on outside of Europe, which allows the reader to assume
that nothing interesting was happening outside of Europe, if not outright assuming that non-​
European polities were just lagging behind. It is very much possible to link the criticisms
around Eurocentrism with the criticisms around the dating of the modern system: one of the
primary justifications of the social stratification of the international system post-​nineteenth
century is the projection of nineteenth century developments back into history (see Zarakol
(2022); also Davis 2008).
This brings us to the second main line of criticism against the traditional ‘emergence of
sovereignty’ literature in IR. This line of criticism goes further in undermining the ‘mod-
ernization theory’ narrative, but still not far enough. Within this camp, several remedies
have been offered thus far for the problem of Eurocentrism: a number of scholars have
been challenging the notion that Europe’s progress was self-​propelling, by offering rich
accounts in which they show that developments in Europe were not endogenously driven
but very much influenced by developments in what is now called the East (see e.g. Hobson
2009, 2012b; Anievas and Nişancıoğlu 2013, 2015; Nişancıoğlu 2014; and so on). Yet another
remedy has been to fill in missing pieces of global history by adding significant periods
from other regions; much of the literature on Chinese history in IR is an example of this
approach (see e.g. Kang 2010; Hui 2005). Finally, some have argued that the system of
modern sovereignty has been shaped also by the pushback from non-​Western regions (see
e.g. Tourinho 2021; Shilliam 2006) and thus should not be understood entirely as a Western
product.15
All of these interventions are helpful in their own way, but there is one fundamental
issue they do not address when it comes to our understanding of modernization. If
other regions are studied only as contributors to Western developments or as entirely
separate historical sites for a different kind of regional system, then our understanding
of the non-​West still remains in its own silo. As long that remains true, IR conceives
of the non-​Western world either as following after (or reacting to) the West (in mod-
ernity) or having been important before the ascendance of the West (pre-​modernity),
but not ever as existing on the same comparative temporal plane in modernity. The
metahistorical narrative of ‘modernization theory’ will not budge until there is an alter-
native metahistorical narrative.
 Modernity and Modernities in IR    417

The way forward: Constructing Alternative

Meta-​Narratives of Modernization
and Modernity

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

the same ‘modernization theory’ type of thinking that gave rise to this situation in social
sciences had also coloured historical scholarship of non-​Western regions so thoroughly
(even in those regions themselves) that even if IR had been more global in its gaze, it might
not even have found anything except its worst assumptions confirmed. In recent decades,
however, historical scholarship of the non-​West has progressed leaps and bounds, radically
revising our understanding of polities of ‘early modernity’19 beyond Western Europe such as
the Ottomans, Safavids, Mughals, not to mention Russia and China in that same period.20
Now the time has come for us to broaden our gaze as well.
A more open-​minded survey of global history would indeed show that many elements
thought to be unique to early modern Europe are not so: e.g. the development of
justifications of political absolutism, subjugation of religious authority under political
rule, creation of a centralized bureaucracy, a standing army, a unified currency zone, and
the emergence of court society, confessionalization/​homogenization of the dominant
group, resistance to and institutionalization of checks on absolutism, treaties of sover-
eign recognition, and so on. Some, such as the notion of supreme political authority and
practices of state centralization, emerged in Europe-​proximate polities in the fourteenth
and fifteenth centuries, before they did in Europe. Many other developments considered
unique to Europe were experienced roughly in parallel: precursors to territorialization
such as boundary making treaties (in the manner of Westphalia) and confessionalization;
the subsequent development of checks (broadly defined) on absolute sovereignty and so
on, indicating systemic patterns (see also Mukoyama 2022). This suggests, at a minimum,
that theories which have attributed causality to any of the previously mentioned factors for
the supposed emergence of the ‘Westphalian state’ as well the ‘Westphalian System’ in the
seventeenth century have to be revisited. In all likelihood, state centralization is not quite
the ‘innovation’ the literature believes it to be, but rather one of those trends that are part
and parcel of human condition and governance, cyclically encouraged and discouraged by
systemic material conditions as well as hindered or helped along by available ideational
repertoires.
In sum, theories of European state formation (and any other theory that implicitly or ex-
plicitly relies on modernization theory to explain its chain of diffusion) need to be probed
again with a proper comparative lens that avoids selecting on the ‘dependent variable’. This is
especially true for those explanations that locate causality in the period before the eighteenth
century; Eurasian polities were equally good or even better state builders between four-
teenth and seventeenth centuries. We need to explain the divergent fates of the East and the
West in the nineteenth century given precisely that background, whereas the ‘moderniza-
tion theory’ of IR has instead insisted on reading present day social and material hierarchies
back into history, thus rendering post-​nineteenth-​century hierarchies seemingly transhis-
torical. The high number of parallel developments in the long sixteenth century throughout
Eurasia is also suggestive of the fact that our global system may not be the first of its kind.
Parallel developments throughout Eurasia within close temporal proximity to each other
could be purely accidental, but what if they are following a pattern? If the latter, we may want
to look for structural material explanations—​e.g. the reverberations of the Spanish price
revolution—​or ideational ones—​e.g. the spread of millenarian beliefs. Evidence for any of
the latter would suggest higher levels of interaction throughout Eurasia than previously
imagined, and hence the presence of a relatively globalized international system prior to our
current one. At the moment, the discipline is incapable of imaging any kind of system in the
 Modernity and Modernities in IR    419

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

Conclusion

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

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

8. For more on this, see Zarakol (2022), ‘Epilogue’.

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

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 Chapter 29

The ‘We st ’ i n
Internationa l Re l at i ons
Jacinta O’Hagan

Introduction

The West is at once one of the most important concepts in the history of international
relations and one of the most problematic. Whilst the concept is deeply entrenched in
the language of world politics, it is highly elusive and contested: there are many different
interpretations in academic and political discourses of what defines the West; and mul-
tiple responses to the questions who, what, and where is the West? Sometimes the concept
is used to refer to a civilizational complex characterized by Judeo-​Christian tradition, at
others to a collection of European empires, elsewhere to an alliance of liberal democratic
states, or to liberal industrialized economies. Often it is used as a synonym for modernity.
Political and popular opinions have also varied starkly about whether historically the West
has been a force for the good, nurturing political social and economic progress, or a force
of oppression and domination. This lack of consensus about how the West is defined and
evaluated make it challenging to understand and explain the role it has played as a his-
torical locale in international relations. Yet it also casts an important light on the com-
plex and multifaceted nature of history in international relations. In this chapter, I argue
we should see the history of international relations as a complex intersection of diverse
histories premised on a range of different ontologies, narratives, and experiences. Within
these, the West is a sweeping historical locale that has functioned as a strategic and nor-
mative reference point through which political actors have situated themselves and their
communities in the structures of the international order. Representations of the West have
played an important role in the constitution of identities and defining the purposes and
parameters of agency within those configurations of international order. To understand the
role played by the West in the history of international relations, we need to delve into the
many different ways the West has been conceptualized and articulated at different histor-
ical conjunctures. I do this through exploring different narratives of the West articulated
across time and space. The narrative approach provides a method to explore patterns and
variations in invocations of the West by different voices at different historical conjunctures;
 The ‘West’ in IR     425

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

Conceptualizing the West

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

be invoked by political actors as counter-​narratives to resist or challenge the dominant

narrative.
As Lehti et al. argue, the West can be treated as a narrative concept in so far as it is ‘a
social imaginary that enables societies and nations to share particular narratives, myths,
and stories on ‘how they fit together with others’, and to imagine ‘the deep normative
notions and images that underlie’ common expectations’. Narratives ‘create a sense of
global agency and set up a moral background for building and maintaining global order’.
(Lehti et al. 2020, 5). The West, however, is not a fixed social imaginary and there is no
single narrative of the West. Rather there are a number of competing narratives that
ascribe the West different forms of global agency in the context of shifting configurations
of international order. In order to capture this historical mutability, I have selected three
sets of narratives of the West articulated in the context of three configurations of inter-
national order in the history of the international system: the European imperial order; the
Cold War order; and the post-​C old War order. The first narrative represents the West as
a unique civilization with a deep historical heritage that stands of the forefront of human
progress. The second is the narrative of the liberal West, which dominated renderings
of the West in the Cold War order. In this narrative the West is closely associated with
the ideas of liberal democracy, capitalism, and the liberal international order. The third
narrative is the fragmenting West. This has been prominent in renderings of the West in
the unsettled post-​C old War order. Whereas the first two narratives frame the West as
a progressive and expansionist force in world politics, the fragmenting West narrative
focuses on its potential decline.
These narratives are layered and interlocking. Each is complex, multifaceted, and
incorporates ambiguities and tensions. For each set, I identify an influential narrative that
was widely accepted by Western elites and publics, which I treat as the dominant narrative.
I also outline a number of contemporary alternative or parallel narratives that vied with,
challenged or resisted the dominant narratives. Some of these came from within Western
intellectual and political establishments, others were voiced by intellectuals and pol-
itical leaders who were positioned, or positioned themselves, outside the parameters of
the West. Exploring these different narratives of the West elucidates some of the contest-
ation surrounding its role in the history of international relations. It also provides insight
into variations in how the West is positioned by intellectuals or political practitioners
in relation to the ordering principles of the international system at different historical
conjunctures.
One theme running through these narratives is the relationship between the West and
modernity. The West has been central to the concept of modernity and is often taken as
synonymous with it. Classical European theories of modernity represented it as ‘a process
begun and finished in Europe, from where it has been exported across ever-​expanding
regions of the non-​West’ (Buzan and Lawson 2015). There was an implicit assumption that
modernizing societies would follow the pathway to modernity carved by the West: to mod-
ernize was to Westernize. But one of the most important and hotly contested aspects of the
modernization debate—​both past and present—​is whether there is one single model of
modernity, which is represented by the West, or whether there are ‘multiple modernities’
(Eisenstadt 2000). This debate is one of the key themes interwoven into the narratives of
the West discussed here.
 The ‘West’ in IR     427

The Narrative of the Civilizational West

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

centuries as Europe’s comparative material power and capability grew. Even China was in-
creasingly regarded as a stagnant civilization governed by Oriental despotism (Pagden
2014). The pervasive conviction of European cultural, political, and economic superiority
formed a crucial foundation of the civilizational West narrative (Hobson 2012; Pitts 2005).
It was expressed in the ‘standards of civilization’, which became embedded in international
law in the nineteenth century (Gong 1984). The standards generated a legal hierarchy within
the international order, premised on whether non-​European peoples were adjudged to have
the capacity for self-​governance in accordance with European standards, and could meet
the rights and obligations of ‘civilized nations’ (Gong 1984; Bowden 2014). The standards
of civilization served to legitimate European colonization and the negotiation of unequal
treaties with non-​European peoples. They were a crucial component of a broader narrative
that endowed European peoples with a mission to spread progress and civilization.
The civilizing mission was a fundamental component of the civilizational West narrative,
becoming ‘an ideology by which late nineteenth century Europeans rationalized their colo-
nial domination of the rest of humankind’ (Adas 2004, 1). It was articulated at many levels.
The mission civilistrice, for instance, became an official ideology of French foreign policy
from 1870s (Conklin 1997). Commerce and missionary activities were also seen as part of the
civilizing mission, acting as mechanisms for the diffusion of Western influence and values.
Commerce, for instance, was considered both a way to bring non-​European peoples into the
global economy, and to inculcate qualities that underpinned Western progress, such as in-
dustriousness and efficiency.
Whilst the narrative of the civilizational West invoked a singular civilizing process, it also
encompassed the idea of Western civilization as a distinct, if loosely bounded community.
The idea of a distinct Western civilization coalesced during the nineteenth century along-
side more entrenched conceptions of civilizational and racial hierarchies (Jackson 2006;
Aydin 2007). The boundaries of Western civilization were inscribed at many different sites.
The civilizing mission, for instance, was often articulated through binary oppositions and
stereotypes: European peoples were scientific, energetic, disciplined, punctual, rational,
whilst other peoples were superstitious, indolent, duplicitous, emotional (Adas 2004; Said
1979). Edward Said (1979) described how this process of essentialization, which he called
Orientalism, permeated representations of Islamic societies in European intellectual and
political discourses. Drawing on historical tropes and narratives of the antithesis between
Latin Christendom and Islam during the medieval Crusades and the threat posed to Europe
by Moorish empires, the Orient was constructed as inferior to the Western self, but also a
threat.
Race was an increasingly important boundary in the narrative of the civilizational West.
Scientific racism became a powerful concept in European thought from the 1860s. It located
peoples in a hierarchy of capability and development based on their biological attributes.
The white races sat at the pinnacle of this hierarchy. Some racialist thinkers believed racial
superiority imbued the white races with a responsibility for the tutelage of more ‘backward’
races, helping to rationalize imperial hierarchies. Others feared the racial purity of the white
races would be diluted by miscegenation or ‘swamping’ by other races, arguments used to
legitimate the containment or even extermination of other races (Buzan and Lawson 2015;
Hobson 2012, 21). Here again a belief in Western superiority blended with a sense of threat, a
recurrent theme in narratives of the West.
 The ‘West’ in IR     429

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

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

The Liberal West Narrative

The Grand Narrative of Western civilization provided ‘a cultural and historical basis for a
liberal consensus about the merits and potential of the West that was unapologetically ra-
tionalist, progressive and confident of the benefits of science and industry’ (Gress 1997,
529). These qualities sat at the very core of the liberal West narrative. This narrative be-
came a central feature of political discourse in the Cold War international order. The lib-
eral narrative drew on elements of the civilizational narrative of the West, invoking
Enlightenment concepts such as freedom, equality, progress, and individual rights; however,
it departed from the civilizational narrative in its rejection of colonial, civilizational, and
racial hierarchies. Instead, it championed a liberal international order based on principles
of sovereign equality, self-​determination, and human rights. This order has been described
as ‘a multifaceted and sprawling international order, organized around economic openness,
multilateral institutions, security cooperation and democratic solidarity’ (Ikenberry 2018, 7).
At one level, the West was represented in the liberal narrative as a bounded commu-
nity of like-​minded states sharing a common heritage of Western civilization, embodied
in physical alliances and institutional networks. The 1949 North Atlantic Treaty
Organization (NATO) Treaty specifically invoked ‘a common heritage and civilization of
their peoples, founded on the principles of democracy, individual liberty and the rule of
 The ‘West’ in IR     431

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

One way of life is based upon the will of the majority, and is distinguished by free institutions,
representative government, free elections, guarantees of individual liberty, freedom of speech
and religion and freedom from political oppression. The second way of life is based upon the
will of the minority forcibly imposed upon the majority. It relies upon terror and oppression,
a controlled press and radio, fixed elections and the suppression of personal freedom.
(Truman 1947)

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

narrative as the West providing a defensive umbrella for its allies, but alternative narratives
highlighted that they also created structures of informal control and dependency. Economic
assistance and investments by US corporations in developing countries provided further
powerful mechanisms of influence and control. They also provided incentives for the US
interventions to protect US interests as happened, for instance, with US-​backed coups in
Iran (1953) and Chile (1973) and its direct intervention in the Dominican Republic (1965).
Whilst human rights were one of the most fundamental norms of the liberal West, during
the Cold War the US and its allies tolerated and supported many repressive regimes because
they were anti-​communist and/​or commanded valuable economic or strategic resources.
For instance, the US provided ongoing support to the Marcos regime in the Philippines
and to the Mobuto regime in resource-​rich Zaire despite their well-​publicized records of
human rights abuses. These activities helped sustain an alternative narrative in which the
US, the leader of the West, was not necessarily a force for freedom and democracy but an
‘imperial republic’.
A second challenge to the liberal West narrative came from the Third World movement.
This movement comprised a range of postcolonial states and national liberation
movements frustrated with the slow pace of decolonization, and inequalities in the inter-
national trading system. Its emergence was marked by the Bandung Conference (1955) and
the establishment of the Non-​Aligned Movement (NAM). This movement sought to shift
the focus of international political discourse from the ‘East-​West’ conflict to the ‘North-​
South’ conflicts. It highlighted two elements of the Cold War international order that
fundamentally challenged the liberal West narrative. The first was the persistence until
the 1970s of European empires in antithesis to the norms of sovereign equality and self-​
determination that were central to the liberal narrative and liberal ordering project. This
alternative narrative highlighted the role played by postcolonial societies themselves in
embedding norms of self-​determination and racial equality into the international order.
The second challenge was to assumptions that modernization and integration into the
Western-​led liberal economic order provided pathways to economic development and
political liberalization. The Third World movement argued that integration of colonial
and postcolonial economies into the global capitalist system had led not to moderniza-
tion and growth but exploitation. This was because liberal international economic order
continued to reproduce the power structures of the imperial economic order. Western
states remained at the core of the order controlling the lion’s share of industrial produc-
tion, trade, and investment capital as they had done under the imperial order. Emerging
economies were positioned at the periphery of the global economy as producers of raw
materials or cheap labour, leading not to development but dependency and underdevelop-
ment. This critique culminated in calls for ‘an alternative model to the dominant, exploit-
ative capitalist system’ (Sajed 2020), a ‘New International Economic Order’ that would
address the inequalities in the global trade system.
These alternative readings of the Cold War international order challenged the narrative
of the liberal West at several levels. They challenged the ideas of the West and of Western-​
led modernization as progressive, positing them instead as forces that destabilized other
societies by weakening their social, political, and economic structures. They questioned the
degree to which the liberal West diverged in practice from the imperial West and whether
the projection of the Western model of modernity led not necessarily to growth but to new
forms of inequality.
 The ‘West’ in IR     433

The Fragmenting West Narrative

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

free market forces and more on gradual economic reform guided by the strong hand of the
state. In the early 2000s, Chinese intellectuals also articulated an alternative conception of
global order, tianxia, based on harmony and mutual accommodation amongst nation-​states
and civilizations in contrast to the Western model of competition and realpolitik (Shiu 2020).
The hegemony of the West was also challenged by non-​state actors who rejected not only
the political and economic dominance of Western powers over non-​Western societies, but
Western political and social values more broadly. One of the most extreme expressions
of this counter-​narrative was the Al Qaeda terrorist attacks on the US in September 2001,
which served as graphic symbolic rejection of Western power over the Muslim world. At
the same time 9/​11 and subsequent terrorist attacks also acted as a rallying point for the
re-​articulation of the narrative of the West as a community that had a mission not only to
protect itself, but to uphold universal values of freedom and democracy. This blended an
appeal to respond to physical threats to Western societies with a broader, muscular liberal
internationalist mission to battle what British Prime Minister Tony Blair called ‘an evil and
barbaric ideology’ (Blair 2005). This narrative of the West, which evoked elements of both
the civilizational and liberal narratives, served to legitimate US-​led coalitions to pursue
wars in Afghanistan and Iraq. Those protracted military campaigns, however, ultimately
fuelled resentment of the West, adding weight to the alternative narrative of the West as a
force of domination. The failures of the Iraq and Afghanistan campaigns also undermined
perceptions of a strong West, creating further space for rising powers, such as China and
Russia, to challenge the narrative of Western hegemony in the international order (Lehti
et al. 2020; Ikenberry 2020).
A second theme running through the fragmenting West narrative concerned an intern-
ally divided West. This drew on conflicting representations within the West itself of who
and what define the West. Two broad representations of the West emerged. The first was
the representation of the West as a liberal and cosmopolitan community committed to the
promotion of universal values such as freedom, democracy, and human rights. Juxtaposed
to this was a more communitarian representation of the West as a bounded community
faced with an imperative to use its strength and force to protect its peoples, their values,
and their way of life from external and internal threats. The tensions between these two
renderings of the West became very clear in the fractious debate surrounding the US-​led
invasion of Iraq in 2003, a debate that shook the transatlantic relationship. Advocates of the
invasion represented the West as an alliance of like-​minded actors who must be willing to
act forcefully to defend its peoples and its values. Those opposing the invasion, in contrast,
represented the West as a liberal cosmopolitan community, advocating the use of diplomacy,
multilateral institutions, and international law rather than force. This was not so much a
disagreement about what Western values were than about how they should be interpreted,
pursued, and protected.
Tensions within the West became more pronounced in the second decade of the twenty-​
first century with the rise of right-​wing populist movements and leaders in Europe and the
US. Their vision of the West was very much one of a community of peoples defined by a
common heritage and lineage as well as shared values that were unique to it. As noted pre-
viously, at this time, Western states faced challenges from the growth of non-​Western rising
powers, the Global Financial Crisis, and terrorist attacks on US and European targets.
Added to these was the pressure of growing numbers of asylum seekers seeking sanctuary
in Western countries. These populist movements vigorously promoted a vision of the West
 The ‘West’ in IR     435

besieged by threatening forces, as it had been besieged by the forces of authoritarianism

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

Conclusion

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

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

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 Chapter 30

T he Eighteenth C e nt u ry
Daniel Gordon

In March and April, 1929, two towering figures in European intellectual life, Martin
Heidegger and Ernst Cassirer, had a debate in Davos, Switzerland at an international con-
ference organized around the question ‘What is Man?’ In their exchanges, the German
philosophers offered profoundly different conceptions of the eighteenth century and its
legacy. The contest was largely about whether it was necessary to embark on a new path for
Western philosophy. Heidegger said yes, for he wished to recover the unity of ancient phil-
osophy against the splintering effects of eighteenth-​century empiricism. Cassirer said no
because he believed that eighteenth-​century thought, by legitimizing self-​criticism and in-
tellectual difference, had established a sound basis for modern theory. (On the Davos debate,
see Gordon 2003; and Gordon 2012.) Today, we are still arguing about whether the ideas that
emerged in the ‘the Enlightenment’ constitute a barrier to overcome or an inheritance to
amplify.
Cassirer championed the manner in which eighteenth-​century philosophy set aside meta-
physical speculation. In The Philosophy of the Enlightenment (Cassirer 1968 [1932]), a book
that continued the debate with Heidegger, Cassirer demonstrated how Immanuel Kant,
David Hume, and others highlighted the limits of human knowledge: the mind’s inability
to seize the constituent units of reality and to assemble them into a unified whole. Cassirer
argued that the ‘completely original’ (vi) quality of Enlightenment philosophy was its rejec-
tion of the search for unity: a renouncing of the ‘esprit de système’ (vii). The monistic systems
of the previous century, the systems of Spinoza and Leibniz, were replaced with a ‘constantly
evolving process of thought’ (ix). Reason itself, according to Cassirer, ceased to be under-
stood as a cement holding the world together and became a critical ‘energy’ yielding a ‘clash’
of doctrines (13, 273, 277).
Heidegger, for his part, pursued the debate in Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics
(1965 [1929]). While agreeing with Cassirer that the Enlightenment demonstrated that
human knowledge is limited, Heidegger faulted Kant for stopping there. Heidegger
affirmed that Kant should have converted the fact of humankind’s cognitive limits into
a new kind of metaphysical exploration: the exploration of our ‘finitude’. Cassirer under-
stood modernity to be the ability to comprehend multiple cultures and competing values;
he encouraged philosophers to move in the direction of intellectual history and cultural
440   Daniel Gordon

anthropology. But Heidegger viewed this cataloguing of ideas to be fruitless-​-a​ distrac-

tion from a direct investigation of ‘being’ by means of intensive reflection on our uni-
versal frailty.
In recent writing about the eighteenth century, one can observe a breach similar to that
between Heidegger and Cassirer. With regards to International Relations (IR), some scholars
view the eighteenth century as the breakthrough to modernity. Consistent with Cassirer’s
vision of the Enlightenment, historians have observed that the quest for a moral and reli-
gious unification of Europe came to an end in the eighteenth century. What emerged was an
ideal of dynamic equilibrium among multiple competing units. For Henry Kissinger, who
was, like Cassirer, a refugee from Hitler’s Germany, ‘the most fundamental problem of pol-
itics . . . is not the control of wickedness but the limitation of righteousness’ (Kissenger 1973
[1957], 206). Kissinger believed there could be no improvement on the eighteenth-​century
concept of balance of power. The eighteenth century created ‘the scaffolding of international
order such as it now exists’ (Kissenger 2014, 27).
Those who yearn for a radical reconstruction of Western culture, however, portray the
eighteenth century as inadequate. As Dorothy M. Figueira (2002, 26) states, much current
scholarship reveals ‘a vested interest in dismissing the Enlightenment’. In each of the ‘post’
schools of thought that claim to open a new horizon (postmodernism, poststructuralism,
postcolonialism, postnormativity, and so on), one finds spokespersons who construe the
eighteenth century as the principal thing being posted: a noxious antecedent against which
a new kind of theory needs to be imagined.1 One illustration is a review essay, ‘After the
Enlightenment’, by Hayward R. Alker.

. . . mainstream IR’s ‘discourse’ is founded on the tenants of the Enlightenment era, marked
by a dichotomized frame of reference (subject/​object, fact/​value, is/​ought, self/​other, do-
mestic/​international), a linear sense of history (specifically of the West), and universalism.
These characteristics effectively detach the analyst from the world ‘out there’ resulting in the
abdication of individual social responsibility. The realization that mainstream IR’s epistem-
ology is based on a ‘modernist’ foundation—​which is only a particular meaning of reality, not
the reality—​will open discourse space and allow the construction of new epistemologies and
‘realities’. (1996, 150)

Alker calls for the development of a new ‘reconstructive’ theory in IR (151). Many
scholars across the humanities and social sciences, for about a century now, have
been issuing manifestos for a new kind of theory in their respective fields. Inevitably,
this constant search for a fresh start means that nothing enjoys prestige for long. Every
new approach claiming to supersede the Enlightenment must be repudiated to make
way for the next new beginning. Thus, Alker, who acknowledges that efforts to go be-
yond the Enlightenment already abound, says that it is urgent to imagine not only post-​
Enlightenment concepts but also ‘post-​Wittgensteinian, [and] post-​Foucaultian theories
of objectivity and truth’ (151).
We may wonder if this recurrent one-​upping thrives only by simplifying the historical
antecedents that are disclaimed. Characterizing the eighteenth century as an era dominated
by ‘dichotomized’ and ‘linear’ ideas is a step backward from Cassirer’s complex under-
standing of eighteenth-​century thought. The discussion that follows is inspired by Cassirer’s
 The Eighteenth Century    441

insight that eighteenth-​century thinkers set out to consecrate difference—​the acceptance of

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

Balance of Power and Limited War

Historians portray 1648–​1789 as an era of balance-​of-​power politics in Europe—​in contrast

to the religious struggles that came before. It was the end of holy war. Ambitions to unite
Christendom under a single confession gave way to alliances designed to prevent any power
from becoming dominant. As Vattel wrote (2008 [1758], 325):

Such is the mode at present pursued by the sovereigns of Europe. They consider the two prin-
cipal powers, which on that very account are naturally rivals, as destined to be checks on each
other; and they unite with the weaker, like so many weights thrown into the lighter scale, in
order to keep it in equilibrium with the other.

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

The Debate About the Origins of Balance-​of-​Power Politics

Scholars have offered diverse reasons for the transformation just described. We can classify
them into four accounts. The first focuses on the 1648 settlement ending the Thirty Years’
War. James Turner Johnson suggests that limited war ‘reflected’ the treaties that ended the
Thirty Years’ War.

No one wanted to go to war for religion any more . . . The Peace of Westphalia ratified the new
reality, and from the time of its signing until the beginning of the French Revolution in 1789
the wars of Europe were of a sort that reflected this reality. They were, as one writer calls them,
‘sovereigns’ wars,’ wars engaged in by the ruling princes of the various nation-​states for dyn-
astic or national-​interest reasons, fought by relatively small, compact, and highly trained
armies of professional soldiers, financed with the limited resources of the sovereigns them-
selves, and carried out in an increasingly stylized fashion. (1975, 199–​200; on ‘sovereigns’ wars’
citing Fuller 1961, ­chapter 1)

In a similar vein, Kissinger praised the Peace of Westphalia for abolishing the quest for
‘doctrinal or political unity’. ‘The state, not the empire, dynasty or religious confession,
was affirmed as the building block of the European order. The concept of sovereignty was
established’ (2014, 25–​26). Similar formulations, admiring in tone, about the importance of
the 1648 settlement can be found in Hans Morgenthau and other twentieth-​century thinkers
of the ‘realist’ school of IR. (See Osiander, 2001, for further examples and penetrating
criticism of them on the basis of the fact that the Peace of Westphalia did not contain the
 The Eighteenth Century    443

principles commonly ascribed to it—​no idea state of sovereignty, no rejection of papal au-
thority, no language of ‘balance’.)
A second explanation for the rise of balance-​of-​power politics focuses on another diplo-
matic settlement, the 1713 Peace of Utrecht. Stella Ghervas (2017, 409) has demonstrated how
the terms ‘équilibre des puissances’ and ‘balance de l’égalité’ occur in this treaty, whose pri-
mary purpose was to prevent the union of France and Spain into a single kingdom. (Charles
II of Spain died childless in 1700 and named Philip of France as his successor.) The fear of
a French ‘universal monarchy’ and the successful prevention of it in 1713 produced what
J. G. A. Pocock (1999, 113) has termed ‘Utrecht and its Enlightenment’. Voltaire and others
heralded the Utrecht settlement as the triumph of a modern commercial civilization over
barbarism and religion.
Two other explanations for the new ethos of balance focus less on treaties and more on
social and cultural factors. For Kissinger, the international system was affiliated with the ar-
istocratic type of society.

The statesmen who operated the eighteenth-​century European order were aristocrats who
interpreted intangibles like honor and duty in the same way and agreed on fundamentals . . . Power
calculations in the eighteenth century took place against this ameliorating background of a
shared sense of legitimacy and unspoken rules of international conduct. (2014, 38)

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

Scepticism as the Stimulus of Balance

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

self-​assurance. ‘Each man calls barbarous whatever is not his own practice’ (Montaigne
1972 [1580], 152). Natural law theorists, starting with Hugo Grotius (d. 1645), imbibed this
scepticism; they accepted the reality of religious and moral pluralism and wished to build
international law on top of this pluralism. To arrive at general laws governing international
relations, they sought to extricate a small number of ‘cross-​cultural universals’, as Tuck puts
it (1993, 347) from the midst of cultural diversity. Under the pressure of scepticism, modern
natural law theorists after Grotius realized that the precepts of international law had to be
minimized.

The principles that were to govern dealings of this kind had to be appropriately stripped
down: there was no point in asserting to a king in Sumatra that Aristotelian moral philosophy
was universally true . . . The minimalist character of the principles that emerged from this
setting caught the imagination of modern Europe, for they seemed to offer the prospect of an
understanding of political and moral life to which all men—​the poor and dispossessed and re-
ligiously heterodox of Europe as well as the exotic peoples of the Far East or the New World—​
could give their assent. (Tuck 2005, xviii)

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

Vattel and the Jus in Bello

In the eighteenth century, Vattel’s Le Droit des Gens (1758) was ‘the most important book on
the law of nations’ (Kapossy and Whatmore 2008, ix) in terms of its circulation and influ-
ence. The work illustrates a brilliant mind engaging with scepticism while attempting to for-
mulate universal doctrines to limit the ravages of war. Vattel’s engagement with scepticism
can be analysed under three headings.
Religious scepticism is the separation of international affairs from religion. ‘The law
of nature alone regulates the treaties of nations: the difference of religion is a thing ab-
solutely foreign to them’ (Vattel 2008 [1758], 221). Grotius (2005 [1625]) had already
affirmed provocatively that the laws of nations would be valid ‘though we should even
grant, what with without the greatest wickedness cannot be granted, that there is no God
or that he takes no care of human affairs’. But Vattel went further. For Grotius approved
of waging war on non-​European peoples if their religion condoned cannibalism, the mis-
treatment of one’s parents, or otherwise offended against the laws of nature, even if there
was no threat to the interests of Europeans.2 Vattel, in contrast, was sensitive to how such
judgments could confer a reciprocal right on non-​Europeans to colonize Europe! The
following passage from Vattel is significant in its ironic use of the language of ‘civilization’.

Those ambitious Europeans who attacked the American nations, and subjected them to their
greedy dominion, in order, as they pretended, to civilise them (pour les civiliser, disoient-​ils), and
cause them to be instructed in the true religion,—​those usurpers, I say, grounded themselves
 The Eighteenth Century    445

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

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

But, as it is extremely difficult wholly to avoid ambiguity in a treaty, though worded with the
greatest care and the most honourable intentions,—​and to obviate every doubt which may
arise in the application of its several clauses to particular cases,—​recourse must often be had to
the rules of interpretation. (443)

Vattel’s rules for interpreting treaties under dispute are mostly procedural—​they are not
based on the premise that a ‘true’ meaning can be uncovered. For example, he states that the
interpretation of an ambiguous term in a treaty should generally go against the party who
prescribed the term in question.
‘Just war’ scepticism is the belief that it is fruitless to argue about which party in a war has
the just reason for fighting (in medieval natural law theory, known as the jus ad bellum).
Reflections on the moral basis of war had figured centrally in Christian ‘just war’ doctrine.
But in Vattel, as a consequence of his sceptical position that moral and religious doctrines are
doubtful, the justness of war shifted entirely to the manner in which war is prosecuted (jus
in bello). For Vattel, modernity means accepting the reality that justice consists not in the
reasons for war but in the rules of conduct during war. This viewpoint would influence IR
theory and practice for two centuries—​as evident in the 1949 Geneva Convention’s exclusive
focus on the jus in bello.
How did the argument work? Vattel adhered to what Johnson has described as the ‘prin-
ciple of simultaneous ostensible justice’ (1975, 20, 23, 185–​195). While God can discern which
side is good, human intellect never can.

It may however happen that both the contending parties are candid and sincere in their
intentions . . . Wherefore, since nations are equal and independent . . . and cannot claim a right
of judgment over each other, it follows, that, in every case susceptible of doubt, the arms of the
two parties at war are to be accounted equally lawful, at least as to external effects . . . . (Vattel
2008 [1758], 320)
446   Daniel Gordon

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

The Dispute Over Commercial Society

The ‘natural’ laws for international relations that Vattel itemized were abstract principles.
But he also claimed that these laws were realized in one place above all others, Europe.

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

In this image of a Europe united by ‘ties of common interest’, we can discern an unspoken
reversal of the sceptical philosophy. For while scepticism meant the rejection of a universal
morality, Vattel still needed something to bind together all the parts of the European ‘system’.
And what we arrive at by means of a ‘stripped-​down’ set of principles is a thickening of the
alleged blessings of commercial development. Richard Whatmore and Béla Kapossy write
that ‘Vattel’s vision of a workable European order’ was linked to ‘the importance he attributed
to political economy for establishing and maintaining a regime of international justice’
(2008, xiii). Many chapters in The Law of Nations affirm the progressive nature of capitalism
and the imperative for everyone to engage in it. He notes that there is a ‘general obligation
incumbent on nations reciprocally to cultivate commerce’ (170). International trade tends
to create ‘real friendship’ and ‘mutual affection’ among nations. Commerce becomes the
essence of what Vattel calls ‘society’.
The end or object of civil society is to procure for the citizens whatever they stand in need of,
for the necessities, the conveniences, the accommodation of life and, in general, whatever
constitutes happiness,—​with the peaceful possession of property, a method of obtaining jus-
tice with security, and, finally a mutual defence against all external violence. (41–​42)
A substitute for metaphysics has entered the picture through the insertion of ‘commerce’
into the social contract.
 The Eighteenth Century    447

But if commerce is such a unifying force, why should there be war at all? Does commercial
competition dissolve or inflame national animosities? Hume summed up the liberal doc-
trine in his 1752 essay on ‘Of Luxury’ (which he renamed ‘Of Refinement of the Arts’ in 1760).
‘Thus industry, knowledge, and humanity, are linked together by an indissoluble chain, and
are found, from experience as well as reason, to be peculiar to the more polished, and, what
are commonly denominated, the more luxurious ages’ (1987 [1752], 164; see also Dickey 2001,
on commercial humanism). Yet even Adam Smith worried about the corrupting effects of
commercial specialization upon the capacity of nations to defend themselves.

The man whose whole life is spent in performing a few simple operations . . . generally becomes
as stupid and ignorant as it is possible for a human creature to become . . . . Of the great and
extensive interests of his country he is altogether incapable of judging; and unless very par-
ticular pains have been taken to render him otherwise, he is equally incapable of defending
his country in war. The uniformity of his stationary life naturally corrupts the courage of his
mind. (1904, [1776] Vol. 2, 267)

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

challenged Hume’s optimism that rich and poor nations tend to converge in their level of
economic development. Tucker argued that rich countries can maintain indefinitely their su-
periority over poor ones. Nations that were already prosperous had the advantages of better
transport infrastructure; more capital for investments and innovations; and higher wages
which lure skilled workers from poorer countries. Hont notes that the rich country/​poor
country debate was tracked very closely by French thinkers and diplomats; it contributed
to the perception of a ‘dangerous synergy between economic competition and international
power rivalry’ (Hont 2008, 249).
In a monograph called Commerce and Government Considered in their Mutual
Relationship (1776), Condillac criticized France’s entanglement in international commercial
competition.

European trade is not an exchange of works in which all nations will each find their advantage;
it is a state of war in which they only think of how to plunder each other . . . In perpetual rivalry
they only work at hurting each other. There is not one of them that would not wish to destroy
all others. (Cited by Hont 2008, 289)

Condillac defended an ideal system of free trade, a system in which every country would
have a proper balance of agriculture and industry and no country would be ‘too rich’ for
its own good (Hont, 2008, 290). This was a speculative vision of commerce as opposed
to the descriptive idealization of commerce such as one finds in Hume and Vattel.
Condillac’s ideal was a hope projected into the future, rather than a benign system al-
ready unfolding in modernity. His ideal differed in substance but not in its conditional
status from Johann Gottlieb Fichte’s vision of achieving peace through a closed commer-
cial order: a system in which autonomous republics banned commerce between their re-
spective citizens and those of different states (Nakhimovsky 2011). Fichte and Condillac,
in fact, had a similar diagnosis of the actual workings of commerce in their time. The
former wrote:

This war becomes more and more violent, dangerous, and unjust in its consequences as
the world becomes more populous, as the commercial state expands through adventitious
acquisitions, as production and the arts increase, and as the quantity of goods that come
into circulation increases and diversifies together with everyone’s needs. (Fichte, The Closed
Commercial State (1800), cited by Nakhimovsky 2011, 77)

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

From Balance of Power to Perpetual Peace

As J. M. Black has trenchently observed, while the language of ‘balance’ proliferated among
European thinkers, the European order was actually in ‘a state of collapse’ (1983, 450) by the
1770s. In particular, the partition of Poland in 1772–​73 revealed the weakness of the European
system (451). In two essays, ‘Idea for a Universal History with a Cosmopolitan Purpose’
(1784) and ‘Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch’ (1795), Immanuel Kant envisioned
 The Eighteenth Century    449

an alternative to the balance model: a united world political community. Pheng Cheah
dramatizes the significance of Kant’s vision:

Kant’s cosmopolitanism signifies a turning point where moral politics or political mor-
ality needs to be formulated beyond the polis or state form, the point at which the ‘political’
becomes, by moral necessity, ‘cosmopolitical’. (1998, 23)

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

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

From Perpetual Peace

to Revolutionary Violence

Authors of the ‘perpetual peace’ line of proposals, from Penn to Kant, contemplated a rad-
ical reorganization of IR but never advocated revolutionary action to create a new order. In
the 1780s and 1790s, the temper changed. The call was made not for transnational govern-
ance but transnational revolution. The cosmopolitan wishful thinking of Kant was displaced
by urgent appeals to humanity to rise up against the true cause of war—​not human na-
ture, not commerce, but kings. Once each nation cleansed itself of its domestic tyrants, a
unified humanity would arise. According to Thomas Paine, ‘Man is not the enemy of man
but through the medium of a false system of government’ (The Rights of Man 1791, cited by
Israel 2010, 147). According to Joel Barlow, a professional revolutionary who, like Paine, was
an American elected to the French National Assembly, ‘The principle of government must be
completely changed; and the consequence of this will be such a total renovation of society,
as to banish standing armies, overturn the military system, and exclude the possibility of
war’ (Advice to the Privileged Orders in the Several States of Europe, 1792, cited by Israel, 146).
In this revolutionary vision, peace was natural; social hierarchy and war are unnatural and
easily lopped off the body politic.
As Jonathan Israel writes about Barlow and other proponents of revolution, ‘Removing
kings and substituting democratic republics would, it was thought, of itself cure national
animosities’ (2010, 147). Bell has traced the impact of this kind of thinking on the practice of
war during the French Revolution.

The widespread expectation of an end to war gave way to the equally widespread conviction
that an era of apocalyptic conflict had begun. Indeed, it was widely argued that to defeat evil
adversaries, war now needed to be waged on a sustained and massive scale, and with measures
once condemned as barbaric. (2007, 1)

Revolutionary war was to achieve not only ‘the complete destruction of the enemy’ but
also ‘a purifying, even redemptive, effect on the participants’ (3). Individuals suspected
of opposing the Revolution were of course targets for terror. But in the Revolution entire
populations were also demonized; the language of ‘extermination’ gained currency. Bertrand
Barère in 1794 declared, ‘[The English] are a people foreign to Europe, foreign to humanity.
They must disappear’ (cited by Bell, 143). Bell provides instances of this rhetoric in action: the
killing of a quarter of a million men, women, and children in the Vendée, and the committing
of atrocities during the French occupation of foreign countries. War, as an extension of so-
cial revolution, led to an ‘abandonment of the regime of restraints’ (138). Vattel’s rules against
harming non-​combatants, the jus in bello, were laid aside during the revolutionary revival of
the jus ad bellum: the moral right to wage war in order to spread the rights of man.
 The Eighteenth Century    451

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

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

References
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 Chapter 31

T he L ong Ni net e e nt h
Centu ry
Quentin Bruneau

This chapter is about the international system during the long nineteenth century.1 The be-
ginning and end points of the long nineteenth century are not self-​evident, but its existence
is premised on the idea of a number of significant interlocking changes in the one hundred
to one-​hundred-​and-​fifty-​year period preceding the First World War (Bayly 2004; Buzan
and Lawson 2015; Osterhammel 2014). The French Revolution (1789) is of course a classic
dividing line between early modernity and modernity, but it is sometimes replaced with the
American one (1776),2 or yet still, the end of the Seven Years’ War (1763); at the end of the
period, the beginning or end of the First World War (1914/​1918) often serve as benchmarks,
at times replaced with the Russian Revolution (1917). Because of the breadth of the topics
covered in this chapter, I do not take a specific position and will move freely between
these dates.
Following the editors’ proposition that we cannot make sense of the history of the
modern world without understanding the history of the international system, the chapter
focuses heavily on this latter dimension. In terms of granularity, two choices are therefore
‘built in’ to this chapter: a chronological focus on the long nineteenth century, and an em-
phasis on the international system as a whole. Specifically, the chapter aims to capture some
of the key changes of the period pertaining to nature of the units of this system, its strati-
fication, and its normative and legal structure. My starting point is the existing historical
scholarship on the nineteenth-​century international system. This body of work frequently
defines the nineteenth century by contrast with the early modern period, outlining a set of
differences that can be summed up through two umbrella terms: expansion and transform-
ation. The first refers to the gradual extension of the early modern system of states to the
rest of the world. The second term describes a set of alterations in the normative and legal
structure of this system.
In this chapter, I first briefly discuss the underlying assumption of traditional
understandings of the long nineteenth century, namely that there was already a system of
states, which then underwent a transformation and expansion. I subsequently offer a crit-
ical discussion of the idea that this system expanded to the rest of the world, before moving
on to examine two transformations widely associated with the nineteenth century. These
 The Long Nineteenth Century    455

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

The Emergence of a System of States?

A tacit assumption that underpins most accounts of the expansion or transformation of

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

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

The Long Nineteenth Century as Expansion

A common way of framing the long nineteenth century is as a moment of expansion of

the international system of states inherited from the early modern period (the seminal
statement is Bull and Watson 1984). This story is about the gradual inclusion of an increasing
number of non-​European states within the international system constructed by Europeans,
a process that culminates with twentieth-​century decolonization. Europeans conducted this
process of inclusion with a set of discriminatory legal precepts sometimes referred to as the
‘standard of civilization’ (the classic reference remains Gong 1984),4 an inchoate set of legal
criteria based on the idea of civilization that early nineteenth century liberals such as Guizot
and Mill had developed (Bowden 2009; Keene 2005, 160–​193). As Gong explains, it included
such demands as the ability to guarantee foreigners’ rights and property, the possession of an
organized bureaucracy and defence force, adherence to international law, and the possession
of a clear domestic legal code, the maintenance of diplomatic representation abroad, and
acceptance of the norms and practices of civilized international society (Gong 1984, 14–​15).
Embracing this standard was the entry ticket to enjoy the benefits of full legal and diplo-
matic recognition among what diplomats and jurists then frequently called the ‘family of
civilized nations’ (Keene 2002, 97–​119; Koskenniemi 2004, 98–​178). Those who did not could
not enjoy those benefits and exist as fully independent international actors, being subjected
to a variety of legal hindrances. Following this view, scholars have sought to shed light on
the timing and nature of processes of entry into the international system of specific states
and regions. These have included the United States, Latin America, Japan, the Ottoman
Empire, and China (Adelman 2009; Hulsebosch, 2018; Schulz 2014; Suzuki 2005; Wigen
2014; Zhang 1991).
 The Long Nineteenth Century    457

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

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

The Nineteenth Century as a

Great Power System

One of the most important transformations associated with the nineteenth century is the
development of a great power system. Two key features differentiate this nineteenth-​
century great power system from the system that characterized the early modern period.
The first is that by contrast with the competitive balance of power typically associated with
the eighteenth-​century international system, the nineteenth-​century experienced a shift
towards an ‘international system of political equilibrium’ managed collectively by great
powers (Schroeder 1994; on the earlier period see e.g. Duchhardt 1997).5 International order,
instead of being based on the egoistic pursuit by all of the balance of power, came to be
sought through collective concertation by great powers. The term ‘political equilibrium’ is
meant to stress the fact that great powers pursued more than just a material balance of forces,
their aims including far more complex questions of domestic politics, with which counter-​
revolutionary states were critically concerned after the French Revolution (Schroeder
1989). Scholars have attributed the demise of this system, so understood, to nationalism and
demands for popular sovereignty that profoundly undermined its legitimacy and ability to
enforce a political equilibrium across Europe, especially after 1848 (Bukovansky 2001, 211–​
215; Schroeder 1994, 803; on this question, see also Mayall 1990).
The second major point of contrast with the eighteenth-​century international system
is that, from the Congress of Vienna onwards, powerful states laid claim to special inter-
national legal prerogatives on the basis of their vast power (Simpson 2004). In other words,
it was not so much the existence of five great powers that was new, but the fact that they
claimed to lay down the law to the rest of Europe on the basis of their material power, for
 The Long Nineteenth Century    459

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

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

The Illiberal Institutions of Modern

International Society?

Beyond the emergence of a great power system, there was a second important transform-
ation of the international system, often associated with a more ‘progressive’ history of the
nineteenth century. This historical narrative is one of ‘liberal ascendency’; it focuses on the
impact of liberal states on the legal and normative structure of the international system,
emphasizing two key changes. The first is the rise of contractual international law, namely
the understanding that the ultimate foundations of the law of nations are treaties, not nat-
ural law (Grewe 2000, 503–​516; Neff 2014, 215–​340; Reus-​Smit 1999, 122–​154). The second
is the advent of multilateralism, the practice of coordinating ‘relations among three or
more states on the basis of generalized principles of conduct’, rather than through sets of
individualized bilateral bargains with different benefits and obligations (Reus-​Smit 1999,
122–​154; Finnemore 2004; Ruggie 1992; Vaïsse 2007).
These two transformations are considered critical because they still, to varying degrees,
form the basis of contemporary international order. And while these changes should cer-
tainly be located in the long nineteenth century, current research suggests two major points
of contention. The first is that there is strong evidence that both were the result of policies
pursued by Continental European monarchies, rather than liberal Britain or the revolu-
tionary American and French states, as is often claimed (Ikenberry 2012, 1–​2, 15–​17, 62–​63;
Jouannet 2011, 38, 120, 139; Reus-​Smit 1999, 122–​154; Ruggie 1992, 580–​581). The second is
that the importance of both innovations for the entirety of the nineteenth century has been
somewhat over-​stated. Let me take each point in turn.
The rise of the idea that international law was primarily based on consent (and there-
fore on treaties and custom) originated in the eighteenth century, though it was only fully
embraced over the course of the long nineteenth century. The promotion of this view took
place through the publication of treaty compilations, a new type of work that began in the
second quarter of the eighteenth century, when Jean Dumont produced the first major work
of the kind, the Corps universel diplomatique du droit des gens (Duchhardt 2004, 50–​51).9
This was rapidly followed by similar works, such as those of the Abbé de Mably and Georg
Friedrich von Martens (Mably 1764; Martens 1795).10 The view that treaties and custom were
 The Long Nineteenth Century    461

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

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

Conclusion

Where does this leave us in terms of our historical interpretation of the international system
in the long nineteenth century? The first point I made was that students of the history of
international relations often refer to the long nineteenth century as a moment of expansion
and transformation of the early modern system of states. To state the obvious, this reading
begins from the proposition that there was indeed a fully fledged system of states prior to
the long nineteenth century. As I have tried to stress, this grounding assumption ought to be
scrutinized more closely. From ideas about sovereignty to modern notions of territoriality,
there are many reasons to doubt it and to think of the nineteenth century through the idea
of emergence, rather than expansion or transformation. Beyond this preliminary remark,
I have sought to make three further points.
First, while the story of expansion of the international system certainly captures an im-
portant dimension of nineteenth-​century international relations, it leaves out two key issues.
On the one hand, it defines nineteenth-​century international order solely in terms of the
normative and legal order of intra-​European politics, namely as a system of sovereign states.
As a result, it omits imperial and colonial relations from its understanding of the constitu-
tion of modern international order. On the other hand, the focus on expansion prevents us
from capturing the demotion of many polities, both European and non-​European, within
the international system. In other words, while some polities, such as those of Latin America,
were indeed entering the international system, others were experiencing a sort of downward
mobility within it, losing rights and privileges they previously held. Some experienced this
because they were deemed uncivilized, while others succumbed to their inability to amass a
rising currency in international relations: material power.
Second, I sought to shed new light on three key transformations of the international
system during the long nineteenth century. The development of a great power system,
notably in the form of a European Concert after 1815, has of course attracted much schol-
arly attention. My main goal with regards to this question was to underline its origins in
the decades preceding the French Revolution and to draw attention to the profound cul-
tural shift that underpinned it. In short, this was not only a transformation in the govern-
ance of the international system, but a change in the underlying basis of power within it.
 The Long Nineteenth Century    463

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

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

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

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 Chapter 32

The Pre- C
​ ol onia l A fri c a n
State Syst e m
John Anthony Pella, Jr

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

Africa in International Relations History

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

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

Understanding the African State System

African States
It is helpful to note that the variation in environmental conditions was arguably the most
important factor that shaped the way African states were organized.1,2,3 During the pre-​
colonial period, from the Gambia south through contemporary Congo, mangrove swamps
and rainforests began at the coastline and stretched some 200 miles inland (Mabogunje 1972,
3). There were two notable exceptions to these conditions, the first a portion of coastline
from roughly Cape Coast in contemporary Ghana to Ouidah in contemporary Benin, and
the second the coastline south of contemporary Equatorial Guinea.4 But it was swamp and
rainforest conditions that dominated much of the coast, and this made dense human settle-
ment a near impossibility (Mabogunje 1972, 3). What was possible was the establishment
of small ‘stateless’ societies—​mostly fishing and hunting villages—​that were home to small
populations numbering under a thousand people.5 These societies were the most common
type of political organization along the West-​Central African coast during the fourteenth
and early fifteenth centuries.
Despite sharing cultural, religious and linguistic foundations, as well as interacting
regularly across West-​Central Africa, these ‘stateless’ societies did not share a common
overarching political structure; instead they remained decentralized, often lacking a central
authority (Potholm 1979, 14–​15). Such decentralization was, in part, tied to the principles
 The Pre-Colonial African State System    471

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

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

Trade and War

To understand the pre-​ colonial African state system as a diverse array of political
organizations would be misleading, however. These states were joined into a system through
shared practices such a war and trade. War was the primary means that power was balanced
 The Pre-Colonial African State System    473

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

have introduced Islam to Northern Nigeria. Aside from these societies that were set up
along trade routes, savannah states tended to gravitate and form along major trade routes
(Vansina 1992), with many consolidated savannah states also found along the borders
of hinterlands states (Lydon 2009, 65). Hausaland, for instance, was made up of 14 inde-
pendent Hausa States all of which emerged in the thirteenth century following the boom in
the trans-​Saharan gold trade.
For more details about how trade was actually practiced, oral histories are enlightening.
They recall that the primary means by which to organize trade and distribute goods was
through the market; and these markets were set to correspond with the type of trade that
was coming into the state. In contemporary Ghana, home to the Tallensi, daily, weekly and
monthly markets were held to accommodate for local, state to state and long-​distance trade,
respectively (Dickson 1977, 132–​135). The situation was similar in Central Africa, where
oral traditions tell of local markets taking place daily, while markets for trade over greater
distances took place on every fourth or eighth day (Vansina 1962, 375). The decision as to
where these markets were held is interesting. At times it was environmental conditions that
would determine where markets were held, at a place where a river pooled for instance; or it
could be a matter of convenience, with markets held on state borders. It was equally plaus-
ible, however, that the most powerful state in the area would set the location—​usually in
its capital—​so that the state could tax merchants when they entered their borders (Curtin
1984, 29).
There was also an array of techniques employed by states and traders to ensure safe
passage to and from these markets. States typically had considerations in place to ensure
trade could flourish; Richard Jobson, one of the early British explorers of the Gambia River,
wrote that traders:

have free recourse through all places, so that howsoever the King and Countries are at warres
and up in armes, the one against the other, yet still the Marybucke [marabout or learned
Muslim] is a privileged person, and many follow his trade or course of travelling, without any
let or interruption of either side. (Jobson 1932 [1623], 106)

Beyond such political considerations, in parts of Central Africa traders were linked and
protected by ndeko, a blood brother system that enabled traders’ free movement and bound
local chiefs to guarantee protection to long distance traders (Bawele 1988, 470). Such
practices were common amongst traders in ‘stateless’ societies as well, where it was common
to establish false kinship ties to ensure protection (Curtin 1984, 47–​48); sometimes, entire
villages were said to move simultaneously to ensure safe transit. In the savannah states, pro-
tection could often be purchased from local chiefs, and tolls were collected along established
routes for this purpose. In hinterland states, it was not uncommon for established merchants
to travel with hired military forces to keep bandits at bay (Curtin 1984, 42).
Thus, trade provided for the foundations of an economic system and served to ‘transcend
political divisions’ (Vansina 1962, 390). Indeed, trade served to link different types of states
together and develop rules amongst them (Diagne 1992, 34). It also meant that both basic
and luxury goods were exchanged across the continent. It was not simply trade that these di-
verse states shared in the workings of however, but wars as well.
The nature of warfare was, again, very much dependent upon local environmental
conditions. In the savannah, the open environment surrounding hinterland states
permitted the fielding of large armies made up of cavalry equipped with spears and arrows
 The Pre-Colonial African State System    475

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

Slavery

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

‘captive’, or ‘serf ’ to distinguish African slavery from other types (Cooper 1979, 105), though
still others have made it clear that slavery is an appropriate term (Cooper 1979; Lovejoy 2011).
Regardless of terminology, African slavery was certainly based upon different norms and
values that need to be addressed.
First, it is helpful to recall the unique notion of territoriality that was present in many
parts of the continent; one’s physical presence in a territory did not necessarily designate
membership to a particular state, kinship, and lineage. This carries with it a rejection of
private property, and indeed, in African states the concept of private property was alien.
Instead, land was communal and the right to cultivate land, which was in abundance, was
on a first-​come first-​served basis. This meant that property in Africa was not the vehicle
to wealth and influence that it was in other parts of the world (Thornton 1999, 16), and
this aspect of life in Africa heightened the importance of slavery significantly. So, be-
cause farmers owned the products of their land rather than the land itself, the ownership
of slaves meant increased cultivation and increased wealth; in turn, slaves, rather than
property, were the way in which to expand one’s social and political power (Cooper 1979,
106–​110). In short, land was not a source of revenue—​people were (Diagne 1992, 26). This
meant that slave ownership became intricately tied to politics, war, and trade. In more
organized states a tax was levied on the number of slaves owned. Furthermore, slaves were
a common form of payment in tributary relationships and the absorption of slaves into a
certain lineage could be a means to challenge the existing lineage in power (Cooper 1979,
107). It should come as little surprise, then, that in the aftermath of war people became the
spoils. Indeed, a trade in slaves featured across the whole of Africa (Lovejoy 2011, 38). Fage
has argued that the idea of a slave as a trade good emerged with Islamic influence in the
Western Sudan (Fage 1978, 171), and clearly, from at least the fourteenth-​century, slaves be-
came an important commodity along many trade routes (Neumark 1977, 129–​130). Given
the centrality of slavery in African life, enslavement was also a means of punishment in
accordance with local rules and laws. For instance, aside from being taken prisoner, an
individual could be enslaved for violating ancient customs, committing a grave crime, or
being unable (or unwilling) to settle a debt (Hair 1965). Interestingly, an individual could
also volunteer to become a slave, seeking the protection that an influential master could
provide (Abraham 1962, 74).
Enslavement was typically not perpetual, as the enslaved could often be ransomed back
to their kin through a slave merchant, and the status of slave was not passed down from
generation to generation. Customs also prohibited the separation of families of slaves,
and it was not uncommon for subsequent generations of slaves to become free members
of the kinship group they once served. In terms of work, customs such as that of the jonya
system—​native to the Saharan hinterland—​meant that slaves enjoyed ownership of some
of the crops they produced (Diagne 1992, 26). In West Africa more broadly, records indicate
that slaves worked in a variety of areas, mostly alongside their owners as administrators,
soldiers, royal advisors, farmers, household guards, and trade assistants (Manning 1975, 127).
Beyond this, slaves enjoyed free movement in connection with the communal land policy,
and were permitted to cultivate any open land (Thornton 1992, 82–​88). By and large, slaves
held a distinct social status within society—​a class of loyal, dependent assistants. It was in
such ways that the institution of slavery played a part in organizing societies, being integrally
 The Pre-Colonial African State System    477

tied to politics, economics, and war, and based upon the mutual expectations among the
states involved.

Kinship

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

bound them all. And, beyond the influence of religious beliefs, kinship, and ancestry upon
the structure of social relations amongst people, they also worked to establish and reinforce
political hierarchy and state organization.
So, the ‘stateless’ societies of the forest were often populated by a single kinship group,
which meant that political hierarchy was determined by position in the family. As al-
ready noted however, these ‘stateless’ societies were actually connected quite closely in
cultural and religious terms, and this connection was precisely because of the norms
and values associated with kinship and ancestry. Societies in close proximity to one
another would often trace their roots back to the same ancestor and were part of the
same kinship group; this meant that strong bonds existed beyond the earthly notion of a
shared ruler (Fortes and Evans-​Prichard 1940, 23). State organization and political hier-
archy were different in the savannah states remember, but here ancestors and kinship
continued to play a central role. Savannah states often traced their foundations back
to a mythical ancestor of which the chief claimed to be a direct descendent, and this
ancestor also passed down a set of unalterable values with which every member of the
state was familiar. These values towered over the chief in terms of importance, and it was
these values that determined a savannah state’s uniqueness and policy (Mair 1962, 214).
Moreover, because the chief was the guardian of ancestral values and the state was a
manifestation of these values, both the position of chief and the significance of the state
reached beyond the secular and into the spiritual world. Abraham summarizes this idea
well, noting that ‘the Akan state was a sacred state in the sense that it was conceived as
falling inside a world inhabited by human beings as well as spirits and gods’, and to these
spirits and gods, ‘human beings owed specific duties discharged through appropriate
rites, and with whom human beings were in constant communion on the grounds of
kinship’ (Abraham 1962, 51).
The situation was similar in the consolidated savannah states. Despite a more centralized
political hierarchy and a more expansive state organization here, the king was still thought
to be a direct decedent of a great ancestor, and the values of this ancestor checked the
power and behaviour of the king. Take the Yoruba states under the control of Ife for in-
stance. Here values were passed down from the ancestor Oduduwa, and from there, the
state took on a familial analogy; the king was regarded as father, his chiefs regarded as his
brothers, and subjects were seen as children. This analogy—​sometimes referred to as ebi
social theory (Akinjogbin 1967)—​was inclusive of the tributary states as well, which were
seen as interdependent with the father kingdom insofar as reciprocal duties existed be-
tween the two (e.g. protection in exchange for tribute). In many cases the history of a tribu-
tary state was altered in accordance with this relationship, namely by claiming that a great
ancestor migrated from the conquering state to establish the tributary—​this was the case
with Kongo’s tributary Ndongo (Thornton 1999, 99). Within the consolidated state, the
king’s authority was based upon the natural obedience of his brothers and children, rather
than the king’s ability to wield force (Akinjogbin 1967, 16). Violations of such organiza-
tion and values were thought to offend the spiritual ancestors, and in such circumstances,
force would be used to defend the ancestral values and, in some cases, remove the king.
While noting that local variations did exist, both primary accounts and contemporary
historians comment on the remarkable similarity in these norms and values (e.g. Atkins
1737; Abraham 1962, 114).
 The Pre-Colonial African State System    479

The African State System’s Place

in International Relations History

By developing an understanding of the pre-​colonial African state system, as well as the

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

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

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

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 Chapter 33

The ‘ Ameri c as ’ i n
the History of
I nternational Re l at i ons
Michel Gobat

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

From America to the Americas

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

the region, for the first time, as a continent separate from Asia. He named it after the Italian
explorer Amerigo Vespucci, who had just published the influential pamphlet Mundus
novus (New World). Over the next centuries, Europeans differentiated among a plurality
of Americas, such as Portuguese and Spanish America or North and South America. For
the most part, however, America continued to be imagined by Europeans as a unified space
subordinate to the Eurocentric international order rooted in the Peace of Westphalia.
America’s place in the international arena changed dramatically during the Age of
Revolution. The hemisphere not only forged its own international system in opposition to
Europe but also became identified with modernity on both sides of the Atlantic. This pro-
cess was driven by the wars of independence that commenced in British America (1775–​
83) and ended in Spanish America (1809–​26). Nearly all of the hemisphere’s new states
rejected monarchy—​one of the world’s oldest political systems—​in favour of republic-
anism, which their leaders (and many Europeans) deemed the most modern mode of gov-
ernance. America’s identification with modernity was reinforced by the campaign its elites
waged against European depictions of the New World as degenerate. In refuting the so-​
called theory of American degeneration, they contrasted the Old World’s alleged backward-
ness with America’s ‘promise of unlimited progress’ (Gerbi 1973, 247). Their crusade for an
American modernity—​together with the admiration that anticolonial rebels in British and
Spanish America had for each other’s struggles—​helped engender a common identity of
Americans. This view of America as an imagined community drove initial attempts to forge
a hemispheric system against European colonialism.
Such integration efforts were spearheaded by the United States (US). They even shaped
its name, for in 1788 Congress dropped the word ‘North’ from ‘The United States of North
America’ so that it would reflect its leaders’ dream of creating a US-​dominated union
spanning ‘all America, North and South’ (Burnett 1925; Fernández-​Armesto 2003, 10).
This dream became viable with the outbreak of the Spanish American wars of independ-
ence, which led anti-​colonial rebels from the southern hemisphere to press for a ‘system of
America’ uniting the republics between ‘the Mississippi river and the mighty [River] Plate’,
which separates Argentina and Uruguay (Barrientos 2009, 94). And American System was
precisely the name that Henry Clay gave to the US-​led hemispheric project he promoted as
Secretary of State (1825–​29).
Clay’s plan coincided in time with the main hemispheric project emerging in Spanish
America: the Panama Congress of 1826. This initiative was led by Simón Bolívar, South
America’s independence hero and President of Gran Colombia. Although the two initiatives
were later seen as antipodes, their similarities outweigh their differences. True, Bolívar
hoped that the Panama gathering would produce a confederation capable of resisting US
impositions. Most Spanish American leaders, however, sought close ties with the US. They
thus ensured that the Panama Congress embraced Clay’s vision of a regional system based on
the modern principles of anti-​colonialism and republicanism but also on trade agreements
designed to liberate the hemisphere from economic dependence on Britain (Sexton 2011, 75).
The failure of Clay’s American System and the Panama Congress accelerated the
hemisphere’s division into two opposing Americas. If the Panama Congress succumbed to
centrifugal forces prevailing in Spanish America, US slaveholders used Clay’s support for the
Panama Congress’s antislavery agenda to sink his American System. The charged US debates
over the Panama Congress intensified the nation’s racist views of its southern neighbors,
 The ‘Americas’ in the History of IR     485

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

Pan-​A mericanism and its Discontents

The idea of two Americas shaped the Pan-​American movement and thus the modern inter-​
American system. Pan-​Americanism is often seen as the brainchild of US Secretary of State
James Blaine, as he engineered the First Pan-​American Conference of 1889–​1890. Yet its
genesis owed much to Latin American statesmen who shared Blaine’s goals of promoting
economic integration, curbing European incursions, and spreading US-​style modernity.
In their eyes, such ‘Americanization’ would allow their countries to prosper but also better
defend their sovereignty against European and US intervention. So even though Latin
Americans rooted Pan-​Americanism in the 1826 Panama Congress, they no longer believed
in a unified America. The same was true of Blaine, who sought to use Pan-​Americanism to
enhance US control over Latin American nations in the name of raising ‘the standard of their
civilization’ (Sexton 2011, 184).
Although US expansion was now driven more by economic interests than the territorial
designs marking Manifest Destiny, this shift hardly assuaged Latin American fears of ‘the nor-
thern colossus’. Latin American governments thus viewed Pan-​Americanism as a propitious
way to constrain US hegemony, for they believed that engaging Washington in cooperation
would ‘discipline US interventionist policies’ (Scarfi 2016, 193). Many Latin American non-​state
actors nonetheless denounced Pan-​Americanism as a tool of US imperialism. Among its main
detractors was the Cuban émigré José Martí, whose 1891 essay ‘Nuestra América’ (Our America)
became a rallying cry against Pan-​Americanism. As the US grew into a global power, Latin
Americans challenged its ascendancy within and outside of the Pan-​American framework.
Pan-​Americanism is best known for its intergovernmental activities involving all of the
hemisphere’s independent states. Most of this work was coordinated by the Washington-​
based Pan American Union, which always had US directors working closely with the State
Department. While Pan-​Americanism aimed to promote economic integration, it also
addressed issues dear to the era’s international progressive movement such as child wel-
fare, education, labor, public health, scientific exchange, urban housing, and women’s rights.
Since Pan-​Americanism’s agenda was set mainly by Washington, it was long deemed by
scholars ‘the friendly face of US dominance in the hemisphere’ (Sheinin 2000, 1)—​a view
reinforced by the Pan American Union’s support for the post-​1898 spike in US intervention
in the Caribbean basin and the post-​First World War (WWI) spread of Dollar Diplomacy to
South America.
Yet recent studies show that US hegemony within the Pan-​American framework had to be
constantly negotiated, thus enabling the system to become ‘more Latin American’ (Petersen
2016, 128). Latin American officials typically used Pan-​American meetings and institutions
to press Washington to respect the principles of non-​intervention and sovereign equality
their predecessors had been championing since the independence era. By the early 1930s
Latin American pressure had become so great that it pushed Washington to implement a
policy of non-​intervention known as the Good Neighbor Policy—​one that also led US
officials to embrace Latin American concepts of international development (Helleiner 2014,
29–​51). Hence some scholars argue that Pan-​Americanism served Washington as a ‘labora-
tory for working out more expansive forms of international association’ that it subsequently
sought to apply globally (Thornton 2018, 412).
 The ‘Americas’ in the History of IR     487

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

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

Globalizing the Americas

Scholars have long emphasized that the Cold War globalized the inter-​American system
by showing how the US and the Soviet Union brought their rivalry to the hemisphere,
most palpably with the 1962 Cuban missile crisis. Newer studies, by contrast, stress how
Pan-​Americanism shaped the post-​1945 global international system, with no institution
facilitating this pivot more than the United Nations (UN). Whatever direction the Cold War
globalized the Americas, it entailed a struggle among projects of modernity promoted by the
two superpowers—​and by Latin America and the Caribbean.
 The ‘Americas’ in the History of IR     489

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

sovereignty’ reinforced decolonization’s North-​South divide (Thornton 2018, 409). But

ECLA also reconceptualized this divide by deeming it less a product of colonialism than of
the international division of labour, with the North serving as the industrial ‘center’ of global
capitalism and the South as the underdeveloped ‘periphery’ that produced primary goods
for the North. For ECLA, it was critical that the South break its economic dependency on
the North by replacing its traditional export model with import-​substitution industrializa-
tion (ISI).
ECLA’s championing of ISI as the Global South’s path to modernity drew on revolutionary
Mexico’s economic project of the interwar era (Thornton 2018). But it also echoed century-​
long Latin American denunciations of the North Atlantic powers for stymieing their
continent’s industrialization by making it dependent on European and US-​manufactured
imports. By globalizing such views, ECLA helped engender dependency theory, which is
the principal theory to emanate from the Third World and maintains that the center (North)
developed only by underdeveloping the periphery (South). Dependency theory quickly
spread to Africa and Asia, leading Latin America and the decolonized Caribbean to become
more connected with the Third World project. It also inspired Marxist and Latin American
international relations (IR) thinking about the place of the Americas in the post-​1945 world
(Acharya and Buzan 2019, 161–​162; Tickner 2015).
Since ECLA sought to restructure the Cold War’s bipolarity, its vision of modernity
clashed with those of the superpowers. While ECLA shared the US goal of capitalist indus-
trialization, it exasperated Washington by insisting that international trade was rigged in
favour of the North and that ISI was the only way for the South to become modern. And as
much as ECLA valorized the Soviet project of state-​led industrialization, it maintained its
faith in capitalist modernity and the ability of the ‘national bourgeoisie’ to lead the South’s
struggle for economic sovereignty. This view both echoed earlier Pan-​American develop-
mental strategies and dovetailed with the high modernism then popular in the decolonized
world (Helleiner 2014, 271–​273; Westad 2007, 397–​398). If ECLA’s vision of modernity
invoked the utopianism marking the idea of the Americas, it also reflected an effort to re-
claim development as a project from and for the Global South (Fajardo 2019, 178).
While ECLA’s impact on Latin America has been a focus of IR scholars, less known are
its efforts to use the UN system to bring modernity to the Global South. ECLA’s first success
came with the 1964 creation of the UN Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD),
which was designed as a ‘global version of ECLA’ and was initially led by its longtime dir-
ector, the Argentine Raúl Prebisch (Zolov 2020, 235). As the largest UN organization of
developing nations, the UNCTAD promoted South-​South cooperation. Yet it mainly aimed
to forge a ‘new international economic order’—​a term coined by Prebisch—​that would allow
the regions of the Global South to realize their own visions of modernization (Getachew
2019, 161).
In 1974 the UNCTAD seemingly realized the Third World’s call for a more equitable global
governance when, under Mexican leadership, the UN General Assembly overcame Soviet
and US opposition to adopt the Declaration for the Establishment of a New International
Economic Order (NIEO). The resolution drew on UNCTAD initiatives made at its 1971 and
1972 meetings and that bore the stamp of their Peruvian and Chilean hosts (Garavini 2012,
132–​141, 174–​183). Hence the NIEO echoed pan-​American views of economic sovereignty,
non-​intervention, self-​determination, social rights, and sovereign equality. The NIEO ar-
guably represented ‘the twentieth century’s most ambitious vision of global redistribution’
 The ‘Americas’ in the History of IR     491

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

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

Re-​Imagining the Americas

The worldwide spread of Washington Consensus policies in the wake of the Cold War is
typically linked with ‘globalization’. Yet this process did not significantly strengthen the
global pivot of the Americas. To be sure, post-​1990 globalization led the countries of the
Americas to join new transhemispheric configurations such as the Asia-​Pacific Economic
Cooperation, while Latin American and US multinational corporations increasingly have
a global reach. The same goes for transnational social movements linked with the World
Social Forums, which since their 2001 founding in Brazil constitute the largest gatherings
of the global justice movement. But if the post-​Cold War age brought the Americas
closer to other world regions, this era has been marked mainly by efforts to reimagine the
inter-​American system—​a process IR scholars often identify with waves of regionalism
(Saltalamacchia 2015).
Post-​1990 hemispheric reimaginations initially strove to reinforce US-​style modernity. At
the forefront of this wave of ‘open regionalism’ was the OAS, which sought to reorient the
inter-​American system toward democracy, free trade, and human rights—​the three pillars
of the US-​led ‘new world order’ that President George H. Bush proclaimed in 1990. At first
sight, the OAS simply fortified pan-​American principles, for democracy and human rights
long defined the idea of the Americas while free trade among its member states spoke to
age-​old demands for economic integration. In reality, the OAS imagined a new hemispheric
order for the post-​Cold War age. Its aggressive promotion of free trade through the elimin-
ation of tariffs and government subsidies upended the pan-​American doctrines of economic
 The ‘Americas’ in the History of IR     493

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

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

Conclusion

Since the Age of Revolution, the international system has undergone numerous
transformations. Yet the Americas have persisted and remained identified with modernity.
This continuity gives new meaning to the myth of American exceptionalism, which refers to
 The ‘Americas’ in the History of IR     495

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

Acknowledgments

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

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

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

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 Chapter 34

‘Asia ’ in the H i story of

I nternational Re l at i ons
David C. Kang

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

more likely than recognized at the moment. Indeed, judging by the historical record, war is
more likely than not’ (Allison 2017, 184).
But what historical record are Shirk and Allison referring to? By far, the most com-
monly examined ‘examples of history’ are European: for example, the Peloponnesian
War (431–​404 bce) and the rise of nineteenth century Germany and resulting Anglo-​
German rivalry of the twentieth century. Indeed, there is a cottage industry that uses
Europe’s past to predict Asia’s future. Allison may be the most recent scholar to use
Greek history to explain the entire China’s future, but he is neither the first nor the only
scholar to do so.
This is troubling, because historical East Asia and historical Europe were different
systems with different international orders. Historical East Asia was a hegemonic order,
not a balance of power system. The fundamental organizing principle in historical East Asia
was hierarchy, not equality. Had the discipline of IR developed by initially studying East
Asian history instead of European history, it would be taken for granted that hierarchy and
hegemony was a natural element of international orders, and that status and rank order
matters as much as material power. Long understudied by mainstream IR scholars, the
East Asian historical experience provides an enormous wealth of new and different cases,
patterns, and findings, which promise to enrich our IR theoretical literature largely derived
from and knowledgeable about the Western experience. As Kang and Lin (2019, 393) point
out, ‘the median American scholar of IR is deeply comfortable with European examples
and analogies and has almost no exposure to Asian examples and history. Thus, when faced
with Asian examples, they are considered within the context they are taught: through the
European lens’.
An emerging first wave of social science scholarship has the potential to influence some
of the most central debates in IR scholarship, most centrally whether anarchy is a constant
element of world politics. This new literature also engages questions about what comprises
an international order and whether patterns of war and violence are the same everywhere
across time and space. The best of this new scholarship bridges the fields of History and IR,
and increasingly uses sophisticated methods and multiple language sources. This literature
also directly addresses the themes of modernity and granularity that are the focus of this
volume.
In this chapter, we examine two areas of scholarship that embody the themes of this
volume. The first is the almost universally accepted link between war and state formation.
Although it is common to see the modern state as arising in eighteenth-​century Europe,
centralized bureaucratic states defined over territory emerged in East Asia in the sixth
to eighth centuries ad; furthermore, they emerged under a hegemonic system in which
war was relatively rare, not a competitive balance of power system with regular existential
threats. Widening our literature on state formation and war to include East Asian history
challenges some of the most core theories in our field. The second area of scholarship
focuses on granularity—​measuring war in historical East Asia. Although careful research
is in its initial stages, it appears that patterns of war and other violence were systematic-
ally different in East Asian history. In a system dominated by one hegemonic power, the
large power may not need to fight, and the small have no desire to fight. In both cases, a
careful study of East Asian history leads to many potential insights and is an ideal way to
move beyond and widen the interaction between the study all history and international
relations.
 ‘Asia’ in the History of IR    501

Modernity: State Formation in

Eighth-​C entury East Asia

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

The might and wealth of the Sui-​Tang empires (618–​907) at their peak deeply impressed
China’s neighbors. Japan, the Korean states, and even (briefly) Tibet imitated the Sui-​Tang im-
perial model, and to a greater or lesser degree adopted the Chinese written language, Sui-​Tang
political institutions and laws, Confucian ideology, and the Buddhist religion. It was during
this era that East Asia—​a community of independent national states sharing a common
civilization—​took shape in forms that have endured down to modern times.
502   David C. Kang

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

Historians call the new, centralized order built in Japan during the fourth to eighth
centuries the ritsuryo state, because it was based on Chinese-​style penal (ritsu) and adminis-
trative (ryo) codes. Sugimoto and Swain (1989, 1) characterize Japanese borrowing of culture
and technology from China in two historical waves: ‘Chinese Wave I’ began circa 600 ce and
lasted until 894. They write:

Only twice in Japanese history has it been national policy to undertake an overall transform-
ation of the entire social system according to an imported foreign model . . . The first began
with the Taika Reforms of AD 646 and continued through the Nara and early Heian eras
(seventh-​ninth centuries inclusive) when Japan sought to adopt the Chinese model of Tang
society. Japan had been assimilating more elementary material forms of continental culture
for several centuries, but the Taika transformation was the first effort consciously based on
systematic, large-​scale importation of high culture directly from China.

Batten (2003, 242) observes that, ‘Japan in the eighth century was already a state society with
relatively efficient, centralized mechanisms for gathering information, formulating political
decisions, and carrying them out’. Indeed, more than 7,000 men staffed the Japanese bureau-
cracy by the eighth century (Ebrey and Walthall 2014, 121). This dwarfs the level of develop-
ment achieved in Europe even 500 years later: By the thirteenth century, the Catholic Church
legal office, or Curia, contained over 1,000 officials, and Mitterauer (Gryzmala-​Busse 2019,
9) argues that the Curia ‘became the model for the beginnings of state bureaucracies’. The
Curia was so advanced compared to fourteenth-​century European royal courts that it be-
came a ‘template for sophisticated administration’ in premodern Europe (Gryzmala-​Busse
2019, 9). Yet the Curia was dwarfed by the complexity and size that the Japanese state bureau-
cracy had already achieved half a millennium earlier.
This state formation occurred through emulation and learning—​there was an exten-
sive epistemic community in historical East Asia that was central to the creation and dis-
semination of regional civilization that flowed mainly from China outwards, from core to
periphery. This epistemic community was composed of Buddhist monks and Confucian
scholars. They studied at Buddhist temples and Confucian academies, wrote in a common
Chinese language using common styles, and made up the bulk of government officials in
each country. These scholar-​officials were also the ones who staffed diplomatic missions to
other countries. Holcombe (2011, 109) concludes that

through the reunified Sui and Tang dynasties, a degree of shared international aristocratic cul-
ture developed throughout East Asia. This was a time when elites in China, Korea, and Japan
(as well as northern Vietnam) in some ways had more in common with each other than they
did with their own peasants . . . in particular, educated East Asians shared a common written
language and literary canon. The glories of Tang poetry were as much admired by contem-
porary elites in Korea and Japan as they were in China.

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

innovation in East Asia was the emergence of a civil service based on merit, not hereditary
aristocracy, in principle. The key institutional aspect to these states was the emergence of the
world’s first civil service: ‘embryonic bureaucracies, based upon clear rules, whose personnel
were obtained independently of hereditary social claims, through meritocratic civil service
examinations’ (Woodside, 2006: 1).
It was the emulation and diffusion of ideas and institutions from the hegemon that gave rise
to state formation in East Asia. War and preparations for war were not the cause of state for-
mation. Rather, a relative absence of war was the result of a particular type of state formation
within a particular regional civilization centred on China. Indeed, as will be discussed in the
next section, patterns of warfare were systematically different between Europe and East Asia.
Between the fourth to eighth centuries specifically, there was only one war involving Korea,
Japan, and China: the Korean War of Unification from 660–​668. Indeed, for centuries before
and after the time period discussed in this chapter, Japan, Korea, and China were not competing
with each other for territory, prestige, or authority. Most importantly, during the fourth to sixth
centuries, China was divided and posed no military threat to the peninsula or Japan. Indeed,
centuries of initial state formation in both Korea and Japan occurred without any threat from
China at all and without any war between these countries. Seth (2016, 37) points out that,
Chinese culture was introduced to Korea at a time when China itself was politically weak and
divided . . . Chinese states were useful sources of cultural ideas and practices, but during this
period of political disunity in China they were not in a position to threaten the existence of the
Korean states. Nor was there any great empire with universalistic pretensions and the ability to
dazzle its neighbors with cultural brilliance or intimidate them with military might. As a result,
the process of state building during the Three Kingdoms period was largely an indigenous de-
velopment, and Chinese cultural borrowing was done on a purely voluntary basis.
Vietnam is a particularly instructive case of emulation. Vietnam came into existence not
to fight China, but rather to coexist within the shadow of hegemony. There is an anachron-
istic twentieth-​century nationalist myth of Vietnamese history that tends to be taken at
face value by Western scholars and indeed most Vietnamese themselves: that historically,
Vietnam feared China and saw China as its main external threat. So deeply has this modern
Vietnamese meme of chronic war with China taken root that it is often repeated without re-
flection by observers and scholars of East Asian security and used uncritically to argue that
Vietnam fears China in the twenty-​first century.
Yet the historical record suggests that the rulers of the Dai Viet period were usually much
more concerned with internal stability than they were with invasion from China. For ex-
ample, from 1365 to 1789, Vietnam experienced interstate war in only 39 years, or 9% of
the time (Kang, Nugyen, Fu, and Shaw 2019, 908). As would be expected in a relationship
organized by hierarchy, the Vietnamese court even occasionally sought the Chinese court’s
cooperation in putting down rebellions. Liam Kelley (2010, 8) is worth quoting at length:

In 968 a man by the name of Dinh Bo Linh became the ruler of the area of the Red River delta. He
did this not by fighting off the Chinese and declaring ‘independence.’ Instead, he allied himself
with a Cantonese warlord and defeated other warlords in the region, some of whom were un-
doubtedly Han Chinese, but others who were likely Vietnamese or Tai-​speaking peoples. Two
years later, the Song Dynasty dispatched an envoy who granted Dinh Bo Linh the position of
commandery prince (quan vuong/​junwang), continuing a long-​running practice of granting
titles to powerful individuals in the region. What would be different this time, however, is that
 ‘Asia’ in the History of IR    505

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

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

Granularity: Measuring War

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

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

periodically, the people living beyond the Great Wall mobilized armies that could threaten
major disruptions. These types of threats typically brought dynasties to their knees, but they
 ‘Asia’ in the History of IR    507

occurred very infrequently and were separated by long periods of stable rule . . . rates of con-
flict were radically different in China and Europe.

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

Peaceful economies can provide more public goods than war-​torn ones . . . . in China a combin-
ation of low taxes and provision of public goods defined good governance . . . the long periods of
quiet in the Chinese empire enabled rulers and subjects to rely heavily on such strategies.

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

Table 1 Dynastic Changes and their Causes in East Asia, 500–​1900 ad

Country Dynasty Dates Cause of fall Internal or
external

Korea Koguryŏ 37 bc–​668 ad Tang/​Silla alliance and decade-​long war External

Silla 57 bc–​907 ad Aristocratic families, civil war, King was Internal
figurehead for last century. Koryŏ
eventually conquered
Koryŏ 907–​1392 Yi Songgye rebelled Internal
Chosŏn 1392–​1910 Japanese imperialism External
(twentieth
century)
Japan Nara 710–​794 Rebellion Internal
Heian 794–​1185 Minamoto no Yoritomo seized power Internal
Kamakura 1185–​1333 Nitta Yoshisada, conquered them. Internal
Shogunate
Ashikaga 1336–​1573 Sengoku warring states era, Hideyoshi (2nd Internal
Shogunate great unifier), Tokugawa (3rd great unifier)
Tokugawa 1600–​1868 Meiji restoration Internal
Shogunate
Vietnam Lý 1009–​1225 Trần Thu͗ Độ forced Lý Chiêu Hoàng to give Internal
the throne to Trần Ca͗nh.
Tran 1225–​1400 Hồ Quý Ly rebellion Internal
Hồ 1400–​1406 Ming China intervened on behalf of External
Tran dynasty
Later Lê 1428–​1788 Mac rebellion Internal
Mac, Le, etc. 1527–​1788 Many rival civil wars Internal
Nguyen 1802–​1945 French imperialism External
(Western)
China Tang 618–​907 Zhu Wen rebellion Internal
Song 960–​1279 Mongol invasions External
Yuan 1271–​1368 Zhu Yuanzhang rebellion Internal
Ming 1368–​1644 Li Zicheng rebellion Internal
Qing 1644–​1912 Empress Dowager Longyu, Yuan Shikai, Internal
and Sun Yat-​sen

Source: Kang and Ma (2020).

Kirk Larsen (2012, 9) notes that there were ‘critical moments in which the Chinese dynasty
possessed both the capability and the momentum necessary to complete aggressive expan-
sionistic designs [against Chosŏn] but decided not to do so’. In fact, the main reason China
seems not to have acted is because it deemed that such invasions of Korea were not in its long-​
term strategic interest. Chinese officials recognized the value of having a loyal ally between
 ‘Asia’ in the History of IR    509

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

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

Conclusion

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

Notes
1. Much of this section is drawn from Huang and Kang (2020).
2. The phrase is from Elisseeff (1963).
 ‘Asia’ in the History of IR    511

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 Chapter 35

T he ‘ Internat i ona l ’
and the ‘ Gl oba l ’ i n
International H i story
Or Rosenboim and Chika Tonooka

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

challenges of the age: issues of war and peace in the aftermath of two catastrophic world
wars; the world’s growing interconnectedness and interdependence in an age of techno-
logical innovation; and major transformations in world order, including the end of Empire
and the birth of new postcolonial states. Crucially, in the eyes of contemporary observers,
these were all developments whose causes and effects seemingly exceeded the boundaries
of any given nation-​state. Against such a backdrop, the locales of the international and the
global presented alternative spaces for conceptualizing political relations beyond the state.
Each locale was moreover conceptualized by its own set of assumptions about 1) the appro-
priate spatial scale of organizing political life, and 2) the degree to which the state ought to
play a central role. As this chapter will make clear, these two domains were open to varying
and overlapping interpretations, defying any easy generalizations or black-​ and-​white
distinctions between them. Our hope is that the diverse and ever-​changing nature of pol-
itical and scholarly debates about the international and global domains as evidenced by our
discussion of the twentieth century will provide a starting point for future engagement with
these locales by historians, IR scholars, and practitioners alike.
So what exactly do the international and the global refer to? At a basic level, the inter-
national and the global describe geographical spaces as well as political domains and
imaginaries. These spaces—​at once concrete and ideational—​define analytical and norma-
tive perspectives of historians, IR scholars, as well as practitioners, commentators, and the
general public. The international and the global indicate a discrete scale, a particular set of
political relations, and normative assumptions about the scope, aims, and protagonists of
politics beyond the state.
One way to distinguish between the international and the global is their relation to the
state: while the international relies on—​and even assumes—​the centrality of statehood to
political order without imposing a strict vision of scale, the global challenges this assumption
by prioritizing instead the world-​scale of political order over the specific structure of its
composing units. For twentieth-​century intellectuals and practitioners, engaging with the
global and the international as locales did not entail a turn away from other conceptual and
geographical spheres of political order. To think about political domains beyond the state in
the modern era was not necessarily to attempt to abolish the state as a protagonist of polit-
ical relations. Instead, the international and the global were embedded in a pluralistic vision
of politics in which other spatial and political locales, such as the city, the state, the region,
the empire, and the continent, could exist and thrive. This multiplicity of spatial and polit-
ical locales has contributed to the formation of ideas about the international and the global,
their scope and scale, as well as their distinct interactions with other dimensions of political
action and thought. In particular, the interconnections between the categories of the state,
the international and the global, has provided a fruitful arena for the examination of key
concepts in politics, such as power, community, order, and democracy.
More than a specific geographical location, the locales of the international and the global
indicate a particular scale of political interaction. While the international and the global
suggest that the spaces of politics may—​and potentially should—​include the whole world,
these spheres do not always represent a universalist vision aimed at levelling the differences
in favour of a united world order. Instead, the international and the global have represented
opportunities to reconsider the links between the different units that compose the world as
a whole, generating debates about inequality and the management of diversity. If the inter-
national seems to draw attention to the relations between states as the main components
 The ‘International’ and the ‘Global’ in IH     515

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

Internationalism and Globalism

c.1919 and 1945

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

discussions about alternative world orders placed a new emphasis on the ethics and practices
of international cooperation. Such formulations amounted to a viewpoint or ideology
broadly known as internationalism that remained influential throughout the twentieth cen-
tury in varying political and conceptual formulations (Sluga and Clavin 2016). In the specific
context of interwar Europe (1918–​39), marred as it was by political fracture and emotional
trauma, the devastating consequences of excessive nationalist belligerency fuelled wide-
spread anxieties about European civilizational decay and moral decline, which in turn
fostered an espousal of internationalism as an ideology of civilizational progress. The most
significant practical consequence of this reorientation was the establishment of the League of
Nations in 1919, an international organization equipped explicitly with the task of fostering
international peace and cooperation.
Yet only a few internationalists advanced a complete rejection of nationalism or envisaged
the abolition of states. As Glenda Sluga (2013) has argued, the national and international
were closely intertwined and to some extent mutually constitutive categories. This entangle-
ment was typically rooted in liberal notions of progress and citizenship that saw the nation
as an essential transitional stage towards internationalism—​ideas that can be traced back
to the nineteenth century (Bell 2007a, 2007b; Mazower 2012). The nineteenth-​century out-
look survived into the twentieth in various forms, including the very structure and naming
of the ‘League of Nations’ which clearly defined the international as a summation of na-
tional units. Likewise, the British scholar and internationalist activist Alfred Zimmern was
only one of many internationalists who were opposed to parochial and competitive forms
of nationalism but nonetheless came to view nation-​states as important building-​blocks for
the construction of a collaborative and peaceful international space (Baji 2021). For some
internationalists, even the concurrent rise of nationalist movements in the non-​West during
this period (galvanized by Woodrow Wilson’s enshrinement of the principle of national self-​
determination) represented welcome evidence of the global diffusion of the nation state as
the universal model of political modernity (Manela 2007; Tonooka 2021). As these examples
attest, thinking beyond the state reinforced the prevalence and legitimacy of the state as a
political form.
Nation-​states, however, were not the only models for the conceptual and institutional
construction of the international sphere. The historical and political context of empire and
imperialism was also central to the understanding of the international space in the twentieth
century, the interwar years being no exception. At a conceptual level, some scholars have
projected internationalism and imperialism as opposites, suggesting that the emergence
of the international should be read as an attempt to overcome the exploitative practices of
imperial regimes, and replace them with a cooperation-​based system of states (Long and
Schmidt 2005). Yet imperial practices, worldviews and ideologies were not excluded from
conceptions of the international that sought to preserve positive elements of the imperial
world order whilst rejecting more problematic aspects (Morefield 2004, 2014; Bell 2016;
Pitts 2018). In the early twentieth century, as in later periods, conceptions of hierarchy, racial
differences, domination, and exploitation permeated ideas of the international derived from
imperial discourses (Bell 2019).
Indeed, historians of international organizations, especially the League of Nations (and
later the United Nations (UN)), have noted the fundamental contribution of the imperial ex-
perience to practices and ideas of governing beyond the state. While the foundation of a new
international institution like the league might appear as a moment of political and intellectual
 The ‘International’ and the ‘Global’ in IH     517

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

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

1960–​80s: The International and

Global after Empire

As the nation—​or the nation-​state—​remained a central part of the international sphere,

the debate about the formation and inclusion of new nations was an important aspect of
the development of the international in the twentieth century. This debate took on a par-
ticular significance in the latter half of the twentieth century in the context of the decline of
European empires and the rise of colonial anti-​imperialism. The non-​Western rejection of
colonialism translated into new movements for national liberation, but the scope of these
movements was not limited to the locale of the nation (Collins 2013). Instead, as with the
pre-​Second World War era, the national and international were closely intertwined. New
anticolonial nationalist leaders sought to overcome the world order of empire after the
Second World War by embracing the founding principles of the international system, first
and foremost self-​determination (Getachew 2019). Here, the foundation of new postcolonial
states was not merely an act of reinforcing the notion of the nation-​state as the desirable
political form after empire, but rather an engagement with the international as a space
defined by statehood, autonomy, and mutual recognition. A prominent example is the Third
 The ‘International’ and the ‘Global’ in IH     519

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

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

Contemporary Theories of the

International and Global

In recent decades, scholars have continued to theorize the category of the global in ways that
are both familiar and innovative. Towards the end of the twentieth century, the rise of glo-
balization as the process of increased social, economic, and cultural interconnectedness led
scholars to reimagine the state as a global unit, a hybrid creation between familiar statehood
and novel political spaces. In one notable formulation, the global perspective on statehood
has been imagined as the ‘Metastate’, a new political domain with global reach though not
necessarily all inclusive (Yurick 1995). With its flexible boundaries and multinational elite
population, the notion of the Metastate offers a response to the imaginary global arena of
modern capitalism that transcends space and place. By imagining the state in this new global
context, political thinkers sought to challenge key political categories such as boundaries,
community, and sovereignty, as well as the modern state itself.
A complementary term advanced to help make sense of the global political space is
‘globality’ (van Munster and Sylvest 2016), defined as ‘the quality of being global; univer-
sality, totality; specifically the quality of having worldwide inclusiveness, reach, or relevance;
(the potential for) global integration, operation, or influence (especially in business and fi-
nancial contexts)’. In other words, globality means the circumstances in which the entire
world is regarded as a ‘single place’ (van Munster and Sylvest 2016, 2–​3). This interpretation
highlights the main normative characteristic of the global: the material perception of the
‘oneness’ of the planet as a significant condition for human action and for political order in
particular. In this view, the world scale of political order becomes its defining feature, while
the primacy of statehood as a condition for participation and recognition is marginalized.
More broadly, thinking globally has induced doubts about the value of a state-​centric
notion of sovereignty, leading to a growing recognition of alternative powers that limit and
direct political decisions around the world (Ferguson 2006; Rodrik 2010; Piketty 2017).
Moreover, by side-​lining the state, scholars have given more dimension to other political
associations, such as the notion of the ‘community’, seen as a local and universal reference
point for political, cultural, and social allegiance (Bartelson 2009; Aydin 2007).
Such scholarly efforts notwithstanding, it is important to note that the global, in practice,
has yet to replace the international as a dominant sphere of political life. Instead, scholars
have continued to innovate theories pertaining to the international. Eschewing traditional
categorizations such as realism and idealism, alternative approaches now include attempts
 The ‘International’ and the ‘Global’ in IH     521

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

Continuity, Change, and the Challenge

of Modernity

There is a strand of thinking within IR which associates the international sphere with a con-
dition of ‘anarchy’ viewed as a timeless universal problem (Schmidt 1998). This perspective
522    Or Rosenboim and Chika Tonooka

emphasizes continuity over change. But as the examples hitherto examined have shown,
both in the realms of practice and ideas, the dynamics of change—​and historical rupture—​
also mattered greatly in the development of the international and global as political spaces
during the twentieth century.
One such dynamic came from geopolitical developments. As we have seen, the aftermaths
of the two world wars saw the rise of new institutional spaces and normative outlooks, at
times reinforcing and at times undermining the centrality of the nation state as the foun-
dational unit of politics beyond the state. The end of empire and the rise of postcolonial
states also led to the emergence of new articulations of internationalism and globalism,
inducing North-​South ideological contestations. In the second half of the twentieth century,
discussions of politics beyond the state reflected a European sense of decline and margin-
alization, at the same time as they reflected a growing recognition of the rise of new polit-
ical powers like the United States, China, and Russia. Throughout, the political challenges of
world order influenced the ways in which the international and the global were interpreted
and contested.
Technological developments have also been key, especially in making the global scale of
politics seem necessary and—​to an extent—​possible. While nineteenth-​century thinkers
had already identified the processes that initiated the integration of the world’s cultures,
economies, and political orders, many political thinkers in the mid-​twentieth century
insisted that the Second World War and the world’s increasing interconnectedness required
a distinctly global political vision.
Collectively, these dynamics of geopolitical transformation and technological change
invite reflections on modernity as a concept and a set of conditions. The rise and diffusion
of the nation-​state as the political foundation of the international, as well as innovations in
science, communication, and transportation, are all quintessential features of what have
come to be known as modernity, whose origins, scholars argue, are to be located in the nine-
teenth century (Osterhammel 2014). The transformations of the long nineteenth century in
the form of industrialization and technological innovation, the rise of rational statehood,
and ‘ideologies of progress’, initially generated a hierarchical core-​periphery international
society, and over time became the basis of global modernity once the material and idea-
tional conditions of the modern West became globalized. In this view, the transformation
of the nineteenth century was the foundational rupture that defined the conditions for and
contours of the kinds of international and global configurations we have identified in the
twentieth century (Buzan and Lawson 2015). And even in the twenty-​first century, in so far
as the international has yet to be rendered obsolete by a ‘post-​national’ global, it is modernity
rather than post-​modernity that continues to provide the enveloping condition for politics
beyond the state.
To the extent that ideas and institutions are human constructions, however, perceptions
of modern conditions matter as much as the nature of the conditions themselves. As
exemplified by mid-​century globalists’ responses to technological interconnectedness,
the intellectual history of the twentieth century reveals recurrent human proclivities for
identifying each epoch as unique, perceiving a radical newness in a condition that may in fact
have more continuities with the past. Seen in this light, as a driving force behind internation-
alist and globalist imaginings, modernity might also be understood in Koselleckian terms as
a particular temporal sensibility—​as a sense of rupture from what had come before—​which
in turn propelled the observer towards a necessary adaptation in the political realm. This
 The ‘International’ and the ‘Global’ in IH     523

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

Conclusion

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

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

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

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 PA RT V

M OM E N T S
 Chapter 36

The Fal l of
C onstant i nopl e
Jonathan Harris

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

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

Accommodation and Resistance

The tension between religious allegiance and economic and political interests had begun
long before 1453 as the result of the intrusion of a Muslim power into the Balkans. Until the
middle of the fourteenth century, originally as part of the Greek-​speaking Byzantine em-
pire, the area had been universally Christian. When the empire spiralled into its final de-
cline in the early fourteenth century, it was initially the surrounding Christian countries that
positioned themselves to absorb what was left of its Balkan lands. The most obvious candi-
date was Serbia which had already seized much of Thessaly and Macedonia during the 1340s.
The Italian maritime republic of Venice was also interested and during 1355 was seriously
considering taking over Constantinople itself, which was an important trading hub (Ljubić
1868–​72, ii. 326–​327, iii. 174–​179; Nicol 1988, 296). As it happened, neither power fulfilled
these ambitions, as a new player unexpectedly entered the scene: the small Turkish Ottoman
emirate which had established itself on former Byzantine lands around Bursa across the
Bosporus in Asia Minor. In March 1354, the Ottomans took advantage of an earthquake that
had levelled the walls of Gallipoli to cross the Dardanelles and occupy the town, thus giving
themselves a foothold in Europe. In the years that followed they took over the remaining
Byzantine lands in Thrace, making Adrianople their capital. They twice crushed the Serbs,
first at the Marica River in 1371 and then at Kosovo in 1389, and so established themselves as
the dominant power in the Balkans.
In the wake of these victories, any hope that the Christian rulers of the Balkans could unite
against the intruders faded. Instead, they purchased their survival by becoming vassals of
the Ottoman emir Murad I (1362–​89). From a purely practical point of view the arrangement
was an advantageous one to both sides. Murad must have been well aware that the Ottomans
were a tiny Muslim minority in the overwhelmingly Christian Balkans so that he was not in
a position to annex the lands of his defeated enemies. Instead he used them as a source of
revenue and manpower because his vassals paid an annual tribute and provided troops to
serve in the Ottoman army when required. For their part, the Serb, Bulgar, Byzantine and
other vassals remained in possession of their territories and received the emir’s protection.
Nevertheless, practical though it may have been, the difference of religious allegiance made
the relationship between overlord and vassals a strained one, with Christian rulers appar-
ently resenting their subordination to an ‘infidel’. That created a rather anomalous climate
for international relations over the next century.
To take one example, the Byzantine emperor was an Ottoman vassal between 1372 and
1394 and again from 1424. He had little option but to accept this state of affairs because by
then he possessed scarcely any territory apart from Constantinople, secure behind its for-
midable defences, some Aegean islands and part of the Peloponnese. Even so, he was con-
stantly seeking to undermine his Turkish overlord. While outwardly maintaining peace,
he engaged in frequent dialogue with the papacy and Western Christian rulers with a view
 The Fall of Constantinople    533

to creating an anti-​Ottoman coalition. This was not necessarily a straightforward strategy

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

compelled by duty to resist them on the other (Pius II 2003–​18, ii. 24–​26; Babinger 1978, 153–​
154, 163–​164; Fine 1994, 74–​76).
The dilemma was particularly acute when it came to two other Christian powers in the
area, the Italian maritime republics of Genoa and Venice. For centuries, they both had
enjoyed an advantageous commercial position in Constantinople thanks to their treaties
with the Byzantine emperor which exempted them from paying any customs duty on the
goods they imported and exported. They also possessed a string of ports and islands in the
region. The Venetians ruled Crete and the long Aegean island of Negroponte (now Evvia),
while the Genoese possessed Chios and the town of Pera (or Galata), situated opposite
Constantinople across its harbour, the Golden Horn. Consequently both republics had a
great deal invested in Constantinople and its hinterland and much to lose, but it was not at
all clear how best to defend those interests. They could have followed the other Christian
regimes and accommodated themselves to the new dominant power by becoming Ottoman
vassals. The Venetians were very reluctant to do so. It would certainly have secured their
trade and their territories, but it would also allow their rivals in Italy to ‘play the Turkish card’
and accuse them of being in league with the enemies of Christendom (Abulafia 1997, 247).
For both Venice and Genoa, the dilemma became acute when the siege of Constantinople
began in April 1453. The Genoese podestà or governor of Pera, Angelo Lomellino, had to
make a decision on how to act. A Turkish victory would certainly put an end to the con-
genial terms under which the Genoese traded from Pera, and the ethics of the time dictated
that they should go to the rescue of Christians who were being attacked by Muslims. On
the other hand, Constantinople had been besieged many times in the past and had al-
ways survived, so it might not be worth provoking the sultan by overtly opposing him. So
Lomellino took a middle course. Envoys were sent to the sultan’s camp to pledge Pera’s neu-
trality in the coming struggle but at the same time Lomellino clandestinely sent troops to
assist the defence (Olgiati 1989, 54). This course of action could be seen either as duplicity or
simply as an attempt to reconcile the claims of religion and the needs of practical survival. At
first sight, the policy paid off. When Constantinople fell, Lomellino handed the keys of Pera
over to the sultan and received in return a treaty whose terms seemed generous: Pera would
be subject to the Ottoman poll tax on unbelievers but not to any customs duty. The homes,
churches and property of its inhabitants were guaranteed, and Mehmed II promised not to
destroy the town’s fortifications. The flaw in the fence-​sitting policy soon became apparent,
however. When the sultan visited Pera in person two days after the treaty had been signed,
he broke one of its clauses by ordering the defensive walls to be demolished. His volte face
was prompted by the discovery that troops from Pera had fought against him and in view
of this breach of neutrality, Mehmed no longer felt bound on his side (Harris 2010, 217–​218;
Pistarino 1986, 63–​64, 66–​67).
The Venetians likewise had much to lose when the siege began. War with the sultan would
put at risk their commercial treaty which provided generous terms for their merchants in
Ottoman Adrianople. It also would expose the republic’s possessions in the Aegean to attack,
especially the island of Negroponte, whose position close to the mainland of Greece made
it particularly vulnerable. So when in February 1452, an envoy had arrived from Emperor
Constantine XI to warn of the build-​up for an Ottoman attack, the senate, a body of about
120 men that was the real decision-​making body in Venice, had temporized. The envoy was
assured of Venice’s disapproval of Mehmed’s preparations, but no concrete offer of help was
given, and he was advised to go to the other powers in Italy whose response the Venetians
 The Fall of Constantinople    535

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

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

International Dialogue and Cooperation

The tension between religious allegiance and practical survival described in the previous
section was a phenomenon that can be seen most clearly among the governments of states
which shared a border with the Ottomans. Further away, everything seemed much more
clear cut. Pope Nicholas V reacted in the traditional way and preached a crusade against the
Ottoman sultan on 30 September 1453, issuing the bull Etsi Ecclesia Christi. The response
was enthusiastic. Several powerful monarchs took public vows to lead an army east against
the Ottomans. The duke of Burgundy, Philip the Good (1419–​467) did so with his leading
nobles publicly at a banquet at Lille in February 1454. In November 1455, the king of Aragon,
Alfonso V (1416–​58), followed suit at a ceremony in the cathedral at Naples which lasted
all day. The Holy Roman Emperor, Frederick III (1440–​93), called a council of princes to
Frankfurt in October 1454 at which it was proposed to send a force of 40,000 men to re-
inforce Hungary. We also hear of many ordinary individuals signing up for the war against
the Ottomans, such as an otherwise unknown Frenchman called François le Franc in 1454.
Some 2,000 people also made a crusading vow at Naples alongside Alfonso V in 1455 (Aloisio
2017, 69–​70; Harris 2010, 233; Harris 2017, 39).
 The Fall of Constantinople    537

In spite of all this crusading ardour, as already noted, no expedition to retake

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

Konya in Asia Minor, was a bitter enemy of the Ottoman sultan. In 1432, a passing French
traveller had noted that although Ibrahim was related to his Ottoman neighbour by
marriage, he deeply resented the territory he had lost to him and would gladly attack him
in the east if he saw a Christian coalition doing so in the West (Bertrandon de la Brocquière
1988, 34–​35; Ágoston 1995, 267–​274). Pius II assured the delegates at Mantua of the same
thing in his closing address. It is even possible that Ibrahim sent representatives to Mantua,
those who were described by Pius as coming from Asia. Doubtless they would have kept a
low profile to avoid news of their presence leaking out, for collusion with infidels was as bad
publicity for Muslims as it was for Christians (Pius II 2003–​18, ii. 22–​23, 198–​199). Another
way to bring in Muslim allies was to follow in the footsteps of the Byzantine emperor and
play off other members of the Ottoman ruling house against the reigning sultan. From 1456,
an alleged half-​brother of Mehmed II, Bayezid Osman was living as a papal pensioner in
Rome, although his potential as a pawn in Ottoman politics was probably negated when he
converted to Catholicism (Babinger 1951, 349–​388). The West was later to acquire a more
useful bargaining chip in Mehmed II’s younger son Cem as well as entering into negotiations
with other Muslim powers such Persia and the Turkoman Akkoyunlu federation. Thus
fifteenth-​century IR were by no means as religiously polarized as might be assumed (Setton
1976–​84, ii. 461–​477; Lacaze 1972, 77–​84).
The ability of the papacy and the Catholic Church to facilitate international dialogue is no-
where better illustrated than in its direct communication not only with ruling elites but with
a wide section of the general population. Public opinion was systematically manipulated by
publicizing the fall of Constantinople, in order to encourage military volunteers and finan-
cial contributions. In Dublin, for example, the archbishop organized penitential processions
in the streets to bring home to the inhabitants the enormity of what had happened hundreds
of miles away. The primary incentive that the Church could offer was the indulgence, a re-
mission of a set number of days in purgatory in return for a meritorious act. Those who
fought and died on crusade could expect a plenary remission and immediate entry into
paradise. More modest acts, such as the donation of money, normally garnered forty days
remission. During 1455, the Jubilee indulgence that had been offered in Rome in 1450, was
made available in England and Ireland with the specific aim of raising money that would
be passed to the Knights of St John on Rhodes and used for the defence of Christendom
(Harris 1999, 26–​27). The dissemination of the message was partly the work of local prelates
but great efforts were made to orchestrate it centrally, use being made of the Franciscan order
for preachers to carry it across Europe (Housley 2012, 138–​140). In August 1463, Cardinal
Bessarion, the papal legate in Venice, drew up a series of instructions for friars who were to
preach the Cross in the city and it territories, urging them to make three main points: the
need for revenge on the Turks for the atrocities they had visited on Christians, assistance for
Christians under the Turkish yoke, and the necessity of fighting the Ottomans because they
were clearly making plans to invade Italy and the whole of Christendom (Housley 1996, 147–​
153). These instructions, though designed specifically for Venice, would have been applic-
able with a few minor alterations across Western Christendom. When a Byzantine refugee
called Frankoulios Servopoulos addressed the English court on behalf of Pius II in 1459, he
wisely tailored the message to an audience for whom the likelihood of an Ottoman invasion
was remote. Instead he stuck to three indisputable points: ‘one for the faith, the second for
peace among Christians, the third that all by one common assent should succour the faith
and drive back the infidels’ (Harris 1995, 107). This spreading of a unified message, in an age
 The Fall of Constantinople    539

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

Transnational Vision and Local Priorities

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

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

Conclusion: Beyond the Fall of

Constantinople

This chapter has traced the responses of the rulers of various Christian states to the fall of
Constantinople and the tension between the claims of religious solidarity and national
 The Fall of Constantinople    541

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

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 Chapter 37

The Peace of W e st pha l ia

Andrew Phillips

The Peace of Westphalia is arguably the most pivotal ‘benchmark date’ (Buzan and Lawson
2014) in International Relations (IR). But while scholars have long hailed it for allegedly
marking the transition from the medieval to the modern world, more recent scholarship has
lambasted the ‘myth of 1648’ (e.g. Nexon 2009; Osiander 2001; Teschke 2003). Despite these
revisionist efforts, however, Westphalia remains tenacious as a putative origin point for the
advent of the modern state system. In this chapter, I review debates on Westphalia’s historical
significance, before offering a qualified defence of Westphalia as a critical inflection point in
the development of both European political order, and also of global modernity. Consistent
with this volume’s emphasis on the theme of modernity, I argue that the Peace of Westphalia
was critically conducive to managing Europe’s cultural diversity following the Wars of
Religion. The Westphalian settlement institutionalized a new ‘diversity regime’ (Reus-​Smit
2018, 13–​14) that neutralized confessional difference as a source of inter-​polity conflict. The
resulting stability then aided domestic state-​building, while entrenching multipolar anarchy
over imperial unipolarity as Europe’s default condition.
Turning to the theme of granularity, I maintain that Westphalia’s true significance is best
understood through the lens of global history, which considers Westphalia as a region-
ally particular solution to a more general crisis of political authority that afflicted Eurasia’s
main power centres during the seventeenth century. Alongside the Thirty Years’ War, large
scale rebellions, wars, and dynastic transitions convulsed most parts of Eurasia in the mid-​
1600s (e.g. Goldstone 1991; Parker 2014). In most instances, rulers overcame these crises
through the consolidation or renovation of regional empires, and through diversity regimes
emphasizing the incorporation of cultural diversity under the overarching canopy of im-
perial rule.
Westphalia conversely marked a critical exception to the Eurasian norm of imperial con-
solidation and regional unipolarity. The Westphalian solution to the seventeenth-​century
crisis may not have entailed the wholesale replacement of heteronomy and empire with
a modern sovereign state system. But it did institutionalize a distinctive diversity regime
that arrested imperial consolidation, and formed an indispensable precursor to a competi-
tive multistate system with few global parallels. The roughly synchronous consolidation of
Asian empires meanwhile facilitated revived prosperity as the seventeenth-​century crisis
abated, stimulating increased inter-​regional trade. The resulting combination of European
 The Peace of Westphalia    545

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

The Peace of Westphalia as Historical Event

The Peace of Westphalia—​comprised of the Treaties of Osnabruck and Munster—​marked

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

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

International Relations Debates on

the Peace of Westphalia

Before analysing debates on its significance, we must first note that Westphalia’s iconic
status—​as a signifier of tectonic transformation in European politics—​is a convention
 The Peace of Westphalia    547

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

The Peace of Westphalia as the Gateway to Modernity

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

The distinction between early modernity and high modernity further complicates matters.
I understand early modernity to refer to an epoch from c.1500–​1800 ce, characterized by
several key developments. These included the rise of more geographically expansive states
and empires; the growth of increasingly commercialized agrarian economies; the consolida-
tion of regional international systems; and the development of increasingly dense networks
of trade, migration, and war linking these regional systems together (Buzan and Little 2000;
Goldstone 1998). High modernity signifies the period immediately following early mod-
ernity and extending at least into the mid-​twentieth century, and possibly to the present.
It is defined among other developments by the growth of rational state-​building, industri-
alization, and the rise of ideologies of progress (Buzan and Lawson 2015, 4). Most relevant
here, high modernity is also characterized by the consolidation of the first genuinely global
international system, as an expanding European international society at last subsumed its
non-​European counterparts. The early/​high modernity distinction is relevant here only to
the degree that the Westphalian order was initially of parochial significance, being one of
multiple regional systems that arose during early modernity. Yet Westphalia’s emergence
eventually assumed global significance, its rise being a critical prerequisite for the rise of the
genuinely global international system that framed high modernity.
Within IR, three grounds for according Westphalia such singular prominence stand out.
These respectively emphasize its institutional significance for the sovereign state’s triumph
as Europe’s dominant polity form; its institutional centrality for the birth of the modern
sovereign state system; and its cultural importance in consolidating the secularization of
European international order.
A key argument of Westphalia boosters is that the Peace confirmed the sovereign state
over its rivals as the dominant polity form in post-​Reformation Europe. Though the sov-
ereign state had critical antecedents dating to the late-​Medieval period (e.g. Strayer 1970),
Westphalia confirmed its ascendancy over the rival transnational authority structures of
Church and Empire. The Thirty Years’ War thus ended with two sovereign states—​France
and Sweden—​ victorious, the former having subordinated its confessional identity to
considerations of raison d’etat in the conflict’s last stages. By contrast, by the mid-​seventeenth
century, the Church’s political and economic power had declined irreversibly. Likewise,
though the Empire survived, 1648 entrenched a constitutional settlement that confirmed
princes’ liberties at the Emperor’s expense. The Dutch Republic’s de jure independence,
and Switzerland’s de facto independence, apparently further consolidated a transition to a
Europe where sovereign states increasingly dominated.
Through this lens, Westphalia’s significance lies in its effect on the constitution of the
European political order, with the so-​called ‘first face’ of political authority (the principle
underwriting which collective actors may legitimately exercise international agency) in-
creasingly favouring sovereign states (Philpott 2001, 15). An implicit assumption in this
narrative is that the sovereign state is a key if not the decisive institutional product of mod-
ernity, as well as the eventual vanguard for modernity’s worldwide spread.
A second, potentially complementary, perspective identifies Westphalia’s modernity
through its prominence as the origin moment in the rise of a modern system of sovereign
states. In contrast to the historic predominance of imperial international orders, a hall-
mark of modernity is the organization of relations between sovereign political communities
through a reflexively monitored international system of sovereign states (Giddens 1987,
4). Off the back of this conviction, influential English School, liberal, and constructivist
 The Peace of Westphalia    549

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

Contesting the ‘Myth’ of Westphalia

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

territorial configuration was not established by the mid-​seventeenth century; mutually ex-
clusive forms of sovereign territoriality instead came much later (Ruggie 1993, 163; Reus-​
Smit 2013a, 70). Revisionists have also noted dynasticism’s post-​1648 persistence as a key
property of Europe’s dominant political units, and the distinct forms of violent transnational
conflict that arose from it (e.g. Nexon 2009). The survival of non-​state polities like the Holy
Roman Empire, and later the German Confederation, further confounds Westphalia’s iden-
tification as a mass extinction event for non-​state actors (Halden 2013; Osiander 2008). In
short, the reality of polity diversity after 1648 undermines Westphalia’s identification with
the sovereign state’s triumphant ascent, as well as the identification of the sovereign state as
the institutional embodiment of modernity.
Just as Westphalia did not mark the sovereign state’s definitive triumph over its
competitors, revisionists have also critiqued efforts to identify it as heralding the genesis
of the modern sovereign state system. Narratives stressing Westphalia’s status as the birth
certificate of the international system are susceptible to critique first on grounds of an-
achronism. This is because many of the most crucial features of the modern sovereign state
system arose only incrementally in the centuries following the Peace of Westphalia. The rise
of modern border delimitation regimes (Goettlich 2019); the delegitimation of private inter-
national violence (Thomson 1994); the entrenchment of norms of non-​intervention and
sovereign equality (Reus-​Smit 2013b)—​each are fundamental to the modern international
system, and arose long after the end of the Thirty Years’ War.
To be fair, even the most ardent Westphalia boosters rarely cast it as a single ‘big bang’
moment heralding the pristine arrival of a modern international system. This nuance blunts
the force of charges of anachronism. A more serious criticism focuses on the Eurocentric
teleology that pervades influential accounts of the expansion of international society (e.g.
Bull and Watson 1984). These accounts strongly endorse international society’s apparent
Westphalian origins. Yet there are dangers in this endorsement. Most obviously, it risks
sanitizing the colonial violence that accompanied international society’s expansion, as
well as downplaying the hierarchical character of international society during the fleeting
era of Western dominance (Kayaoglu 2010). Such narratives likewise omit the constitutive
role overseas colonial expansion played in shaping the evolution of core institutions and
identities within and between European states (e.g. Branch 2012).
More fundamentally, in elevating Westphalia as the singular epicentre and origin point
for the modern international system, traditional accounts reinforce the idea of modernity as
a constellation of institutions that originated from the West, and then propagated with the
sovereign state’s amoeba-​like global diffusion. This conception is historically flawed, in that
it overlooks the complex dynamics of Western expansion prior to the nineteenth century,
which frequently entailed Westerners’ incorporation into powerful Afro-​Asian polities,
rather than the outright imposition of Western institutions (Suzuki et al. 2015). Equally, it
also obscures the ways in which international society was not only globally extended, but
also transformed, through subaltern actors’ struggles for recognition (Dunne and Reus-​
Smit 2017).
Turning last to accounts of Westphalia as an exemplar of secularization (e.g. Philpott 2001;
Straumann 2008), this claim is vulnerable to the charge that it risks overstating religion’s
retreat from public life after 1648. True, religious difference was no longer a catalyst for inter-
national war after Westphalia. But rulers’ legitimation strategies remained suffused by reli-
gious convictions throughout the Age of Absolutism (Gorski 2003). So too did underlying
 The Peace of Westphalia    551

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

Rethinking Westphalia’s Significance

through the Lens of Global History

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

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

The Thirty Years’ War and the General Crisis of the

Seventeenth Century
The upheaval wrought by the Thirty Years’ War was far from unique in early modern Eurasia
(Goldstone 1991; Parker 2014). On the contrary, the period saw far-​reaching convulsions
throughout the Old World. Russia and China both saw widespread conflict and dynastic
transitions during this time. The Ottoman, Safavid, and Mughal Empires conversely proved
more resilient, though each faced dramatic challenges to their rule (Dale 2010; White 2013).
While the causes of these crises were diverse, their synchronicity was far from serendip-
itous. A combination of over-​population and climatological oscillations (the so-​called ‘little
Ice Age’) made all complex agrarian societies susceptible to strain during this time (Blom
2019; Goldstone 1991; Parker 2014; White 2013). Ecological pressures intensified existing
intra-​elite group competition (Goldstone 1991), while the previous Eurasia-​wide diffusion
of new military technologies (Lorge 2008) increased the scale and potential destructiveness
of conflicts.
The resulting conjunction of popular distress, institutional strain, and increasing vio-
lence interdependence produced legitimation crises across Eurasia. As rulers responded
to these crises, they recalibrated their legitimation strategies accordingly. Across much of
Eurasia, this entailed the refurbishment of incorporative diversity regimes, that defined and
organized cultural diversity in ways consistent with maintaining imperial power. Thus, in
India, the Mughals doubled down on a strategy of syncretic incorporation that legitimized
the Emperor as the divine reconciler of the Empire’s otherwise irreducibly heterogeneous
faith communities (Phillips 2021). Conversely, following the Manchu conquest, the Qing
Dynasty defined cultural diversity largely along ethnic lines, preserving and extending
their empire through a diversity regime grounded in the careful segregation of imperial
‘constituencies’ (Crossley 2002, 6) from one another.
 The Peace of Westphalia    553

Crises of Legitimacy and the Distinctiveness of Westphalian

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

Admittedly, even this revised characterization of Westphalia needs caveats. Notably, we

must neither overstate the geographic scope of the Westphalian diversity regime, nor exag-
gerate its elasticity in accommodating cultural difference.
Geographically, the Peace of Westphalia was primarily a means to manage political and re-
ligious conflict within the Empire. Westphalia guaranteed continued religious and political
pluralism within Latin Christendom’s physical core. Together with the concurrent extension
of independence to the Dutch Republic and the Swiss cantons, it foreclosed the consolida-
tion of imperial hierarchy across much of the great cluster of urban settlements that were
traditionally West-​Central Europe’s great incubators of wealth and cultural innovation.
The resulting mixture of proto-​sovereign and imperial arrangements within the Empire
deviated significantly from the ideal of sovereign anarchy. Nevertheless, at a systemic level,
Westphalia still indirectly helped entrench the rise of sovereignty in Western Europe over al-
ternative organizing principles, such as heteronomy or suzerainty. This is because it stopped
neighbouring state-​builders from being side-​tracked into ruinous entanglement in the
Empire’s constitutional and religious controversies. This enabled them to concentrate on
consolidating their own sovereign authority over internal rivals at home, even as many con-
currently extended imperial hierarchies abroad through overseas expansion.
The geographic effects of Westphalia were thus uneven, radiating out in concentric
circles from the Empire to Western Europe to the wider world. Paradoxically, Westphalia’s
improvised combination of sovereign and suzerain practices in Europe’s core helped con-
solidate sovereign state-​building projects on its Atlantic periphery (e.g. France, Spain, and
England). This then enabled the latter to further pursue trans-​continental expansion, even-
tually extending imperial hierarchies across large swathes of Afro-​Asia, the Americas, and
Oceania.
Just as its geographic impact was limited, so too was Westphalia’s fabled ecumeni-
cism. Undeniably, Westphalia entrenched a more stable confessional order than before.
Nevertheless, the Westphalian diversity regime remained highly restrictive, especially
when compared to its Eurasian counterparts. This is because it continued to tie political
authority tightly to confessional allegiance, broadening the bandwidth of toleration within
the Empire to encompass only Catholics, Lutherans, and Calvinists. Both within and be-
yond the Empire, Jews, Muslims, and Christian dissident sects remained largely excluded
from public life in Westphalia’s wake. This contrasted with the relatively more favourable
treatment religious minorities generally enjoyed in the Ottoman and Mughal Empires,
cautioning against Westphalia’s commemoration as a milestone in the move towards a
more tolerant world.
These caveats aside, the Westphalian dispensation nevertheless undeniably differed pro-
foundly from its Eurasian counterparts. Elsewhere, the seventeenth-​century crises favoured
imperial consolidation, and the subordination or extinction of local sovereignties by
centralizing conquest elites. Thus, in South Asia, by the late seventeenth century the Mughal
Empire had peaked in size, extending its reach almost throughout the entirety of the sub-​
continent. In East Asia, meanwhile, the Qing Dynasty’s ascendancy foreshadowed vast
conquests, the Manchus encompassing huge new territories including Tibet and Xinjiang,
and doubling the empire’s size by the end of the eighteenth century. Following the ascent
of the Romanov Dynasty, Russia likewise expanded relentlessly, enfolding diverse duchies,
kingdoms, khanates and tribal confederacies into a vast patrimony stretching from Finland
to Vladivostok. By contrast, Latin Christendom stood out as one of the few major power
 The Peace of Westphalia    555

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

Westphalia’s Significance in the Context of Multiple

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

exceptionalism is not to reproduce the Eurocentrism of earlier valorizations of Westphalia,

which conceived it as a uniquely viable solution to the problem of political and cultural plur-
alism (e.g. Jackson 2000). On the contrary, a comparative analysis illuminates the limitations
of European achievements, by contrasting them with the successful projects of imperial re-
newal and incorporation of cultural diversity that distinguished most other early modern
regional systems (Phillips and Reus-​Smit 2020).
More positively, a comparative analysis does invite us to revisit the puzzle of Europe’s
persistent political pluralism. Certainly, Westphalia did not make future bids for universal
empire impossible. But it did make them more challenging than before, establishing a path
dependency for Europe that grew stronger with each successive general peace. This is be-
cause Westphalia insulated Europe’s geographic core, and a good chunk of its urban wealth-​
producing heartland, within a constitutional order that survived down to the Empire’s
abolition in 1806. The imperial constitution preserved diverse polities that empire-​builders
might otherwise have easily devoured, while allowing time for the maturation of other
system-​stabilizing mechanisms (notably the idea and practice of the balance of power) that
then further entrenched Western Europe’s political fragmentation.
Additionally, Westphalia also provided successive anti-​imperial coalitions with a potent
propaganda device they could invoke to frustrate would-​be empire-​builders, and to legit-
imize general peace settlements favouring pluralism over hegemony. Weaponized nostalgia
for Westphalia for example proved crucial in solidifying support for the Congress of Vienna.
It did so by providing an elongated historical genealogy of Europe’s political pluralism, that
the anti-​Napoleonic coalition had successfully defended against imperial conquest (Keene
2002, 21–​22). In this latter sense, then, successive invocations of the ‘myth’ of Westphalia
proved cumulatively as important as the initial contents of the settlement itself in reinforcing
a trajectory towards sovereignty over empire as West-​Central Europe’s default condition.
Second, considering Westphalia comparatively is valuable in helping us to understand the
crucial warm-​up period of early modernity that helped to pave the way for a global inter-
national system in the nineteenth century. The combination of European fragmentation
after Westphalia and Asian imperial consolidation was critical in driving both the European
thrust overseas, as well as in shaping regionally diverse patterns of European incorporation
into Asia. The resulting thickening of inter-​regional ties was critically conducive to the much
later acceleration of European colonial conquest that helped inaugurate a global modern
international system. Equally, these colonial entanglements were themselves critical in
reshaping European political order, and in giving form to the ‘Westphalian’ sovereign state
system in its most mature elaboration.
Though Westphalian revisionists are convincing, the case for defining Westphalia down
into insignificance is overdrawn. Westphalia was indeed a critical juncture in European
political evolution, which nudged Europe down the path to sovereign anarchy, against the
Eurasian norm of imperial hierarchy. This seventeenth-​century ‘great divergence’ then dras-
tically shaped the contours of subsequent inter-​civilizational interactions, inaugurating a
web of entanglements that then made the nineteenth century advent of a global international
system possible. To understand how we became ‘modern’ and how the global international
system came to be, it is critical to explore the interactive pre-​histories between different
regions that made this development imaginable. Within this context, Westphalia remains
vitally important for all who are interested in comprehending the deep historical origins of
today’s global order.
 The Peace of Westphalia    557

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Violence in Early Modern Europe. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
White, S. 2013. The Climate of Rebellion in the Early Ottoman Empire. Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press.
Wight, M. 1977. Systems of States. Leicester: Leicester University Press.
Wilson, P. H. 2009. The Thirty Years War: Europe’s Tragedy. Cambridge, Mass: Belknap Press,
an imprint of Harvard University Press.
Zarakol, A. 2010. After Defeat: How the East Learned to Live with the West. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
 Chapter 38

The Seven Ye a rs ’ Wa r
Karl Schweizer

Perspectives

In its contextualist approach to international politics, the Handbook deploys two key
organizing concepts—​‘modernity’ and ‘granularity’—​which are designed to productively in-
tegrate the various spatial and temporal dimensions of transcontinental power relationships.
They also seek to highlight both the scope for, and the opportunities to be found in, cross-​
fertilization with ideas derived from cognate disciplines.
Inherently a defining component of global history, ‘modernity’ gives shape and direction
to the discipline as an interactive cognitive system: revisions in the sociology of knowledge
arising from changing world dynamics have produced concomitant demands for more in-
clusive, less narrowly national perspectives on the past. Here, the Handbook’s unique de-
sign offers a corrective to those internalist or genealogical versions of historical thinking that
view all civilizational development as generated from ‘within’; transformations occurring
via diffusions from centres of power (i.e. Europe) to the peripheries. It variously challenges
long-​dominant narratives of socio-​cultural change embedded in the lexicon and epistem-
ology of ‘Eurocentrism’, discursively and institutionally restructured in ways tending to
obscure the symbiotic cross border exchanges that define our networked/​globalized world
(Holsti 1991).
In its holistic orientation, moreover, the Handbook is sensitive to transnational
connectivities and cross-​ cultural relationships: regular, sustained, and systematically
consolidated on a global scale. As such, the ‘global turn’ is not a synonym for ‘macro his-
tory’: the contributors do not attempt to replace the established paradigm of ‘national his-
toriography’ with an abstract entity ‘World’, but with an awareness of global networks,
connections, and interactions. This helps avoid the growing tendency among cultural
historians to depolitize and de-​internationalize international history and so risk becoming
atomistic if not solipsistic (Gunn 2003).
Essentially global consciousness has evolved within ever expanding contexts, broadening
visions of the world reflecting diverse geo/​politico-​cultural realities from the early modern
period to the late eighteenth century. Inevitably, this process came to be identified with
European/​Western hegemony, leading to concomitant Eurocentric proclivities in history
 The Seven Years’ War    561

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

Setting

This global/​local interface has important implications for the study of Great Power conflicts,
the Seven Years’ War in particular. It engulfed the Euro-​Atlantic world from 1756 to 1763 and
engaged the energies of European cabinets as never before. More than previous conflicts,
the Seven Years’ War entailed a variety of approaches to dynastic rivalries and taxed the
military, material, and moral resources of both belligerent and neutral powers. It affected
relationships not merely between governments and governed but also, more than previous
conflicts, between and within governments themselves. Moreover, the war’s conduct only
in part foretold its outcome, as unanticipated changes affected strategy, logistics, finance,
and diplomatic networks on a global scale. While the transatlantic sphere served as the cen-
tral focus, inter-​European dynamics were equally critical: dynastic successions, tactical
issues, contests between fiscal, political, and social structures from which land and naval
forces derived their legitimacy and their strength. The Seven Years’ War was not merely an
exercise in combat and campaigns, but a struggle for survival and hegemony that strained
the resources of the greatest European powers in every corner of the globe, and generated
a complex web of proposed, theoretical and actual commitments taxing the economic, pol-
itical, and diplomatic capacities of the most talented ministers and soldiers throughout
the Euro-​Atlantic world. New war-​induced social spaces of communication also emerged,
expanding across both national and imperial confines, creating sustained reconfigurations
of power and space that provide the operative context in which foreign/​military policies
were designed and executed (Schweizer and Schumann 2010).
As such, the concrete activity of war must be embedded within the deeper causal ma-
trix of ‘structural’ processes: those inherent characteristics of the international system
that comprise not only the range of interests/​issues dividing or uniting states, but also the
attitudes whose furtherance state policies were designed to obtain. It is both the chain of
events and the spatial parameters, in all their complexity, within which events take place
that impel ‘Great Powers’—​the dominant actors in international politics—​towards open
war. The system approach offers potentially useful insights into the dynamics of large-​scale
war and peace, provided it avoids excessive abstractionism and the concomitant danger of
eliminating the role of individuals: their views, choices, motivations, and responsibility for
paths taken.
From this perspective, whatever its immediate causes, the Seven Years’ War represents a
deeper structural crisis within the emerging global system, generated by the need to readjust
relations among its core members in line with intervening shifts in power ratios and, more
generally, to resolve pre-​war ambiguities in the order and status hierarchy of the system
as a whole. Hence, Britain, victorious over France, emerged as a world power, wielding
transmaritime dominance, while in Europe the war registered the superiority of Prussian
absolutism over its Habsburg rival, thereby consolidating Prussia’s rise to major continental
influence and prestige. Ancillary campaigns in the Caribbean, Africa, and India shaped the
subsequent history of those regions as well.
From its origins in the late 1400s, the European international or ‘Great Power’ system
had by the early eighteenth century developed into a complex of secular, sovereign states
as autonomous centres of power and decision, theoretically equal yet widely divergent in
 The Seven Years’ War    563

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

Diplomatic Prelude

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

the solution of problems in the Baltic—​a legacy of the Northern Wars—​and assured pro-
tection for Hanover, dynastically linked to Britain since 1714. It also fostered the Quadruple
Alliance in 1718, thereby effectively establishing a rudimentary system of collective security
for western and central Europe.
Yet, Anglo-​French cooperation was not to last: although France remained prone to dip-
lomatic isolation and, at different points between 1714–​39, each of the two powers needed
the other’s support and had benefitted from it, their respective aims and interests were
diverging. Colonial competition began to intrude more once both states recovered from the
strains of continental war and as the relative peace within Europe enabled them to devote
more attention to naval and imperial expansion. Within Europe, England and France still
had no significant reason for conflict, though the alliance preferences of each (aside from or
in addition to their mutual relationship) intruded upon entente, first in terms of prestige and
subsequently in terms of being drawn into the disputes of leading states on opposing sides.
By 1738, the success of French diplomacy in Balkan and in imperial affairs, combined with
the revival of French naval/​commercial expansion, reawakened Britain’s traditional gallo-​
phobia. These suspicions were given added force by France’s subsequent support of Spain
in the latter’s colonial disputes with Great Britain, support which took the tangible form of
military operations against the Dutch, Britain’s ally during the so-​called Austrian Succession
War that absorbed the Anglo-​Spanish conflict after 1740 (Baugh 2011). The Peace of Aix-​
la-​Chapelle, which terminated this war, left vital questions of relationships and territory
unsettled; all it confirmed were the continuous grievances of major states, the unresolved
rivalry between England and France for colonial dominance and, finally, the need to inte-
grate the newly emergent great powers, Russia and especially Prussia, within the European
congerie of states—​a complex process of adjustment which would henceforth determine the
pace and direction of diplomatic events.
Uneasy though the peace was, until 1754 no major conflicts developed. By degrees,
Europe assumed its long-​accustomed shape and disposition, the immediate postwar years
witnessing no sudden or dramatic rupture in the established patterns of power alignments.
Prussia was still allied to France, who in turn wielded controlling influence in Turkey,
Sweden, and Poland, her client states in the North and East. This combination was opposed
by Britain, the Dutch, and Austria, comprising the historic ‘old system’, based on the Barrier
Treaties of 1713 and 1715. Hovering menacingly on the periphery was the daunting state of
Russia whose conflicts of interests with Prussia and France, correspondingly cemented its
alliance with Vienna and facilitated convivial relations with Great Britain.
Yet, behind the scenes, Europe was, all unknowing, beset by forces at once destabilizing
and precarious. Barely contained by the fragile facades of stability were subtle
transformations in the very structure of power and interest in Europe, a process which would
eventually produce a totally altered configuration of alliance groupings. In its widest con-
text, this was due to a long, albeit erratic development dating back to Louis XIV, reflecting
the deep-​seated shiftings and diplomatic convulsions which time and statesmanship had
wrought (Black 1986).
A more immediate precipitant—​triggered by the recent war itself—​was the sudden rise
of Brandenburg Prussia as a first-​rate military state. Seizing control of Silesia via repeated
breaks of international law, and successfully defending his spoils, Frederick II had solidified
his military reputation, confirmed his state’s potential for continued, even accelerated,
growth, and substantially offset the fragmentary character of Prussia’s geo-​political identity.
 The Seven Years’ War    565

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

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

The Advent of War

As these futile proceedings extended into 1754, it soon became evident that the uneasy truce
between Britain and France in North America and India was about to end. The activities
of the Ohio Company and the gradual westward expansion of British colonial traders
alarmed the French who controlled Canada to the North and Louisiana to the South. The
aggressiveness of French traders in India alarmed Britain, as did French fortifications of their
American holdings along the Ohio frontier, while intensifying disputes over naval prizes and
titles to strategic Caribbean islands antagonized both powers. The situation everywhere was
explosive (Schweizer and Schumann 2010).
More knowledgeable about colonial affairs than is usually assumed, the Duke of Newcastle
was determined to defend British interests in America against French transgressions,
yet also leave scope for compromise and negotiation in the prevention of further escalation.
However, under domestic political pressure, he gradually became committed to an American
policy which made French counter-​actions, and hence steady progression from crisis to open
conflict, virtually certain. Adopting an expanded plan of operations formulated by William
Augustus, Duke of Cumberland (George II’s favourite son) and Henry Fox, Secretary at War,
the cabinet duly dispatched two regiments under General Braddock to attack the French
(in conjunction with colonial troops) at four strategic points, although formal declarations
of war had not yet been issued by either side. Deterrence diplomacy, gradually intensifying
force as a negotiating tactic, was giving way to more direct, accelerated military measures.
Apprised of these events, the French government, however reluctantly, had little choice
but to send a counter-​expedition; mobilization orders were duly issued for six battalions
intended to strengthen the critical outposts on the Great Lakes. By then, however, the
 The Seven Years’ War    567

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

ill-​disciplined troops, ramshackle navy, and declining economy, the United Provinces were
hardly prepared for an impending war. Not only was there a growing movement for all-​out
neutrality, but also the influential pro-​French Republican party, centred in Amsterdam,
roundly threatened to make terms with France unless Britain took immediate and effective
measures for their defense. Realizing that Kaunitz’s demands—​apart from the expense
involved—​were clearly directed towards Britain’s ultimate collusion with Austria’s revi-
sionist plans against Prussia, the British cabinet unanimously decided on their rejection.
Already, Newcastle’s thoughts were moving in another direction, in response to an un-
expected Prussian overture indicating Frederick’s interest in a convention of neutrality, a
move revealing his unease with the menacing potential of the recent Anglo Russian subsidy
accord. As yet, this treaty had not been ratified and judging by past events it could well take
months, following ratification, before the cumbersome Russian military machine sauntered
into action. Prussia, conversely, a close neighbor of Hanover, was at once more dangerous,
more useful, if not less expensive, than the venal Russians. Thus a defensive arrangement
with Frederick for the ‘neutralization of Germany’ would not only safeguard Hanover, but,
even more, localize the war with France and so enable Britain to focus exclusively on her pri-
mary imperial interests.
These objectives were formalized in the Treaty of Westminster (January 1756), by which
the contracting parties guaranteed their respective possessions and agreed to resist jointly
the entry of all foreign troops into Germany, including those of their current allies. The
Anglo-​Prussian convention also damaged Britain’s credibility in St. Petersburg and triggered
a shift of Russian interests in favour of France (backed by Austrian influence). Whereas for
Britain, once Prussia came to terms, the casus foederis of the Anglo-​Russian agreement had
changed, to Russia it always been and still was primarily the instrument for a concerted of-
fensive against the Prussian state only (Schweizer 2001).
By the end of July 1756, despite strenuous British attempts to salvage some part of the
pending agreement, it became clear that Britain’s influence at the Czarist court was collapsing
while that of Austria and France continued to solidify. Russia’s evasive behaviour towards
Britain, combined with intelligence indicating mobilization activity in Livonia (not to
mention the major build-​up of Russian forces along the Polish border), convinced Frederick
that an Austro-​Russian offensive, likely supported by France, was imminent. Not one pas-
sively to await the inevitable, he accordingly moved to forestall his enemies with a swift mili-
tary strike against Saxony on 28 August 1756. The European part of the Seven Years’ War had
begun and the ‘reversal of alliances’ or ‘Diplomatic Revolution’, set in train years earlier, was
completed. Britain and Hanover were now reconciled with Prussia while the Bourbons and
Habsburgs ended a quarter-​millennium of dynastic rivalry, with Russian military might as
backup. Although Anglo-​French skirmishes in North America had evolved into the French
and Indian War by 1754, the large-​scale conflict that drew in most of the European powers
centred around Austria’s revisionist plans against Prussia. Yet, while continental strategists
prepared for the next European war, ministers and diplomats from London to St. Petersburg
kept at least one eye trained on the transatlantic theater. Thanks to ambitious opportunists
and highly placed speculators on both sides of the Anglo-​French frontier, their hopes were
not disappointed.
Herein, then, lay the real and proximate origins of the Diplomatic Revolution, even more
than the rise of Frederician Prussia. Without the opportunities opened by the rising tensions
between Westminster and Versailles, the other courts of Europe could go little farther than
 The Seven Years’ War    569

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

initiative succeeding the failed diplomatic maneuver—​brought to completion the Austro-​

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

Conclusion

Via its organizing precepts (modernity and granularity) the Handbook has encouraged a
concentrated theoretically reflective and contextualist approach to the history of thought
that innovatively expands the temporal/​spatial perimeters of International Relations (IR)
research. Applied to the Seven Years’ War, this more nuanced mode of analysis intersects
with and challenges the ‘hegemony of time’, a central component of modernization theory;
namely, the primacy of temporal metaphors and the view of history as genealogy and internal
development. Transcending the polarity of conventional temporal scales, the contributors
are largely agreed that no single time frame is appropriate for all human history or inher-
ently superior. The operative historical trajectory then entails not linear unfolding but ever
shifting forms of human contact that, over the centuries, have crossed untold qualitative
thresholds. Even ‘tradition’ is shown to be a flexible language of social discourse. Tradition
can be adapted to new circumstances, or indeed ‘invented’ to historically legitimate current
political practice (Conrad 2016).
A wider matrix allows alternate time perspectives to be viewed together, providing more
integrative, analytical correlates that allow the deployment of global perspectives within an
expansive framework of both agency and contingency. Ultimately, interstate conflicts are not
 The Seven Years’ War    571

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

Bibliographic Notes

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

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

References
Baugh, D. 2011. The Global Seven Years War, 1754–​1763. Harlow: Person Education.
Black, J. 1986. Natural and Necessary Enemies: Anglo-​French Relations in the 18th Century.
London: Duckworth.
Conrad, S. 2016. What is Global History. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Fowler, W. 2005. Empires at War: The Seven Years War and the Struggle for North America.
Vancouver BC: Douglas and McIntyre.
Gunn, G. 2003. First Globalization: The Eurasian Exchange 1500–​1800. Lanham, MD: Rowman
and Littlefield Publishers.
Holsti, K. 1991. Peace and War: Armed Conflicts and International Order, 1643–​1989. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Levy, J. 1983. War in the Great Power System, 1495–​1975. Lexington, KY: University Press of
Kentucky.
Marston, D. 2001. The Seven Years War. London: Routledge.
Middleton, R. 1985. The Bells of Victory The Pitt-​Newcastle Ministry and the Conduct of the
Seven Years War, 1757–​1762. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Sachsenmaier, D. 2011 Global Perspectives on Global History: Theories and Approaches in a
Connected World. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Schweizer, K. 1987. ‘The Seven Years War: A System Perspective’. In The Origins of War in Early
Modern Europe, ed. J. Black. London: Routledge.
Schweizer, K. 1989. England, Prussia and the Seven Years War. Lewiston, NY: Mellen Press.
Schweizer, K. 2001. War, Politics and Diplomacy Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Schweizer, K. 2003. ‘Diplomacy’. In Oxford Dictionary of the Enlightenment, ed. A. Kors, 360–​364.
New York: University Press America.
Schweizer, K. and Schumann, M. 2010. The Seven Years War: A Transatlantic History. London:
Routledge.
Szabo, F. 2008. The Seven Years War in Europe 1756–​1763. London: Routledge.
Thompson, W. 1983. Contending Approaches to World System Analysis. Chicago: Sage.
Thompson, W. 1988. On Global War: Historical-​Structural Approaches to World Politics.
Columbia, SC: University of South Carolina Press.
Van Evera, S. 1999. Causes of War: Power and the Roots of Conflict. Ithaca, New York: Cornell
University Press.
 Chapter 39

The Haitian Revolu t i on

Musab Younis

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

(Dubois 2005, 302, 298; Trouillot 2015, 99; Geggus 2002, 50). The destruction of the city of
Cap Français in 1793 was ‘the most murderous instance of urban conflict in the entire his-
tory of the Americas’ (Popkin 2010, 2). Yet the end result was, contrary to every other known
slave uprising in history, an independent state led by the formerly enslaved. The historian
David Patrick Geggus (2002, 5) justly concludes that ‘few revolutions in world history have
had such profound consequences’.
What were those consequences? One way of exploring this question is through the calcu-
lation of costs and consequences. A number of historians have taken this route (see especially
the volume edited by David P. Geggus, 2001). The revolution cauterized a major artery of the
Atlantic slave trade. The largest slave insurrections in the Americas all took place in the forty
years following the Haitian Revolution (Geggus 2001, xii): one historian has credited the
revolution with a substantive shift in the demands made by such rebellions (Genovese 1992).
When a planned uprising known as the Aponte Rebellion in Cuba was discovered in 1812,
its leader was found with a book of images of Haiti’s generals (Childs 2009). The Louisiana
purchase—​a direct result of the revolution—​was a transformative turning-​point in the intra-​
European battle for the Americas, buttressing Anglo hegemony through a vast expansion of
the US, which subsequently became the world’s most powerful state (see e.g. Lachance 2001;
for another view, see Geggus 2001, 249).
To the south, Haiti impacted the course of Latin American nationalism. Alexandre
Pétion—​the president of the southern republic of Haiti—​hosted a fugitive Simón Bolívar in
1815–​16 and provided him with vital material support for an expedition to Venezuela. Haiti
assisted a number of other attempts to overthrow Spanish rule in the Americas (Dubois
2005, 302; Geggus 2001, xv, 250). And it repeatedly invaded and occupied neighbouring
Santo Domingo over a period of five decades—​initially, in 1822, enjoying considerable
popular support in the Spanish territory. Haiti also reverberated across nineteenth-​century
Western culture: it inspired a verse drama from Lamartine, a sonnet from Wordsworth, and
Victor Hugo’s first novel (Geggus 2001, 248). It left a deep imprint on Caribbean and African
American literature, most strikingly in a series of plays from Césaire, Walcott, Glissant, and
Du Bois (see Figueroa 2015).
I have been sketching out some of the key claims that could underwrite a re-​evaluation
of the Haitian Revolution according to what we might call a balance-​sheet approach—​
fundamentally empirical in nature. There are conceptual difficulties with this approach,
which I will soon outline. But there are difficulties with this argument even on its own em-
pirical terrain. For every example of the revolution’s spread, there is a counter-​argument that
the revolution was actually contained. What was the revolution’s true impact on slavery?
Enslaved Africans were no longer taken to Saint-​Domingue; but they were taken elsewhere
in the Caribbean, strengthening slave-​based production in countries like Cuba (Drescher
2001, 11; Ferrer 2014).
Not all the revolution’s reverberations were progressive, and some were plainly reac-
tionary. White exiles from Saint-​ Domingue, for example, discouraged independence
movements in Cuba and Puerto Rico (Bryan 1984, 35). And despite Haitian assistance to
Venezuela and Colombia in 1816, the northern republics of Latin America refused to recog-
nize Haiti when they became independent. A victorious Simón Bolívar distanced himself
from the republic that had sheltered and equipped him, refusing it an invitation to the Pan-​
American Conference in 1826 (Fischer 2004, 4). On the cultural plane, though Haiti gripped
 The Haitian Revolution    575

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

is not mentioned in his book (which is titled Revolutions in Sovereignty.) Haiti is only listed
as a hapless member of a group of ‘war-​torn, malnourished, dictatorial, and minority-​
persecuting states’, and an example of a state that is technically sovereign, but subject to
international supervision (Philpott 2001, 16).
This orthodox conception of sovereignty has been censured for its blindness to the colo-
nial relations that produced both the idea and the practice of sovereignty (Krishna 2001).
An analysis of the Haitian Revolution can help to advance this critique. First, Haiti’s ability
to be sovereign was qualitatively different from that of other fledgling republics of its era. It
was treated as a case apart due to its successful overthrow of slavery and the threat it conse-
quently posed to the Atlantic racial order. The US imposed an embargo on Haiti between
1806 and 1810. In contrast to every other comparable case involving a breakaway republic, no
country would recognize Haiti until France, the former colonial power, had done so in 1825.
Recognition came in exchange for a crushing indemnity that, among other things, forced
Haiti to recognize the legitimacy of the slave system it had overthrown (Knox 2016, 119).
Haiti was not, as has sometimes been suggested, totally isolated. The historian Julia Gaffield
(2015) has shown that Britain, Spain, and the US generally continued to maintain trade
relations with Haiti. While they were concerned about the spread of the revolution, more
prosaic interests could prevail. ‘As long as we don’t allow the blacks to possess a ship’, mused
Thomas Jefferson in 1801, ‘we can allow them to exist and even maintain very lucrative com-
mercial contacts with them’ (Dubois 2005, 225; see also Brown 2005). But this does not alter
the overall picture. Before many European states came into existence, a uniquely contained
‘revolution in sovereignty’ had already taken place in the Caribbean.
The Haitian republic was not so much unrecognized as it was subjected to what Karen Salt
(2019, 286) has called ‘repeated acts of non-​recognition’. Thinking about non-​recognition as
a constructive act brings to our attention the formative exclusions at the heart of sovereignty.
When the French chargé d’affaires in Washington, Louis André Pichon, counselled that Haiti
could not be recognized because ‘[t]‌he United States could not place herself on a level with
Negroes’, he was making a specific argument about the role of race in the operation of sover-
eignty (Gaffield 2015, 133). Almost two centuries later, Haiti was again implicated in questions
of sovereignty when Haitian migrants heading to the US were detained in a space of ‘excep-
tional sovereignty’ at Guantánamo (Reid‐Henry 2007). Instead of seeing sovereignty as the
application of state power across a bounded territory, then, Haiti helps us to think about sov-
ereignty as a process that is necessarily racialized, ‘order[ing] subject populations differen-
tially in pursuit of particular historical agendas’ within a global imperial framework (Wolfe
2015, 25; see also Nisancioglu 2019). Haiti shows how race and sovereignty are indissolubly
bound, the one producing the other. In other words, rather than asking about why Haiti has
been ‘weak’, ‘fragile’, or ‘failed’, we could ask what Haiti’s struggles with sovereignty reveal
about sovereignty’s occluded lineaments and boundaries.
I have been suggesting that the concept of sovereignty can be destabilized through an
examination of Haiti. This is also true for other ideas. Rather than making claims about the
strength and capacity (or otherwise) of the Haitian state, for example, we can use the revolu-
tion to interrogate the conception of the unitary state that lies at the core of such arguments.
This involves grappling with what Trouillot (2015, 40) called ‘a war within the war’: key
divisions in the revolution’s late stages (1802–​03) between ‘Bossales’—​African-​born ex-​
slaves, largely from the Congo—​and Caribbean-​born Black officers. Trouillot (2015, 40–​48)
points out that accounts of King Henry Christophe generally fail to mention his murder
 The Haitian Revolution    577

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

neo-​colonialism (Nesbitt 2008; Bellegarde-​Smith 1980). Launched with what Sidney Mintz
(2007, 263) called ‘the most pessimistic prognosis in modern history’, Haiti was immedi-
ately confronted with the pressing dilemmas of the Third World, avant la lettre. Its predica-
ment had preceded independence. Toussaint Louverture, in the period before his capture
and exile, had seen no other option than to reconstruct the plantation system. He forced
workers back to plantations, the only escape from which was military service: a shattering
betrayal of the smallholding hopes of many insurgents (Dubois 2005, 248). His Constituent
Assembly included members of the old Saint-​Domingue elite, but no ex-​slaves; to prove his
loyalty he betrayed a slave uprising in Jamaica (Dubois 2005, 242.) Other Haitian leaders
faced the same problems; they too attempted to reimpose plantation labour. The subsequent
tribulations of Haiti—​its inequality, poverty, overdeveloped military, violent transitions of
power, civil wars, weak export sector, vulnerability to foreign loans and intervention, and
so on—​conform to a familiar pattern: what Naeem Inayatullah (1996, 52) has termed the
difficulty of realizing ‘concrete sovereignty in the face of the external authority of the wealth-​
producing global division of labor’.
So why is Haiti missing from most postcolonial accounts? Because it happened so early,
Haiti’s independence seems impossibly out of time. Inaugurating the postcolonial era in
the very midst of the colonial era, Haiti destabilizes standard periodizations. The process
of decolonization is commonly represented with an implicit teleology, beginning with the
First World War and the Russian Revolution, peaking at the ‘winds of change’ period around
1960, before dragging on through the proxy wars of Salazar’s collapse and the last gasp
of White-​minority rule in South Africa. What to make of Haiti, whose intellectuals were
theorizing decolonization, in a postcolonial state created through armed struggle, before the
birth of Marx?
The Saint-​Domingue uprising was historically unique, but it pushed at the limits of a racial
order that extended far beyond the colony’s borders. When the French general Rombacheau,
attempting to reconquer the country, reinstituted racial segregation in theaters, or when his
chief of staff wrote that ‘it is high time the white color dominates everywhere’ (Girard 2011,
251), they were seeking to resolve a material crisis that recurred, in different times and places,
across the world, following the collapse of a particular system of colonial governance within
a world of empires. The French general Leclerc’s description of the guerrilla campaign waged
by Haitian insurgents as a ‘war of Arabs’ is particularly revealing (Girard 2011, 120). So too is
Toussaint Louverture’s (2014, 143) insistence from his prison cell that ‘if I were a white man,
after serving like I served, all these misfortunes would not have happened to me’. In other
words, as Trouillot (1990, 11) has aptly put it: ‘Haiti is not that weird. It is the fiction of Haitian
exceptionalism that is weird’. For writers and artists across the Caribbean and Black Atlantic,
an interest in Haiti has typically been founded not on the country’s apparent incommen-
surability, but on its potential comparability with other sites of anticolonial revolution and
postcolonial state building.
There is another key sense in which Haiti can be seen as prefiguring the postcolonial
condition. Choosing the Taíno name ‘Haïti’ and thus emphasizing an indigenous and non-​
European identity for the country, Haiti’s early leaders sought to imagine a route out of the
confines of race. The 1805 Haiti constitution thus defined all Haitians as Black, enacting what
Fischer (2004, 232–​233) has called a ‘radical resignification’ of the ‘language of the colon-
izer’: seeking paradoxically to attain the universal by generalizing the particular. Though this
article was dropped from later constitutions (Geggus 2002, 209), its importance has rightly
 The Haitian Revolution    579

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

seated at the national assembly, which explicitly debarred changes to the slave system ‘unless
they were proposed by the slave owners themselves’ (Popkin 2010, 96, 131). As C. L. R. James
(1989, 80) argued, it was the colonial question that ultimately ‘demoralized’ the constituent
assembly. Little surprise that the slave insurgents initially lacked faith in the revolutionary
republic, preferring to pledge allegiance to the deposed king.
It is true that the French government, both in Saint-​Domingue and in Paris, ordered
that slaves were freed (the decision was overturned under Napoleon). These orders were
contained in the emancipation decrees of the commissioners Sonthonax and Polverel in
1793, and the emancipation proclamation issued by the French Constituent Assembly in
1794. It could therefore be argued that the French Revolution was indeed extended to Haiti,
even if this freedom was later rescinded, and that it is inaccurate to state the metropole-​
colony boundary was always so clearly drawn. But two points must be made about these
decrees.
First, they took place only in response to the self-​liberation of enslaved people and the
consequent civil conflict in the colony. Until the destruction of Cap Français on 20 June 1793,
as the historian Jeremy Popkin (2010) has shown, there was no sign of a general emancipa-
tion. Even as the commissioners gradually extended freedom to the whole enslaved popula-
tion of French-​controlled Saint-​Domingue, they did so while ‘determined to show that they
were still in control of the black population’; and their proclamations were accompanied
with open threats to ex-​slaves carrying arms on their own (Popkin 2010, 258). ‘Who can cal-
culate where our calamities will end, if more than 400,000 slaves who have nothing and who
detest work, all become free at once, and if they become free through insurrection and by
right of conquest?’ wrote one of the commissioners, Polverel, in a private letter in mid-​1793
(Popkin 2010, 265).
Second, official moves towards ending slavery in Saint-​Domingue were bereft of any
programme of genuine transformation. ‘This land does not belong to you’, insisted the
commissioner Polverel, addressing the colony’s formerly enslaved people in the wake of
emancipation (Dubois 2005, 185). Land reform was stalled, then abandoned. The historian
Laurent Dubois (2005, 186) explains that the system Polverel instituted in the wake of eman-
cipation was, in fact, ‘eerily prophetic of the social formations that would emerge throughout
the Americas in the wake of slavery’. In Paris, the Constituent Assembly’s emancipation
proclamation—​overturned by Napoleon on 20 May 1802—​was, while unprecedented and
hard won, of little consequence for enslaved people living in France’s colonies. It did not
benefit those in Guadeloupe, in Martinique, or in France’s territories the Indian Ocean;
and those in French-​controlled parts of Saint-​Domingue had already been liberated, either
through their own actions or by the proclamations of the commissioners in the colony. Only
a small number in Cayenne (French Guiana) were actually affected by the decree (Popkin
2010, 373).
The obdurate reluctance to apply the Rights of Man to Saint-​Domingue can easily be
attributed to the interests of the plantocracy and their influence on the Constituent Assembly
and the internal politics of the colony. But that view, while accurate in some respects, scants
the structurally determinate role played by race in shaping the outcome of the Haitian
Revolution. Power in Saint-​Domingue was, like elsewhere in the Caribbean, premised
upon race, which structured society and connected it, through this structure, to the colonial
economies of Europe. The colony’s free people of colour (the gens de couleur), a group that
was mostly of mixed African and European descent, constituted an intermediary class in
 The Haitian Revolution    581

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

They emphasize how the material fact of colonial slavery and its attendant social formations,
organized on the basis of race, continued to underwrite the political transformations
in Europe that constitute the advent of modernity. At precisely the same time as those
transformations, and connected to them, an act of mass self-​liberation in Saint-​Domingue
came to represent an ‘unthinkable’ limit to the promises offered (to some) by that modernity.
So rather than measuring significance in terms of state power and capacity, sovereignty
and influence—​attributes of states in a situation of modernity—​we might see the Haitian
Revolution as significant in that it that exposes the limitations of those very categories.
To conclude these reflections, I want to move to asking how Haiti’s own intellectual his-
tory can help us to sketch an alternative view of the international. Haiti is remarkable for the
depth and venerability of its self-​analysis. At a time when colonial rule was metastasizing
across most of Africa, Asia, and the Caribbean, the independent Haitian state was producing
its own traditions of historiography, poetry, play-​and novel-​writing, fabulism, political po-
lemic, and satire. The richness and variety of this work militates against any easy conclusions,
but we can make three general points here. First, Haiti’s tradition of historiography has
left us an unmatched archive: it is the oldest such body of work in any postcolonial state.
Thomas Madiou published Histoire d’Haïti in 1847, a multi-​volume work combining archival
methods with oral histories; Joseph Saint-​Rémy published, among a number of studies, La
Vie de Toussaint Louverture in 1850; and Beaubrun Ardouin published Etudes sur l’historie
d’Haïti in 1853. Along with other key nineteenth-​century figures—​the historians Émile
Nau and Vergniaud Leconte; the poets Juste Chanlatte, François-​Romain Lhérisson, and
Jules Solime Milscent; the playwrights Massillon Coicou, Antoine Dupré, and Vendenesse
Ducasse—​their work can help us to explore questions of postcolonial state formation and
Caribbean international politics, as well as meta-​historical questions about the relationship
between history-​writing and politics in a postcolonial context.
Second, Haiti’s political writing occupies a central location in the history of anticolonial
thought. Baron de Vastey’s Le Système Coloniale Dévoilé, published in 1815 and recently
translated into English as The Colonial System Unveiled, has been described as ‘the first
systemic critique of colonialism ever written’(Bongie 2016, 7), prefigurative of Fanon and
Césaire. Vastey (2016, 144) celebrates his ability to contradict the slanderous writing of
Europeans—​‘The friends of slavery, those eternal enemies of humankind’—​with ‘Haytian
presses of our own’, allowing him to ‘unveil the crimes of the colonists’: a celebration of
anticolonial literacy that resonates emphatically with the work of writers, editors, and
journalists across the Black Atlantic a century later (Younis 2022).
Marlene Daut’s (2016, 191) masterful analysis of the narrative qualities of Vastey’s text
shows how, like the work of other early Haitian writers such as Louis-​Bosrond Tonnerre,
The Colonial System Unveiled constructs itself in opposition to the ‘commercial, alienating,
and complicit literary genres’ of gothic romance and sentimental abolitionist narrative. As
Daut demonstrates, Vastey self-​consciously refuses to employ common literary devices that
would ameliorate the intensity of the slaveowner tortures he describes; at the same time, he
presents himself as communicating with surviving witnesses and with the voices of the dead,
a distant precursor of the Latin American tradition of testimonio. Daut’s analysis gives us a
glimpse into the avenues opened up by Haitian political writing for a study of anticolonial
thought. If Haiti was the prototype of the postcolonial state, Haitian intellectual culture
foreshadowed forms of anticolonial and postcolonial cultural nationalism. This was espe-
cially the case during the US occupation of 1915–​34. An influential tradition of indigénisme
 The Haitian Revolution    583

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

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 Chapter 40

T he C ongress of V i e nna
Jennifer Mitzen and Jeff Rogg

Introduction

The Congress of Vienna was quite an event. For nine months, from September 1814 through
June 1815, the city hosted ‘the most spectacular peace conference in history’ (King 2008, 14).
The Congress had it all: monarchs and princes, plenipotentiaries and politicians, financiers
and filles de joie. Roughly 215 European principalities and states were represented, as well as
many non-​state interest groups (Sluga 2017, 1407; Nicholson 1946, 132–​133). Those assembled
danced, ate, paraded, and played, in an unprecedented mixing, symbolically and physically,
across class and status (Vick 2014, 12–​13). In many respects, the Congress was one big party—​
a ‘Festivals Committee’ arranged the banquets, dances, performances, and parties (King
2008, 14). Attendees also talked—​formally in committees and diplomatic venues, informally
in salons and at dinner tables. Meanwhile, behind closed doors the self-​proclaimed ‘powers
of the first order’ crafted the Vienna Settlement, reordering the map of Europe. Because the
settlement was negotiated in the shadow of Napoleon’s Hundred Days and signed before
his defeat at Waterloo, there was no certainty that its provisions would be implemented. It
took the post-​Waterloo Second Treaty of Paris and Quadruple Alliance to set the terms of
enforcement.
When late-​twentieth-​century International Relations (IR) scholarship (re)discovered the
Concert of Europe as a case of great power ‘long peace’, the Vienna Settlement came under
particular scrutiny. First, the fact that European great powers avoided war for so long, with
neither nuclear weapons nor bipolarity, lent hope to those who wanted a happier answer to
the question: in a world of nuclear weapons, does the path to peace rely solely on the capacity
to destroy the world? Second, the fact that great power management and humanitarianism—​
principles central to contemporary global governance—​entered inter-​state relations with the
Vienna Settlement raised questions about the relationship between liberal ideology and inter-
national order, especially since liberal revolution arguably brought the concert down in 1848.
The Congress of Vienna itself played a limited role in the IR debates. Indeed, the terms
‘Congress’ and ‘Concert’ are used nearly synonymously. Paul Schroeder’s groundbreaking
Transformation of European Politics (1994a) helped fuel all sides of these debates, while
igniting a conversation about the relationship between the two disciplines, History and
588    Jennifer Mitzen and Jeff Rogg

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

The Modern Congress

Statesmen, diplomats, and scholars have long mined the Congress for insights about and
templates for international diplomacy (discussed in, e.g. Conze 2019; Schulz 2015). While
 The Congress of Vienna    589

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

The Congress and the Long Peace

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

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

The Congress and Liberal Order

In debates about the contemporary liberal world order, the Congress often is treated as the
origin of a messy but persistent trajectory toward a world order marked by collective se-
curity, institutionalized self-​restraint, and liberal global governance. The approach is linear
and Euro-​centric, tracing a through-​line from the Congress to the League of Nations to the
United Nations, sometimes entailing arguments about the spread of the ‘standard of civiliza-
tion’ (e.g. Gong 1984).
In the early 1990s, Holsti and Ruggie each hinted in this direction. For Ruggie (1992,
578–​ 580), norm-​ driven multilateralism originated in the Concert. Holsti similarly
interprets the Congress ‘pentarchy’s’ arrogation of the responsibility for European stability
as—​functionally if not formally—​a continental political authority (Holsti 1992, 32–​33; also
Dakin 1979, 32).
 The Congress of Vienna    591

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

The Congress

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

Around the Congress

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

Revolution
Lawson (2019) reverses IR’s gaze for thinking about the relationship between revolution and
war, arguing that revolution should be treated as a force of its own rather than a ‘second
image threat’. Characterizing revolution as ‘inter-​social’ and constituted by ‘transboundary
entanglements’, Lawson proposes that revolution is aimed not so much at individual states
or regimes as it is aimed at ‘the international’ itself as an overarching structure of oppression
(Lawson 2019, 8–​9). Revolutions challenge international order physically through violence
 The Congress of Vienna    593

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

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

which progressively universalized as informal exclusions of Congress diplomacy give way to

formal inclusion with decolonization.
But the history of liberal global governance is not merely progressive unfolding. Müller
(2020) highlights the non-​fixity of these rules and roles in the Congress period, and the dy-
namics of institutionalization over time, revealing it to be more complicated than the linear
narrative suggests. Additionally, noticing empire highlights that the Vienna innovations were
introduced in the context of domination. As the Vienna innovations became assumptions of
international law and diplomacy, the role of imperial domination in producing the system
receded further from view. Getachew (2016) thematizes the problem. If liberal governance
innovations rest on the ability to bracket colonial empire, then it is unlikely that a diplomacy
rooted in them can confront the problem of achieving sovereign equality from a starting
point of domination.
Third, the dynamics of empire highlight the Eurocentrism of IR narratives of the origins
of liberal global governance. Much IR scholarship treats Europe(ans) as authors and teachers
of the ‘standard of civilization’ to the rest of the world, with overall good effects. For example,
scholars analyse the Vienna Final Act’s declaration abolishing the slave trade as a case of
successful advocacy by British abolitionists that planted the seeds of contemporary humani-
tarianism (e.g. Kaufman and Pape 1999; Keck and Sikkink 1998). Rooting humanitarianism
in Congress abolitionism in this way positions it as a moral concern emanating from the
metropole. Humanitarian concerns may, sometimes, affect or even constitute state political
interests, and the question is whether states, guided by the logic and constraints of the pol-
itical, act on moral values. Humanitarianism is action by international protectors guided by
liberal values to help victims of harms, who cannot help themselves.
Several scholars have pushed back against the ‘Whiggish’ interpretation of humanitar-
ianism, revealing a more ambivalent narrative that comes into focus as the nineteenth cen-
tury progressed and hierarchies between the civilized ‘family of nations’ and the barbarous
others were institutionalized (e.g. Barnett 2011; Colas 2016; Crawford 2002; Keene 2007;
Lowenheim 2003). Vick’s study of the London Committee on Abolition (2014) contextualizes
these critical narratives, showing the Committee’s work to entail a complicated interplay of
egalitarian moral thinking and hierarchized political practice.
Several scholars further deepen the critique by reversing the gaze. Shilliam (2014) focuses
on practices of the descendants of slaves. While scholars might dismiss these as remnants
of tradition, Shilliam interprets them as rituals of self-​protection. He argues that these
forms of protection against dehumanization suggest that former slaves saw themselves
not as liberated but as in ‘continuous captivity’. Getachew (2016) highlights that abolition
as an international political phenomenon was born through the costly physical actions of
those enslaved in Haiti, who took their freedom from colonial rulers, declaring independ-
ence in 1804. All of the great powers at the Congress of Vienna knew of the revolution, with
some—​Britain and France—​having attempted to undo it at the time. This does not erase the
importance of moral action by British abolitionists. But by revealing British moral agency
as a partial story, the known fact of Haitian self-​abolition points to an erasure of Haitian
political agency—​both at the time and in historical memory. Troulliot (1991) argued that
the Haitian revolution—​a revolution by slaves, in the name of liberal values—​was ‘unthink-
able as it happened’ and so remained invisible and left out of the nineteenth century revolu-
tionary myths.
 The Congress of Vienna    595

Integrating the Haitian revolution into the Napoleonic story would change the way liber-
alism, and potentially liberal internationalism, are thought. What happened in the Haitian
case is not that ‘subaltern actors’ took up ‘already existing universal ideals’ ‘thereby fulfilling
the universal intent’ (Getachew 2016, 822). To the extent that the colony is constitutive of
metropolitan modernity and liberalism was born in that metropole, then the domination of
the colonial relationship needs to be thematized as a problem within liberalism (Getachew
2016; Pitts 2010: 216).
In sum, scholarship on empire is a reminder that ‘great powerhood’ rested on colonial ex-
traction, making colonial domination central to its constitution and effects. Empire made
possible the ‘hothouse’ environment enabling a European territorial settlement that lasted
40 years and incubating the internationalization of liberal values. While imperial, national,
and diplomatic histories have long been studied separately, as Osterhammel (2014) and
others (e.g. Mazower 2012) argue, global history requires coming to terms with their mutual
constitution.

At the Congress
The IR debates and the diplomatic histories of the modern Congress treat only (male)
statesmen as the relevant actors and their agency as political—​dividing territory, preventing
great power war. But lines between political, economic, and social were not sharply drawn
at the Congress or in its time. Recent work blurs the lines between political and economic
spheres, male and female agency, and political and cultural milieus.

Bankers
Glenda Sluga’s archival work (2017) recovering the role of bankers disrupts the political/​
economic and domestic/​international divides. Sluga ‘follows the money’ rather than the
statesmen, to show how capitalists, transnationally managing Europe’s imperial wealth,
made possible the Congress event and the re-​integration of France into the great power club.
Bankers were not new players in European politics, but the scale and type of their participa-
tion at the Congress was noteworthy. Bankers were present informally at salons and festivals.
Formally, their services were central to the settlement and the long peace.
The central role of transnational capital complicates arguments that either territorial div-
ision or diplomatic innovation alone produced the long peace. Consider France’s war debt
to its allies—​comparable in magnitude to that of Germany after the First World War (White
2001). After Napoleon’s final defeat, Congress allies stationed troops in France as a guar-
antee of debt payment. Private financiers and the British government stepped in with trans-
national loans, the first sovereign debt (De Graaf 2019, 2020; Sluga 2019). Two such loans
enabled France to pay enough to remove troops by 1818. It is worth considering the counter-​
factual: but for sovereign debt, would France have successfully re-​integrated? Without repay-
ment, had there been continued economic instability, would there have been a ‘long peace’?
From here, it is instructive to note the multilateral cooperation and management of the oc-
cupation, with the Allies shepherding France back into the elite group of great powers (De
Graaf 2019, 2020). This contribution to the long peace is not a ‘levels’ story, where domestic
596    Jennifer Mitzen and Jeff Rogg

and international, political, and economic are neatly separated. The Congress event and the
great power peace afterward were politically and financially a networked production.

Women
Sluga (2014, 2015) and others (e.g. Vick 2014; see Aaslestad 2015, 233) have recovered the
roles of women at the Congress in ways that upend the common sense of the Congress and
Settlement as male accomplishments. This scholarship invites a complex reading of male-​
female roles and the gendering of diplomacy and the political. Sluga shows that women’s pol-
itical agency was crucial to the run-​up to and agenda of Congress discussions: Duchess Sagan
hosted 1813 negotiations among allied partners (Sluga 2014); Germaine de Stael articulated
liberal ideas in her salons and her writings, focusing on the transmissibility of liberal ideas
into illiberal contexts and international peace-​making (Sluga 2015, 155–​156, 2014, 51). The
consultation provision, which characterized the Concert and now is the basis of global gov-
ernance, drew heavily on women’s political agency symbolized by the salon (Sluga 2015, 156;
Vick 2014, 14).
Sluga goes further, diagnosing the ‘gender work’ of sidelining and sexualizing women’s
political agency as resulting from two dynamics. The nineteenth century brought advances
in both the study of geopolitics and the profession of diplomacy, each inflected with male
norms. The decline of women’s visibility in historiography tracks also with the consolidation
of a discrete international political sphere and the national project. All of these processes
‘confirmed men as the stakeholders of modern political life’ (Sluga 2014, 61; Neumann 2012,
11; Sluga and Jones 2016). By the late-​twentieth-​century IR debates, the Congress event,
with its pomp and festivals, was associated with the feminine distraction from the mas-
culine, political, and even scientific work of constructing continental peace. Even in some
twenty-​first-​century accounts, women appear (if at all) solely as hostesses and mistresses
(Zamoyski 2007; King 2008). In sum, it took work to produce the current common sense of
the Congress as male.

Cultural Milieu
The Congress was a celebration of the end of 20 years of war, full of festivals, banquets, and
parties. The famous quote that ‘the Congress dances but does not progress’ suggests that
these were frivolous, non-​political distractions. But that assessment is questionable on its
face, and it relies on a separation of politics from culture that did not cleanly exist in the early
nineteenth century. Recent scholarship places the Congress in its broader socio-​cultural
environment.
Brian Vick’s work is central to changing the lens for interpreting the event. What he calls
the ‘political universe’ of this transitional time is found in the full Congress milieu not (just)
the negotiating room. That universe included multiple locales, diverse actors, and a range of
symbols and ceremonies. The latter included many seeming contradictions: religious and
secular; military and dynastic; ‘grassroots patriotism’ and national; traditional and novel;
court and folk; market, speech act, and spectacle (Vick 2014, 27ff.). Even traditional festivals
were marked by something representing the changing times: perhaps a souvenir object,
reflecting the market culture, or a story in the press, reflecting the sense of a wider public
 The Congress of Vienna    597

attentive to political affairs (Vick 2014, 134; also Rothschild 1995; Mitzen 2013, c­ hapter 4).
Vick argues that these are not passive backdrop to the Congress but ‘the very matrix and
stimuli’ from which the ideas and motivation for Congress accomplishments sprouted (Vick
2014, 330).
Felix Rösch (2020) begins from a similar premise, homing in on the dominant dances of
the Congress as part of a theoretical argument relating affective processes and socio-​political
change. Rösch argues that affective currents of practice help us understand how people cope
with a constantly changing world like that of the early nineteenth century. He analyses the
‘affective dynamics’ of the minuet and waltz, arguing that attendees’ dancing allowed them
to imagine and enact alternative political imaginaries, side by side (Rösch 2020, 12; also
McSherry 2019).
Pulling these together, with its attention to lower-​level diplomacy, transnational finance,
and revolutionary, gendered, and colonial agency, the scholarship discussed in this section
pries the Congress loose from the assumptions and priorities of IR debates. The blurred
boundaries and connections that a wider lens and granular level reveal suggest that the
Congress and subsequent Concert of Europe can mean something else.

Conclusion

In 1815, those assembled at Vienna knew that but for the Battle of Waterloo, the Vienna Final
Act may have amounted to mere words, and the event itself a brief interlude in a longer
story of continuous European revolution. They also knew themselves to be in an uncertain
and changing socio-​political environment, reflected in the event itself, in which dynasts,
nationalists, aristocrats, financiers, and proto-​democrats celebrated alongside each other.
This uncertainty, instability, and mixing has not been central to IR’s Congress debates.
Indeed, in the IR discipline, the Congress’ importance has not been intrinsic to the event but
derivative of other concerns: the long peace, the liberal international order.
With this in mind, this chapter has had three aims: to demonstrate the productiveness of
the IR debates, to encourage awareness of their limits by articulating their assumptions, and,
with the latter in mind, to encourage a return to the event. The Congress was a case of great
power diplomacy leading to an agreement. But it was not only that; and widening the schol-
arly gaze with granular accounts of actors and processes is not meant merely to add richness
of detail. Recent, granular archival work of historians in conversation with theoretical
lenses in and beyond those of the IR canon, brings into a view a complex, holistic, political-​
economic-​social phenomenon, and a global one that de-​centres Europe. Juxtaposing the two
congresses therefore encourages new, inter-​disciplinary conversations to uncover new polit-
ical potentialities in this event.

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 Chapter 41

T he Revolu ti ons of 184 8

Daniel M. Green

The Revolutions of 1848 were an explosion of liberal and nationalist political rebellions,
largely confined to Europe, that erupted in Italy in January of that year and quickly spread
continent-​wide. They may seem an odd choice to appear here in the ‘Moments’ section of
this volume, or in this volume at all, as arguably the least important of the listed topics in
terms of carrying turning-​point events for International Relations (IR) scholars. Though
marked by transnational demonstration and spread effects, the revolutions in most places
were determined by domestic factors, such that 1848 is not one of IR’s typically cited res-
onant dates (e.g. 1648, 1713, 1789, 1815, 1919, and 1945). Yet, if we shift from events to macro-​
structural changes in unit-​type and political formations, 1848 becomes highly significant,
indeed arguably a founding moment, shaping the fundamentals of what we label ‘modernity’
and the modern international system and delivering insights into today’s world and what
might be called ‘globalized late modernity’.
The Revolutions of 1848 are a topic where IR scholarship connects with and draws from
the historical literature fairly well, especially those in IR who adopt social change frameworks
concerned with macro-​scale socio-​economic shifts, such as watersheds in state formation and
the development of capitalism (Anievas 2014; Hall 1999; Rosenberg 1994; Teschke 2003). The
topic also leads one directly into the sociological literature on modernity and its dimensions,
including nationalism and the nation-​state. Indeed, the revolutions of 1848 can only be under-
stood adequately if one takes a multi-​disciplinary approach to them, well beyond the confines
of ‘IR’. Similarly, that the locale of events is largely in Europe makes this a Eurocentric topic, yet
in shifting out to the macro-​structural, we find insights into globe-​wide experiences. Finally,
as historian G. M Trevelyan has noted, they are also ‘the turning point at which history failed
to turn’—​all the revolutions were crushed or collapsed, for the most part. Yet here again, the
failure of the revolutions, and the way they failed, continues to reverberate through history.

The Events of 1848: A

Transnational Narrative

The Revolutions of 1848 were ‘a Europe-​wide movement for civil and political citizenship led
by whichever social classes lay just below the existing political citizenship line’ (Mann 1993,
 The Revolutions of 1848    603

339, quoted in Hall 1999, 166). They hit almost everywhere in Europe simultaneously, but the
political stakes varied. The political setting in Western Europe was oligarchic constitutional
monarchies with limited suffrage; in the East it was absolutist monarchies (Sperber 2005,
56–​59).
In the spectrum of political positions, liberals at the time were the centrists, in fa-
vour of constitutional monarchy rather than republicanism, backing property rights,
equal treatment and equal opportunity, expanded suffrage, and improved public educa-
tion. Positions on free trade varied—​in central Europe there was less enthusiasm for it,
as Listian economic nationalism was more common. On the conservative side, politics
were more of the ‘throne and altar’ variety (Sperber 2005, 76), linking churches, official
religions, and conservative, legitimist politics. On the radical side, it was republicanism
and anticlericalism. The further East one went the more these were ethnic-​national
demands, pressing for some kind of nationality recognition, and not necessarily liberal
in character.
Because the revolutions were such a transnational phenomenon, the following is a
continental-​scale continuous narrative of events from January of 1848 to August of 1849,
telling the story of their rise and decline.

Origins and Genesis

The Revolutions of 1848 were preceded by a similar wave of liberal outburst in Europe in
1830. The Revolutions of 1830 were also largely crushed, and thus became the seeds for 1848.
The difference between 1830 and 1848 would be in elite response afterwards which, as we
will see, was much more innovative after 1848. The first revolutionary eruption of a very
busy 1848 was in Palermo in the Kingdom of the Two Sicilies in January, an insurrection that
prompted the king to grant a constitution. By way of backstory, large parts of Europe saw
very poor agricultural harvests in 1845–​46 (Sperber 2005, 110–​111), and then there were two
key elections in June of 1846 which brought a new Whig/​liberal government of Russell and
Palmerston in London and the election of a very liberal candidate for the papacy in Rome,
Pius IX. A liberal rebellion stirred in occupied Poland, attracting Europe’s sympathies.
Excited at having just repealed the Corn Laws months earlier—​viewed as an epochal sym-
bolic victory against aristocratic, landed power, and an embrace of free trade as a panacea for
all the world’s troubles—​the new British government set out to encourage liberal reforms on
the Continent, even giving the sense to some liberal activists in Italy that they would back
them (Matsumoto-​Best 2003; Parry 2006).
Thus the first moves of 1848 were in Italy in January, but while things began there, the key
catalytic shift for the continent was the upheaval in the still more pivotal Catholic country
of France. There the surprise abdication of Louis Philippe came on 24 February after two
days of demonstrations; he fled abroad to Britain and a second republic was proclaimed in
France. As Queen Victoria wrote in a letter to her uncle, King Leopold of Belgium, ‘Since
24th February I feel an uncertainty in everything existing, which . . . one never felt be-
fore’ (Grenville 1980, 80). Once Paris and its monarchy fell to liberal street rebellions, the
revolutions then spread simultaneously to Berlin and Vienna. This social upheaval in the
West was for new citizenship recognition, while in the East the plea was more for national
identity recognition, destabilizing multi-​ethnic units like the Austrian and Ottoman empires
(Hall 1999; Mann 1993).
604   Daniel M. Green

Revolutionary Spring
Sperber (2005, 121) notes how amazing was the sheer ‘speed’ with which governments
collapsed in these early days. In the Italian peninsula, the problem was the toxicity of very
conservative Austrian influence and effective control. Austria held the provinces of Venetia
and Lombardy, kept an Austrian archduke in charge in Tuscany, and had great influence over
the conservative King of the Two Sicilies. But Austria was profoundly shaken by events in
France, as March of 1848 was an even more astounding month of changes in Europe. By 4
March, France had adopted universal male suffrage and a new acting prime minister was
installed. To placate fears about a new French revolutionary threat, his first step was to
announce that France’s ambitions were modest and inwardly focused. It has been argued that
France did actually work behind the scenes for a continent-​wide liberal revolution (Chastain
1988), though not very effectively; it was thus almost a deeper European liberal moment,
guided again by France. Also on 4 March, Piedmont-​Sardinia was granted a constitution by
King Carlo Alberto.
Most momentous of all, in Austria on 13 March the infamous Chancellor Metternich
resigned due to public demand—​the godfather of European reactionary politics since 1815
was gone. Two days later the Hapsburg emperor ended censorship and promised to convene
a constitutional assembly. On 15 March, Berlin saw the beginning of days of demonstrations
and street fighting, leading the King of Prussia to promise a new liberal constitution and to
take steps towards German unity. Similar events unfolded in almost all the thirty-​odd other
German states in these weeks, now granted new constitutions, press freedoms, and more lib-
eral administrations (Robertson 1967, 142).
Yet the revolutions easily went in contradictory directions. Nationalist rebellions were
opportunities for constitution-​making and securing new liberties, but also for territorial
expansion. The statelets of Italy had a busy month. In mid-​March a series of protests and
disturbances roiled Milan, leading to the expulsion of Austrian forces from the area. Seizing
the opportunity to annex Milan and Lombardy, on 22 March Piedmont-​Sardinia declared
war on Austria, as Carlo Alberto tried to expand in the north and drive Austria out. A re-
public was declared in Austria-​controlled Venice. In greater Germany, new freedoms also
unleashed nationalist expansion. As historian Priscilla Robertson observed, ‘[t]‌he other half
of German idealism showed up in the fierce insistence from every section that now, 1848,
was the time for Germany to unite, for a German empire to be created’ (1967, 142). This
ended in war with Denmark over the Schleswig-​Holstein provinces. The largely German
populations of the duchies of Schleswig and Holstein revolted, set up a provisional govern-
ment, and accepted Prussian troops in as protectors (Robertson 1967, 157). By April there
was a war between Prussia and Denmark over Schleswig-​Holstein. Similarly, in Austrian
Bohemia, Czech and German nationalists were now free to mobilize against each other as
well (Sperber 2005, 217).
In late March a simultaneous rebellion broke out in the Polish areas of Russia and Prussia.
These would be the first losers of the revolutionary days, as they were roundly crushed in
April. But there were liberal-​nationalist successes elsewhere. The Belgian parliament quickly
expanded the franchise by 70% and cut taxes, calming things there (Sperber 2005, 120). In
April, the Habsburg emperor recognized the new Hungarian government and promised a
constitution for Bohemia; Hungary gained independence and a new parliament, for a few
 The Revolutions of 1848    605

months. 18 May saw the first meeting of the Frankfurt Parliament, to work towards German
unity along liberal-​federal lines.
As a result of all the previous examples, many first elections were held in April–​June,
for new parliaments and constitutional assemblies, with greatly expanded franchises and
people voting for the first time in their lives (Sperber 2005, 150–​153). But, ominously, it was
mostly elites, the clergy and lesser nobility working on the ground who were able to steer
outcomes in a continent-​wide ‘strange discrepancy between advocates of democracy and
its beneficiaries’ (152); elections resulting from the revolutions ended up ‘repudiating the
revolutionaries’.

Revolutionary Fall and Winter

This meant that the second half of the revolutionary year was not a time of consolidating
gains, but of ideological polarization and open conflict (Sperber 2005, 208). There wasn’t
much of a liberal-​revolutionary summer of success and institution-​building, as the news
turned sour quickly. France never stabilized, and in May a low-​grade civil war began there,
as radical demonstrators seeking expanded workers’ rights and a war to liberate Poland
attempted to storm and dismiss the Constituent National Assembly (Robertson 1967, 80–​81).
In 4 June by-​elections to the Constitutional Assembly Louis Napoleon was elected, calling
himself a socialist, but a reaction against working-​class demands had begun and a conser-
vative Bonapartist press was unleashed. This led to the so-​called ‘June Days’ in France, days
of bloody street fighting in Paris; reactionary forces were on the rise, in what has been called
‘the first real class war of modern times’ (Robertson 1967, 77).
Meanwhile the news elsewhere was mostly bad for liberal causes. Austria was not driven
from Italy. On 24–​25 July, Radetzky’s Austrian army defeated Piedmont-​Sardinia and its
Italian allies at Custozza, and Hapsburg control of Lombardy was re-​established. August and
September were crisis days in Greater Germany as well. Prussia conceded to international
pressure to conclude the Schleswig-​Holstein War, but German nationalists in Western
Germany around the national assembly in Frankfurt were angered at this and wanted the
war to continue. Europe was worried that a more united Germany would seize control of the
passages between the Baltic and the North Sea (Sperber 2005, 229). In the end, the belligerent
democratic forces lost on both counts—​the war did not resume, and national democracy-​
building collapsed.
In one of the last enduring achievements for liberal ideals, in September the Austrian
Constituent Assembly voted to abolish serfdom (Grenville 1980, 122). But just a month later
Prince Windischgrätz of the Prague garrison marched down to besiege Vienna and soon
succeeded in wresting it from the liberal anti-​monarchists. A Hungarian army tried to come
to the rescue but was driven back (Sperber 2005, 233). Inspired by the outcome in Austria,
King Friedrich Wilhelm IV largely re-​established his control of Prussia in November
(Sperber 2005, 234–​235). Italy, by contrast, was still in tumult. In late November a popular in-
surrection in Rome forced Pius IX to flee the city and run south into exile in the Two Sicilies.
This proved a bad turning point, as henceforth Pius shifted from cautious liberal reformism
to reactionary arch-​conservatism. Days later, 10 December 1848, Prince Louis Napoleon
Bonaparte was elected president.
606   Daniel M. Green

Overall, 1848 was pivotal for Austria and Prussia (Hall 1999, 166). The Grossdeutsche
model that lumped in Austria now ceded place to the Kleindeutsche model of a smaller
Germany built around Prussia. The ethnic passions that exploded in the Austrian
confederational system decided ‘the issue of the borders of a future all-​German state for the
German nationalists’ (166).
A short year after it began, the final death blows were dealt to liberal revolution in Europe.
In March 1849, the Frankfurt parliament issued a liberal constitution for a Germany united
around Prussia, but when they offered the crown of Kleindeutschland to Friedrich Wilhelm,
he refused it. The Frankfurt Assembly collapsed; Germany would not be united in a liberal-​
federal manner. A last liberal gasp for Italy came in February 1849, when a Roman Republic
was proclaimed. But this was viewed as a dire threat to the papacy and Catholic conservatives
everywhere mobilized. In April, Louis Napoleon sent a French army to the papal states and
by July the Roman Republic had succumbed to French troops. In February and March,
Austria was losing the ground war to Hungarian nationalists on all fronts. In June 1849, the
Russian army entered Hungary and crushed Louis Kossuth’s nationalist forces by August.
The Hungarian Revolution was defeated, and many Hungarian nationalist rebels fled to the
Ottoman Empire.

The International Relations Dimension

of the Revolutions

In the biggest picture, Britain and Russia sat on opposite sides and did nothing to effect
major changes in international relations (Grenville 1980). Britain hoped to see Austria out
of Italy but was not willing to intervene or do more than offer supportive words. There were
two localized wars—​the war in northern Italy, which Piedmont-​Sardinia mishandled, and
the war over Schleswig-​Holstein, to cut Germans there away from the Danes—​but neither
resulted in a lasting transfer of territory. And there was no dreamed-​of war to liberate Poland
from Russia and Austria (that would have been hugely significant). Nor was there a French
intervention in northern Italy in the summer of 1848 to save it from the Austrians, a near
thing considered very seriously (Sperber 2005, 221).
The revolutions were mildly significant for discomfiting the ancien regime. Some argue
that to function well the Concert required a lingering fear of French political ambitions,
which slowly faded after 1815. However, this fear was revived somewhat by the Revolutions
of 1848, and the fact that they also ‘cut old ties and brought unsocialized leaders to power’
(Jervis 1983, 184). Additionally, the violent suppressions in the East alienated liberals and
radicals in Western Europe even further from Russia and Austria, rendering the Crimean
War a few years later all the more likely. Outside Europe, the Revolutions of 1848 were weakly
connected to and impactful in other regions, inspirational to liberalism in the Americas for
example (Roberts and Howe 2000). Many liberal ‘48ers’ moved to the United States (US),
especially from Germany, and strengthened the northern, liberal abolitionist element in
American politics, enabling the US Civil War (Eyal 2007).
Nonetheless, it is quite likely that 1848 would not stand out in the evenementielle narratives
of the international relations of the nineteenth century, such as: 1815–​22 (early Concert),
 The Revolutions of 1848    607

1822–​53 (Congress years), 1853–​7 1 (interim era of wars), 1871–​90 (Age of Bismarck)—​1848
could go unmentioned. Similarly, 1848 might be discounted because, as one prominent his-
torian has argued, ‘the Vienna system’ survived intact through 1848–​50 and handled the
revolutions (Schroeder 1994, 800–​801). The system of 1815 allowed widespread domestic up-
heaval but contained it and avoided a continental war as governments restrained themselves
from lashing out at each other: ‘every treaty still in force, every state boundary unchanged’
(1994, 801). This was ‘inconceivable in any other era’ (1994, 801).
In most cases, as soon as the old order was defeated the victors began to fight among
themselves, much to the glee of the temporarily weakened conservative forces, who came
back months later (Hall 1999, 167; Sperber 2005). Several revolutions shared a common
flaw—​they ‘turned into class struggles and failed because they did’ (Robertson 1967, 412). To
complete the backlash, in December 1851 Louis Napoleon—​soon to be Emperor Napoleon
III—​staged a coup and established his own dictatorship in France. Days later Austria’s con-
stitution was revoked in a return to absolutism there as well. In pivotal locations—​all of
Germany, the Austrian Empire—​new freedoms meant freedom to mobilize and fight along
ethnonationalist lines, something conservative elites could easily turn to their advantage,
and did.
What might have been? Some near-​possibilities would have been highly consequential for
regional international relations at least, and for general political-​historical trajectories: the
break-​up of Austria-​Hungary along national lines, the reemergence of a Poland from pieces
of Austria, Prussia and Russia, the merging of Germany and/​or Italy along the lines of a loose
liberal-​federal bloc.1 Each would have altered the course of history.

The Global-​Historical 1848

Yet shifting out to think broadly about the revolutions as a ‘Global-​Historical 1848’ reveals
momentous shifts on other fronts. The granularity issue, altering our depth of focus, points
towards deeper historical-​structural change and reveals a watershed in the development of
nationalism. This in turn should inform our understanding of modernity and the ‘modern’
state-​system today in ‘globalized late modernity’. 1848 lingers to the present.
Granularity, as the volume introduction states, ‘encompasses questions of texture, of
focus, and of scale’, ‘The focus one adopts, whether coarser or finer-​grained, allows one to
see different aspects of a phenomenon, and thus offers quite different kinds of knowledge
and insight’. Altering the scalar dimension of inquiry brings two such insights to 1848.
First, it greatly raises the status of a moment not generally seen as significant in IR: no great
war, no one defeated in an epochal struggle, no great peace settlement, no equivalent to
analysing statesmen assembled at a Vienna or Versailles, and so on. Second, in spatial terms,
a granular shift takes a cluster of events in Europe and makes them far more globally signifi-
cant, and indeed a constitutive element of modernity itself and of the modern state system.
A Eurocentric case becomes globally important.
Indeed, 1848 is arguably the origin of the modern international system. It thus sets the
agenda for most of the Moments after it in this section of this volume, since it is about na-
tionalism, democracy and class power all at once. This is especially true if the entire era of
1789–​1945 is viewed as being about Europe settling down to institutionalized democracy
608   Daniel M. Green

(Meadwell 2001). In the bigger picture of key dates, if 1648 marks the emergence of sover-
eignty as a principle for ordering an international system, then 1848 tells us a great deal about
which units will get sovereignty in the modern era. 1789 raises up the possibility of a new
popular sovereignty, and 1848 answers it with specifics, as nations and peoples. It is here that
the nation-​state form is endorsed and valorized in Europe (certainly not an outcome in 1648,
for example).
Judging the historical significance of 1848 in other realms has been taken up, such as the
social question and Europe’s stumbling dealings in the nineteenth century with poverty,
inequality and new classes. There is also a basic consensus across disciplines on 1848 as a
pivotal moment for nationalism. Liberal, more civic nationalism was the driver of events in
many places in 1848, but it won lasting victories nowhere in Europe. Nor was ancien regime
loyalty to the dynast restored. Instead conservative and ethnic nationalism leapt forward
(Grenville 1980), what can be called ‘ethnonationalism’, to juxtapose with civic nationalism.
Thus, 1848 marks a giant setback for the liberal, transnationalist dream of human solidarity.
Liberal free trade ideas widely espoused in the 1840s, for example, had been premised on the
idea that national economic development wasn’t a relevant focus.
Before 1848 most liberals were nationalists as well, and most nationalists were liberals,
in part because they shared a common enemy in the Metternichian system (Cassels 1996,
56). But after, nationalism went ‘from a revolutionary to a right-​wing ideology’ (Cassels
1996, 64); the ‘Mazzinian phase of nationalism’ ended (Hobsbawm 1992, 102). Because na-
tionalism moved to the right, it became more politically viable in many locales and spread
more readily—​it need no longer be resisted by the political establishments in many places.
This also enabled a shift from bottom-​up to top-​down patterns of mobilization, and soon
gave us the ‘official nationalisms’ of Tsarist Russia, Ottoman Turkey, and Meiji Japan (Smith
1998), as nationalism became a political tool of conservative political elites. Liberalism had
a hard time grappling with this new nationalism at the time (Hobsbawm 1992, 24–​25), and
this remains true today. After the 1848 watershed, the shift from cosmopolitanism to the
‘international’ becomes more discernable (Hobsbawm 1992, 25). Ethnonationalism is by def-
inition exclusionary and less cosmopolitan. In sum, liberal civic nationalism suffered major
setbacks; ethnonationalism in turn has been enduring.
Why this shift in the status of nationalism at this point? First, pressures for an 1848
had been building since 1789, in the parallel growth of liberalism and national self-​
determination ideas, both fueling a related creeping ‘conflation of people and state’ (Buzan
and Lawson 2015, 116). Liberalism had a corrosive effect on aristocratic privilege (Buzan
and Lawson 2015, 104), and national self-​determination—​in Greek, Polish, and Romanian
nationalisms, for example—​had been percolating since 1815/​1830. Those efforts were the
pioneers in establishing national self-​determination as a would-​be norm in Europe. So the
preconditions for 1848 had been building for some time. Second, it was largely true that
one method for achieving national unity in the important cases of Germans and Italians
had now been tried and failed in 1848, so it was on to another. Much of what had been
sought would be achieved by the opposite forces, later. ‘Most of what the men of 1848
fought for was brought about within a quarter of a century, and the men who accomplished
it were most of them specific enemies of the 1848 movement’ (Robertson 1967, 412). The
Mazzinian route to Italian unification, for example, thwarted (Cassels 1996), was success-
fully supplanted by Mazzini’s enemies in Piedmont-​Sardinia a decade later. Indeed, ‘no im-
portant new freedom was wrested’ in 1848; ‘Instead men lost confidence in freedom and
 The Revolutions of 1848    609

imagined they had made a great advance in sophistication by turning from idealism to
cynicism’ (Robertson 1967, 419).
Thus, while the events of 1848 were not particularly significant in international relations,
their impacts in altering macro-​political calculations of strategy and state formation were—​
the shift to conservative ethnonationalism as an elite political weapon. This manifested
in warfare a few years later, after the Crimean War: ‘Before the revolutions of 1848 the
governments of the continental monarchies avoided war in order to strengthen themselves
against their internal enemies; after the Congress of Paris some of them sought war for
exactly the same purpose’ (Bridge and Bullen 1980, 81). Ruling elites abandoned their un-
yielding resistance to domestic change, which had ‘united all their enemies against them’
anyway (1980, 81) and shifted to harnessing nationalism and ‘riding the tiger’ of nationalist
sentiment, now a conservative one they had a better chance of controlling. Wars and polit-
ical upheavals in Europe after 1856 tended to follow the two courses of action dictated by na-
tionalism and the nationality principle—​secession and unification.
Nationalism and its political concomitants quickly gained prominence in the inter-
national realm. For Hans Morgenthau (1962), the nation-​state became the predominant
unit-​form expected: ‘inter-​dynastic relations’ gave way to ‘international’ relations. National
self-​determination’s new salience in Europe also meant that: 1) the compensation schemes
of the eighteenth century no longer worked in Europe, as national boundaries became rigid,
and 2) when national self-​determination led to two major national unifications, the balance
of power shifted and nothing could be done about it (Morgenthau 1962). F. S. Northedge
(1976, 69–​73) notes two further effects of the national principle: an increase in the number of
states, and more ‘organized selfishness’, since the nation is ‘a self-​regarding animal’ (72). The
new nationality-​based identity ‘problematized ethnic, linguistic and cultural minorities, ter-
ritorial integrity and security, migration . . . . and the integrity and identity of polyglot states’
(Hall 1999, 169). Nationalism became ‘a potent new source of legitimacy’ (Buzan and Lawson
2015, 35), a new political technology with useful ‘stabilizing effects within core states’ (2015,
117) but destabilizing within multi-​ethnic empires. The modal type of unit did not change
entirely, but expectations did, and thus so did developmental pressures and tendencies in the
international system; over time, this has not been confined to Europe.

Ethnonationalism in Modernity,
Coloniality, and After(?)

Nationalism is hugely important for further eroding European dynastic international

relationsand making the nation-​state a prominent unit-​type. How should 1848 and conser-
vative ethnonationalism fit within our understandings of ‘modernity’ itself and modernity as
an account of history? Characterizing modernity in any aspect is inherently fraught, but one
can lessen the peril with the simplifying concession that there are at least two well-​developed
schools on the subject: Eurocentric ‘modernity’ and postcolonial ‘coloniality/​modernity’ or
simply coloniality. What is the place of 1848 in both?
Since it is also thought of as ‘a period’, asking when Euro-​centred modernity was makes
sense. For many, it begins at the end of the eighteenth century and continues to the present
610   Daniel M. Green

(Bayly 2004; Giddens 1990; Osterhammel 2014). Others observe that the origins of mod-
ernity are typically said to be around 1500 or 1789, depending on where one is from: observers
from the South of Europe choose the former, those from ‘Anglo-​Saxon’ countries and
France, the latter (Mignolo 2005). This can be supplemented with the notion of a ‘global
early modern’ starting around 1500. Jürgen Osterhammel, for example, sees parallels be-
tween the vibrant Braudelian sixteenth-​century Mediterranean and similar developments in
Southeast Asia. There is ‘an approximately simultaneous transition to an early modern age’
between 1450 and 1600 all over the world (Osterhammel 2014, 57). The global early modern
has also been described as the era of an ‘Oriental globalization’ led by China (Hobson 2004),
for the period 1500–​1800 (Phillips 2017; Zhang 2017). After this global early modern era,
Osterhammel posits a Sattelzeit of 1750–​1850, the global era of transition to modernity (2014,
59–​63).
As to its descriptive content, there is no consensus in IR about what modernity is, but a
variety of markers are regularly mentioned: societal complexity and functional social dif-
ferentiation, capitalism and a division of labour, industrialization, markets, and the modern
state (Buzan and Lawson 2015; Go and Lawson 2017; Rosenberg 1994; Teschke 2003).
Osterhammel’s heuristic list of indicators of modernity adds some novelties: ‘the conduct
of life involving rational calculation’, ‘the growth of political participation’, ‘destructive
capacities of a quite new dimension’, and ‘a shift in the arts away from imitation of tradition
to the creative destruction of aesthetic norms’ (2014, 904). While modernity has these mul-
tiple dimensions, for IR’s primary purposes the key is the state system.
In sharp contrast, postcolonial theorists have introduced the term ‘coloniality’ into the
discussion and point to the date of 1492 (Escobar 2004; Mignolo 2005; Quijano 2000). Since
imperial exploitation made modernity possible, coloniality brings in colonial experiences
and ‘the perspectives of the wretched’, In this approach, modernity is ‘the direction of his-
tory that had Europe as a model and a goal’ (Mignolo 2005, 4–​5). Modernity is in effect
Europe’s description of its own role in history, whereas coloniality better incorporates the
entire world’s experiences and exposes the Europhiliac gloss of ‘modernity’. The momen-
tous calamity of 1492 was to simultaneously generate so much that went wrong and ruined
the world after that date: colonialism, the genocide of native peoples, capitalism as com-
modity production for global markets, the entire institution of slavery to work the fields
and mines, and race and racial hierarchy, to justify the exploitation and slavery. Later, 1789
and maturing French nationalism created ‘nationalization’ as a process that is also imposed
and became part of the formula (Quijano 2000). Again, the non-​whites in Latin America
were excluded in nation-​building efforts directed by Creole elites. The expansive notion of
coloniality surfaces the horrendous damage inflicted by the West in the last 500 years, in-
geniously obscured by modernity’s narrative.
The Eurocentric/​Occi-​centric account of modernity has long been critiqued and years ago
the notion of ‘multiple modernities’, that there were and are different modernities in different
locales (e.g. Bayly 2004, 10), was offered as an alternative. But many have now moved past
multiple modernities, which blossomed with particularisms suggesting that each country
effectively had its own modernity. Recent scholarship favours a ‘logic of confluence’ account
of modernity in history (Hobson 2017, 230), rejecting the monocultural-​origin narrative. By
this reckoning, ‘modernity has always been a transnational and global development’ (Go and
Lawson 2017, 7); there is no great discontinuity in time or space, just an ongoing ‘concaten-
ation of social forces’ (Buzan and Lawson 2015, 7–​8). As Bayly describes the long nineteenth
 The Revolutions of 1848    611

century (2004, 11), the ‘changes were so rapid, and interacted with each other so profoundly’.
In short, cross-​flows and cross-​influences abound in modernity’s development.
Can the modernity and coloniality narratives be reconciled and merged? Not for most of
the past. The coloniality argument does not agree that everything was blandly ‘co-​produced’
in confluences. Its narrative has agency, is critical, and assigns blame, identifying the origins
of societal change and the damage done. The ‘confluences’ metaphor would hide coloniality’s
message. Alternatively, we might be attentive to time periods and realms of life where
‘confluences’ is the appropriate metaphor and those where influences are more unidirec-
tional. Combining ‘when’, ‘what’, and ‘who’ in a periodization narrative would illuminate
convergences (and divergences) in the characteristics of human societies over time and
might enable merging the narratives in some way. Conservative ethnonationalism, for ex-
ample, is an instance in which Europe goes through developments which later become more
universal, and the charge of Eurocentrism is less problematic. It is relevant to Buzan and
Lawson’s idea of the ‘leading edge’ (2015, 22) and historical developments when the origins
are uneven, and one locale is more influential. Thus, 1848 is a, perhaps the crucial step on the
way to European modernity as nation-​states, but also is raised later as a possible universal
turning point.2

1848 and the Two Schools

The contributions of the Revolutions of 1848 to Eurocentric modernity are well-​discussed.
Many argue that the nineteenth century is the crucial period; indeed, the entire long nine-
teenth century sees ‘the birth of the modern’ (Bayly 2004, 11; Buzan and Lawson 2015).
Nations and nationalism are essential features of modernity, ‘intrinsic to the nature of the
modern world and to the revolution of modernity’ (Smith 1998, 3). Nationalism is basic-
ally the creator of the state system itself and a key constitutive element of modernity for IR.
Historical-​structural longue durée analysis of the emergence of the modern set of social
formations (Rosenberg 1994; Teschke 2003) links this to capitalism and the creation of non-​
politicized markets. The ‘modern international system’ has capitalism, markets and the state;
the former requires the separation of the latter two. If one focuses on logics of territoriality
and how they change over time (e.g. Teschke 2003), the diversity of early modern types of
actors, sustained by a complex, confused dynastic world in Europe, featured a menagerie of
unequal actors and was not a modern states-​system. Instead, ‘the formation of the modern
states-​system, based on exclusive territoriality operated by a depersonalized state, must be
pushed up to the nineteenth century’ (Teschke 2003, 230).
1848 nudged a regional and ultimately the global logic of territoriality in a different dir-
ection. The ‘’national-​sovereign’ identity’ in Europe was a new identity and set of interests
and caused raison d’état to be replaced with national self-​determination (Hall 1999, 7),
introducing the new quandaries of secession and irredentism. Nationalism had immediate
political uses in Europe: ‘Aggressive wars of national reconstruction and the identification
of victory on the battlefield with national pride and regeneration were the means by which
monarchical conservatism gave itself a new lease on life’ (Bridge and Bullen 1980, 81). 1848
triggered the widespread embrace of ethnic nationalism by political elites, catalytic after
1856 in pushing Italian and German unification but also fuelling Japan’s ambitious develop-
ment. The postcolonial coloniality narrative also, though with regret, sees the nation-​state
612   Daniel M. Green

as a model within the coloniality complex and 1848 further cements a new alien process,
‘nationalization’, as part of the European modernity model the rest feel pressure to follow.
The nationalization process furthers homogenization and keeps non-​whites subjugated and
disempowered. In Latin America, since the early nineteenth-​century Europeanized creoles
and mestizos have controlled the nationalization process (Quijano 2000, 222–​225).

1848, Widespread Ethnonationalism, and the Present:

Still Relevant?
What of conservative ethnonationalism within the conditions of the twenty-​first century?
How to describe the present era? Most fundamentally, it is the age of a profound global-
ization, itself said to be a special moment and opportunity for modernity, a chance for it to
spread wildly (Giddens 1990). Indeed, globalization might make modernity truly universal
and unavoidable—​‘modernity all the way down, everywhere, until the end of time’ (Escobar
2004, 212). Building on this, I argue that the present era of post-​2008 global recession has
three basic features. First, it is a globalized and inter-​penetrated world, with incredible levels
of economic and social inter-​change, as well as refugee flows and migrants, thanks to neo-
liberal globalization and openness that began in the 1980s. Second, in geopolitical terms,
it is a multipolar world both politically and economically, with several large and booming
economies across the world, evident in the rise of the Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South
Africa (BRICS) countries. And this is a multicultural multipolarity, in a post-​imperial world
where some of the poles are former colonies (Brazil, India, South Africa), or almost were
(China). Finally, it is a post-​neoliberal world, of varied reactions to the American neoliberal
unipolarity of roughly 1987–​2007, now in decline. Multicultural multipolarity is challenging
key aspects of the old neoliberal consensus, which was actually an imposition for many.
Neoliberalism’s fueling of economic inequality has also produced a global class of wealthy
oligarchs, increasingly exerting their power to hold on to and expand their wealth. Thus,
‘globalized late modernity’ is an apt descriptor for the present era in broad terms—​the con-
temporary global socio-​political environment. ‘Global’ here is also intended to denote a high
degree of socio-​cultural similarity on a global scale, a sizeable set of global socio-​cultural
conditions—​in similar technologies, the worldwide web, social media, common issues,
inter-​connectivity.
And this era is witnessing an explosion of ethnonationalism, like Europe after 1848, but
more widely global. Many have noted how ethnonationalism both made the disruptive
changes of 1989–​91 possible and then exploded still further after the Cold War itself. In
the 1990s ‘the very idea of the ethnic nation’ became dangerous, carrying ‘the seed of trau-
matic events’ such as ethnic cleansing, population transfers, and new territorial partitioning
(Gottlieb 1999, 120). Rodney Bruce Hall concludes his important study of national col-
lective identity through history with a case study of ethnonational identity and the demise
of the Soviet Union in 1989, a victory over the ‘Proletarian-​Internationalist Identity’ (1999,
285–​293).
Many have written on the recent rise of nationalist parties that are ‘populist radical
right’ in Europe (e.g. Mudde 2007), but this has now spread to many places: India, Russia,
 The Revolutions of 1848    613

Turkey, and the Philippines (Jenne 2018). Both India and China today are ever more
deeply embracing a conservative, exclusionary ethnonationalism. Chinese nationalism
has taken a ‘strident turn’ after 2008, in which the government has tried to join in with
popular nationalism and coopt it into official nationalism, though with mixed success
(Zhao 2013). Rising numbers of ‘ethnopopulists’ everywhere are lashing out at global
elites, immigrants, and foreigners (Brubaker 2017; Jenne 2018); new exclusionary moves
run rampant. Indeed, far from being wiped out by globalization, as some thought likely,
nationalism has continued its steady rise and been ‘globally diffused so as to become the
dominant operative discourse of modernity’ (Malešević 2018, 555). What was confined to
Europe in 1848–​60 is no longer.
Of course, there are temporally specific peculiarities in the current conjuncture. One
is the mixing-​in of populism with ethnonationalism. A second is the connection to the
depoliticizing effects of global and regional integration. Jacques Rupnik (2007), for example,
noted years ago how the European Union (EU) invigorates populist ethnonationalism as a
reaction to interaction and the EU, after accession. He refers to the ‘emptying’ of party com-
petition of its substance (22) because of the forced acceptance of so much from the EU’s for-
mulaic neoliberal directives. These imply a ‘redefinition of national sovereignty and identity’
that can be hard to stomach (2007, 22). This operates on a global scale as well.
Another apparently propitious background condition for ethnonationalism today,
alongside the backlash against the hollowing-​out of politics, is the rise of esteem issues,
as ‘fear’ and war declines (Giddens 1990; Lebow 2008). Descriptions of late modernity
(e.g. Giddens 1990) commonly posit a culture of angst and reflexivity, with traditions no
longer available to provide psychic certainty—​this especially describes late modernity on
an individual level. If we think in terms of moving between motivations of spirit, fear, and
appetite—​spirit being the esteem and shame dimension—​then in late modernity we are
back into an era of spirit and the desire for self-​esteem ‘is a universal drive’ (Lebow 2008,
61). This is a ‘post-​fear’ world in which ‘concern with geopolitics and the martial spirit is
largely eschewed’ and concerns about esteem and self-​esteem are newly preoccupying
(Browning 2015, 200). Richard Ned Lebow observes that in Europe in the second half of
the nineteenth century, when fear of war declined, empire and ‘display’ rose in significance
instead (2008, 310). Well, nationalism is precisely about dignity and honor—​‘nationalism
is driven by the community’s desire to justify itself ’ (Browning 2015, 199; Greenfeld 1992).
Indeed, smaller powers may feel the need ‘to legitimize their very existence and subjectivity’
(Browning 2015, 199; emphasis in original) and can.
Today’s eruptions of conservative ethnonationalism and official nationalism thus
help chart the context of our globalized late modernity, in contrast with the past. In 1848,
European conservative elites took over and coopted a failed liberal civic nationalism. Today,
doing so is an old and familiar technique, newly relevant thanks to unfolding conditions in
some countries. Today’s widespread incidence of conservative ethnonationalism also raises
profound questions. Is this proof of its universality within human experience, confirming
that the backers of the ‘modernity’ notion were correct, that this was the natural way forward
for all? Or is it simply proof of the success of European culture in forcing more of the world
into its image? True, the ethnic nation-​state itself is not a universal phenomenon, since there
would be far more countries today than 195 or so. But there does seem to be a near-​universal
susceptibility and vulnerability to political/​societal pressures towards the nation-​state form
614   Daniel M. Green

and to harnessing ethnonationalism for political purposes. Thus, common processes of

socio-​economic development may arise in seemingly different contexts, interacting with
factors nonetheless present in all societies. The ubiquity of conservative ethnonationalism
today is explained by causes resembling those offered for 1848’s nationalism: unfolding cap-
italism, new social classes, economic dislocation, new media, urbanization. This suggests
important underlying variables identifiable in 1848 and today, such as ethnic-​linguistic
identities, the emergence at some point of ‘the middle ranks of society’ (Osterhammel 2014),
and spirit—​the desire for social esteem and self-​esteem (Lebow 2008). The tools of conser-
vative ethnonationalism are proving widely useful, perhaps until the counter-​project of the
coloniality critics takes off.

Conclusions

To understand and describe the past and present of international relations, the task before
scholars today is one of periodization—​develop thick, shared understandings of the turning
points and watersheds in international history, and why they are such. This means mapping
out both regional and system-​wide disjunctures, identifying common and shared social
processes, and seeing how they unfold in different places at different times. The Revolutions
of 1848 watershed introduced and made common a new political technology: conservative
ethnonationalism. It was a propitious time for this to happen in Europe, but this was also
a regional development that contributed to an enduring, widely shared script of a ‘mod-
ernity’ that continues to the present. For the Eurocentric modernity narrative that is not
surprising—​Europe is, and was, always creating social formations that others should imi-
tate. While Eurocentrists may not recognize the damages of this development, postcolonial
thought is well aware of it. Conservative ethnonationalism eventually became common
across polities in the present era of ‘globalized late modernity’, a second propitious—​this
time global—​context.
However, now conditions in globalized late modernity—​multicultural multipolarity after
homogenizing neoliberalism—​are also seemingly making it possible, perhaps for the first
time in centuries, to imagine other worlds and radical alterities. The Revolutions of 1848 thus
mark the first explosive emergence of conservative ethnonationalism, while today’s widely
spreading ethnonationalism may be the last.

Notes
1. This is the ‘German question’—​the prospect of a more federal merging of Germany, as
opposed to the Bismarckian-​Prussian version that happened. The Sonderweg argument is
that Germany modernized in an odd, proto-​feudal manner and thus failed to successfully
democratize; instead the path to Nazism was laid.
2. Individual cases of ethnonationalism had arguably emerged earlier—​Greek secessionism
against the Ottomans in the 1820s, Polish secessionist nationalism around the same time,
a form of Egyptian/​Arab ethnonationalism against the Ottomans in the 1830s. These were
episodes the actors of 1848 learned from.
 The Revolutions of 1848    615

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 Chapter 42

The Indian U pri si ng

of 185 7
Alexander E. Davis

The Indian Uprising and Colonial Violence

The Indian Uprising, often remembered in India today as the ‘First War of Independence’,
and condescendingly referred to by the British as a ‘mutiny’ of ‘native’ soldiers, reverberated
around the empire and the world.1 It began on 10 May 1857 and ended on 1 November 1858,
with Queen Victoria’s declaration that India had become a Crown Colony. It marked the
end of the East India Company’s rule, the fall of the Mughal empire, which had lasted for
centuries, and the rule of both being replaced with the British Raj.
The event comprised widespread violence committed not only by the British, Indian
soldiers (both loyal and rebellious), but also by civilians across much of North India.
Although it started with soldiers in Meerut, the resistance to British rule spread through
North and Central India, including peasants, artisans, and labourers (Bender 2017, 3).
It was a far broader uprising throughout Indian society than the term ‘mutiny’ implies.
The rebels killed thousands of Europeans early in the conflict. In response, the British
and their numerous Indian allies put down the Uprising through counterinsurgency
tactics and massacres. Records for the number of deaths are poor, but descriptions of the
violence and census data from after the event, suggest that it was vast, in both brutality
and scale.
This violence draws our attention to the granularity of history. For the purposes of this
chapter, granularity means the grittiness of history, the texture of the event. This texture is
all too easily skipped over when we fold events into broader global and political narratives.
This often happens with the Indian Uprising. This can be seen in the labels ‘mutiny’ and
‘war of independence’. However, as postcolonial International Relations (IR) scholars have
noted, the scope that IR offers, of theorizing about the international across history, brings
entrenched risks of oversimplifying such events. IR tends to skip over historical texture, by
folding history into progress narratives, telling stories about how our modern states system
came to be. For the Indian Uprising, granularity must draw our attention to the scale and in-
tensity of colonial violence.
618   Alexander E. Davis

Aside from its historical significance as stand-​alone event, the Uprising was also a crucial
formative moment in the creation of the contemporary Indian state and the reorganization
of the British empire. Many of the government institutions that are now fundamental to the
postcolonial Indian state were built under this more bureaucratized form of control of the
Raj. Furthermore, the violent Uprising changed British global colonial governance and the
way that the empire was racially and culturally ordered. It revealed to the British the possi-
bility that their growing colonial control around the world could be challenged by colonized
peoples. This led to a rethinking of the racialized ideational structure of the empire, which
sat alongside defensive structures. This can be seen in debates on imperial federation and a
broader rethinking and re-​theorizing of the empire.
To understand what a granular reading of colonial violence tells us about history and
international relations, this chapter examines the Indian Uprising, its causes, the changes
that it produced in global imperial structures, and the ways that it has been interpreted and
remembered. Two issues are particularly important: the event itself, its causes, and direct
consequences; and the ideas and memories that it generated. I look first at postcolonial IR
theory, and its critique of IR’s modernizing historiography. The second part considers the
Indian Uprising as an event, focusing first on its origins and context, and then on the ways
it transformed India. The third part looks at the international ramifications and the ways in
which it provoked a reorganization and thinking of the British empire. In particular, I look
at the Australian response to the Uprising, which demonstrates how the Uprising revealed
weaknesses in the empire’s defence. I conclude by reflecting on the colonial violence that
underpins India’s postcolonial modernity and the way it should inform our understandings
of historical international relations.

Colonial Violence, Modernity, and

Postcolonial IR Theory

IR scholars and theorists, drawing on what postcolonial theorists have referred to as IR’s
Eurocentric historiography, have often seen the spread of the states-​system, with its tethering
of sovereignty and nation to delineated territory, as the end point of modernization which
started in Europe and spread around the world. This narrative has been subjected to con-
siderable postcolonial critique in recent years. As Sanjay Seth (2011, 170–​172) has put it, IR
theory and its account of the modern states system suggest that the ‘Westphalian’ system,
and the narrative of its spread and expansion, has privileged European history and the ex-
pansion of European empires, in ways that sanitize colonial history and violence. When we
see Indian history through this frame, colonial violence is obscured.
The international system we study today emerged out of interactions between colonizer
and colonized. To challenge Eurocentrism, historical IR must be sufficiently linked to global
histories of empire. As Pinar Bilgin (2016, 494) put it, ‘addressing the Eurocentric limits of IR
involves addressing the Eurocentric historical accounts that students of IR draw upon’. This
needs to encompass the ways in which the interactions between European powers and the
people they colonized produced differentiated forms of ‘modernity’ around the world, and
the process by which interactions during the imperial period structured the international.
 The Indian Uprising of 1857    619

This suggests, as Eisenstadt (2000) argued, that modernity is best thought of as differentiated
across time and place. India’s postcolonial modernity is different, for example, to that of the
United Kingdom (UK). The interaction between colonizer and colonized draws us to look
at the imperial origins of our current system. This requires reading seriously and critic-
ally the experience of colonized peoples, the process of colonization, and the violence that
underpinned it.
These Eurocentric historiographies emerged from IR’s unwillingness to deal with, engage
with, and/​or theorize imperial histories in detail, particularly after the Second World War,
(Guilot 2014). Before the Second World War, much IR scholarship was dominated by im-
perial questions, but assumed that imperial hierarchy was natural and desirable.2 By taking
the starting point for international affairs as the state, IR dramatically narrows its historical
and temporal scope, and leaves colonized societies and their experiences of this moderniza-
tion outside its theoretical models. In this sense, the ‘state as actor’ paradigm dramatically
simplifies the processes of both colonization and decolonization, viewing the modern state
as beginning in Western Europe with Westphalia and spreading its way around the world
(Thakur et al. 2017).
A useful example for the relevance of imperial history to IR, with considerable salience
here, comes from Andrew Phillips’ work on native soldiers and the empire. Phillips (2016,
62) argues that IR commonly accepts ‘the sovereign states’ ubiquity. . . as the endpoint of a
centuries-​long process of modernization, spearheaded by European imperialism’. A key
part of this assumption is that European military might and its greater modernization is
what enabled it to take colonies and dominate world order. In response, Phillips notes that
‘native’ troops were used in various wars of conquest in South Asia and, indeed, tended
to outnumber European soldiers. Elsewhere, various historians have pointed out that, far
from modernizing India by building state institutions and railroads, colonizers in many
ways looted or even de-​industrialized India. South Asia’s networks for feeding its people
were shattered, causing millions to die in regular famines (Davis 2002, 311–​313). The profits
created by India’s textile industries were moved from Gujarat and Bengal to the North of
England (Misra 2003). These are not the benign actions of a modernizing power. A more
granular engagement with the histories of colonization in South Asia, histories which have
already been undertaken by historians of empire in recent years, disrupt the narratives of the
state and modernity on which IR’s theory and historiography has generally been premised.
The Indian Uprising, as a moment in history, reveals the enormous violence that
underpins India’s, and with it other colonized societies’, postcolonial modernity. If we are to
think of this event as any part of the modernization process of empire, and with it the making
of the states-​system, it shows us first and foremost the brutality of this ‘modernization’ pro-
cess. A granular reading of this history of the rise of modernity in the case of a colonized
society like India tells us a great deal about the tendency of IR’s theorizing to sanitize colonial
history. This sanitized account is undermined by a granular reading of the Indian Uprising.
Reading the Indian Uprising, and emphasizing this moment as a piece of historical IR, forces
us to reckon with colonial violence. It leads us to rethink some of the softening and sanitizing
concepts to describe world order, such as those critiqued by Seth. If we are to think of the
Indian Uprising as part of a process of modernization, or even fold it into a narrative which
ends with the creation of the Indian state and its foreign policymaking, then the granularity
of this event must draw our attention to the role of extreme colonial violence in maintaining
colonial order.
620   Alexander E. Davis

The Indian Uprising of 1857: Causes,

Actors, and Outcomes

Understanding the events of 1857 requires an understanding of the context of colonial India
and the gradual creep of British control across South Asia. The British had been landing on
the coasts of India since the early 1600s, initially seeking trade. They had slowly gathered
armies, power, and territory in the Indian subcontinent, based on the exploitation of the
divisions within the societies they encountered. The East India Company’s dominance had
been established incrementally through a series of wars from the mid-​eighteenth century
onwards. This was made possible through a private army which numbered 260,000 soldiers
by 1803 and which enabled the East India Company to wield tremendous influence across all
of South Asia (Dalrymple 2019).
The East India Company at the turn of the nineteenth century has been memorably
described by historian William Dalrymple as a ‘dangerously unregulated private company
headquartered in one small office, five windows wide, in London, and managed in India by
an unstable sociopath—​[Robert] Clive’ (Dalrymple 2019). Since the 1820s, the East India
Company had seen themselves as having paramountcy over India, suggesting that they had
the right to exercise control over India’s politics, its economy, and culture. British power at
this stage rested on a thin veneer of violence and coercion.
The rule of the East India Company re-​wrote South Asia’s political geography. Three
major trading ports were established by the East India Company, around which its political
administration was based: the Bombay Presidency in the West, the Madras Presidency in the
South, and Bengal Province in the East. Lying alongside these three centres, were hundreds
of Princely States, which were key parts of this political patchwork. These small bodies had
independence in domestic affairs, but many owed their allegiance to the British. This geo-
political patchwork reflects the enormous divides and diversity within South Asia’s cultural
regions. These Princely States maintained their sovereignty despite the transfer of India’s
sovereignty to the British Crown.
The growth of British racial and cultural arrogance was producing social problems and
generating anger in Indian society. Post-​hoc justifications for British rule, based on emer-
gent racialized notions of superiority, were giving shape to divide and rule strategies. This
was taking place amid the slow plunder of India’s wealth, with the profits of India’s agricul-
tural production going to the British. Famines were becoming more commonplace. Divide
and rule strategies had exploited and worsened division among Indian society, particularly
through the British practice of taking a census every ten years (Bhagat 2001, 4352–​4356).
Much of the resistance to the slow creep of British rule had been put down by wars with
local Maharajahs. For example, in the south of India, significant resistance from Tipu Sultan
of Mysore had been brutally put down in 1799. Increasing numbers of Indian Maharajahs
now owed their allegiance to the British. The Mughal empire had lost the vast majority of
its territory and prestige and its influence had become minimal. Still, there was a nominal
Mughal ruler—​Bahadur Shah Zafar II. But by 1857, he was elderly, quiet, and best known for
his works as a poet.
Historians, broadly speaking, have not been able to agree on whether or not the Indian
Uprising was a nationalist Uprising that reflected a growing anti-​colonial nationalism and
 The Indian Uprising of 1857    621

the idea of India. However, it did play a role in generating a new consciousness within India
about the need for self-​rule. In this sense, the Uprising played a part in the creation of an
idea of the nation in India (Srivastava 2018). It would be a vast oversimplification (and ana-
chronistic) to argue it was driven primarily by nationalism; it was both a military Uprising
and a civilian Uprising. Elsewhere, it has been thought of as a peasant Uprising, and the
death throes of the feudal Mughal empire. The motivations behind the Uprising are made
more complicated and difficult to understand when we look at the choices various Sepoys
made. Some soldiers chose to go home rather than fight on either side. Those engaged in
the Uprising requested that Bahadur Shah Zafar II be reinstalled as ruler, suggesting that
the purpose of the Uprising was notionally at least to return the Mughal empire to its
previous position. Some of those in revolt, however, did not accept this as the goal of the
Uprising, with the return of a previous order not necessarily a shared goal of those involved
(Dalrymple 2006).
Cultural issues emerging out of the British belief in their inherent superiority also played
a significant role in provoking the Uprising. The resistance was premised partly on the sense
that the westernization of India was damaging. Control by the East India Company was
dispossessing and alienating local populations. One element of this alienation was the com-
monly reported rumour about the Enfield Rifle. To load the rifle, soldiers had to bite the end
off of a lubricated cartridge. Rumours spread throughout the Indian army soldiers that this
lubricant was a mix of pig and cow lard. Such a lubricant would have been offensive to both
Hindu and Muslim soldiers. There was already, however, a growing and deep sense of eco-
nomic and cultural dislocation among soldiers in the Indian army before the rumours about
the Enfield rifle emerged (Bose and Jalal 1997, 76). The rumours themselves are evidence
of this mistrust, regardless of their veracity. The Uprising was also very much a response
to British racial arrogance. Whether we call it nationalism or patriotism, a shared sense of
‘loss of country’ brought together Hindus and Muslims in resenting and ultimately rising up
against the British (Bose and Jalal 1997, 76).
The Uprising began in the cantonment of Meerut, where Indian soldiers turned on their
European officers, and led to almost all the 100,000 soldiers in the Bengal Army rebelling against
the British (Anderson 2007, 3). The mutinous soldiers marched to Delhi and took control of
the city within 24 hours (Bender 2017, 3). The Uprising then spread from Meerut and Delhi, to
Agra, Lucknow, and Cawnpore (Kanpur). The rebels quickly took control of most of the north-​
western provinces and Awadh (Oudh). In Delhi, the leaders of the Uprising demanded that
Bahadur Shah Zafar be returned to power. In Lucknow, there was a famous siege at the ‘British
Residency’ in the centre of the city, the ruins of which are now a tourist attraction.
The Uprising did not spread as its leaders had hoped. The British were able to recruit
soldiers from the Madras Army, Pathans from the north-​west frontier province and Sikh
soldiers from Punjab in large numbers to assist in putting down the Uprising. Much of the
fighting then was done by Indians attacking other Indians. This makes it difficult to cat-
egorize the Uprising as a ‘war of independence’. The use of native troops was not uncommon.
Recruiting local soldiers had been crucial to the consolidation and spread of the British
control around South Asia and elsewhere (Phillips 2016). The role of Indian soldiers loyal
to the British, however, shows the success of divide and rule strategies. Furthermore, it
demonstrates the Eurocentrism of accounts of empire which emphasize the technological
and military superiority of colonizing powers. In the case of the Indian Uprising, the vast
majority of soldiers loyal to the East India Company were of Indian origin (Bryant 1978).
622   Alexander E. Davis

Many Indian Princely States, led by Maharajas who owed their title and territory to the
British, also sided with the colonizers. These included Hyderabad, Mysore, Travancore
in the South, and Kashmir to the North. Numerous smaller Princely States in Rajputana
(Rajasthan) also gave the British support. The situation in these regions remained calm.
There was no violence in trading cities such as Bombay and Madras. This means that the
Uprising was relatively localized to the plains of North and Central India, particularly in
Delhi, Uttar Pradesh, and Madhya Pradesh. The support of the Princely States ensured
that Indian princes remained a key element of India’s political patchwork until 1948. While
Delhi was retaken relatively quickly, it took far longer for the British to retake Jhansi and
Lucknow. The Awadh countryside was particularly difficult to pacify, leading to ongoing
small outbreaks of conflict and counter-​insurgency.
Throughout this one-​and-​a-​half-​year period, both sides accused the other of indiscrim-
inate killings, including the killing of non-​combatants, women, and children. Indeed, there
were major acts of violence on both sides of the conflict. One of the first major examples of
this violence was carried out by a rebel commander Nana Sahib (Rudrangshu 1990). The
British garrison at Cawnpore had surrendered and been offered safe passage down the Ganga
to Allahabad. Instead, however, the men were massacred and 200 women and children were
taken hostage. When British troops approached two weeks later, the women and children
were killed and thrown down a nearby well (Bender 2017, 3). The British remembered the
slaughter of women and children as evidence of the savagery and unreliability of Indian
soldiers (Bender 2017, 106). It provoked long running and bloody counter-​insurgency
campaigns and mass executions (Wagner 2010).
The British response was vicious. Bender (2017, 4) describes the British response as:

The British, for their part, destroyed entire villages rumored to have ties to the rebels. They
hanged Muslims with pork stuffed into their mouths and forced Hindus to lick the bloodstains
from various sites, including the Bibighur at Cawnpore.

The British also killed Indian combatants in ways which guaranteed their bodies could not
be identified. The violence was done with a purpose: it was seen as the only way to establish
and legitimize British control of South Asia (Bender 2017, 4).
Control of Delhi was returned to the British by mid-​September 1857. Bahadur Shah Zafar
was taken captive, and exiled in Rangoon, Burma, where he later died. Twenty-​one of his
sons were executed in Delhi. Crushing the rest of the Uprising was slow. The fighting turned
to the Residency in Lucknow, which was not taken until March 1858. The Rani of Jhansi,
widely thought of in India as a hero in the conflict, was killed in June 1858; the city and
Gwalior fort fell soon after. The British declared the fighting over by July 1858, but occasional
guerrilla-​style warfare continued for several months. Consequently, it is difficult to calcu-
late the numbers of dead and injured. Douglas Peers notes that the cost in human lives is
poorly recorded and difficult to confirm. He suggests that 6,000 of the 40,000 Europeans in
India were killed. The number of Indians who were killed in response is even more difficult
to ascertain. Peers (2006, 64) estimates that the number of Indians killed in the reprisals to
be 800,000, but possibly more. These numbers were particularly poorly documented, how-
ever, and so Peers’ estimate is based on census figures from 1871. Chopra (2003, 118) estimates
that 150,000 were killed in Oudh alone, 100,000 of which were civilians. The British press
called for reprisals, with one Guardian article stating that ‘these rebels of Delhi must be
made an example to all their countrymen for ages to come of the consequences of such
 The Indian Uprising of 1857    623

crimes’ (Guardian Research Department 2011). The same editorial also recommended that
the administration should be kind in dealing with rumours about forced conversions to
Christianity and the use of lard in the Enfield rifle, stating that: ‘In dealing with such a people,
it is the duty of a Government administered by a more enlightened race, to be as tender of
their superstitions as if it shared them’ (Guardian Research Department, 2011). Overall,
brutal reprisals were seen as necessary to maintain order in a supposedly ‘savage’ land.
The conflict ended formally on 1 November 1858, with Queen Victoria’s proclamation
stating not only that India was now a Crown Colony, but also noting the violence: ‘Our
Power has been shewn by the Suppression of that Rebellion in the field; We desire to shew
Our Mercy, by pardoning the Offences of those who have been thus misled, but who desire
to return to the path of Duty’. This was a thinly veiled threat: the British had perpetrated
enormous violence to maintain their colonial possessions in India. They were prepared to
repeat their slaughter of any Indians who threatened them (Bender 2017, 143). India’s princes
were guaranteed territorial rights and autonomy from 1858 through to India’s independ-
ence and were folded partly into intra-​empire diplomacy (Naik 2014 and Thakur 2017). The
fear of similar uprisings stayed with the British throughout the rest of their time in India.
Indeed, after the Amritsar massacre in 1919, some hailed General Reginald Dyer as a hero
for averting another 1857. As Shashi Tharoor (2017, 173) has noted, Dyer was referred to by
Rudyard Kipling upon his return to Britain as ‘the man who saved India’. The British public
raised £26,317 which was given to him along with a ‘jewelled sword of honour’ (Tharoor
2017, 173). After the Uprising, colonial rule in India was continually based on this threat of
reoccurring violence.
There were even greater lessons for the British in terms of administration. Gyan Prakash
argues that the experience led the British to conclude that ‘India needed to be ruled with a
stronger hand, that what the natives required was a productive and secure empire fashioned
with modern technologies of rule’ (Prakash 2002, 85). This meant increased surveillance,
imprisonment, control of information, and the creation of the Indian Civil Service (ICS)—​as
Prakash explained, ‘governance with rationalistic, bureaucratic means’ (Prakash 2002, 85).
The idea of ‘the mutiny’, and the memory of it, provoked continual terror in the minds of
British colonial governors in India, leading the colonial state to crack-​down upon, imprison,
and monitor Indian society (Wagner 2013). The colonial control on information, rational-
ization and use of information is captured nicely by the Raj’s 1860 report on the control of
information suggested the need to centralize power and control information (Government
of India 1948). This directly produced a more brutal colonial legal system (Anderson 2007).
As Bender (2017) has shown, these changes were later spread to other colonies, a means of
governing colonized peoples.
The violence committed by Indians was also seen as justifying the rule of the British and
set in motion colonial ideas of ‘martial races’ (Sinha 1995). The Uprising had a profound
effect on the Indian Army and the way it was deployed globally. While Bengali regiments
were almost entirely disbanded, and no longer recruited from, Punjabi and Gurkha troops
who stayed loyal were recruited in far larger numbers. This element of the Uprising, as we
will see, went well beyond colonial India, with these ‘martial races’ used continually for mili-
tary and police around the empire.
What are we to make of these events for historical IR? The Uprising precipitated sig-
nificant changes in the way that India and the broader empire were governed. All of this
might be placed into a modernizing historiographical narrative. It was indeed the end of the
624   Alexander E. Davis

Mughal empire. Instituting the Raj led to the bureaucratizing of India’s governance and pol-
itics. Institutions such as the Ministry of External Affairs, the Imperial Records Department
(which became the National Archives of India), the Indian Civil Service (ICS) and indeed
the secretariat buildings of Lutyens’ New Delhi, were creations of the Raj. These are all
associated with modernity in India. C. A. Bayly (1996) has memorably described this anxiety
as an ‘information panic’ which informed British policy in India after 1857. Coupled with the
fall of the ‘feudal’ Mughal empire, we might see this as ‘modernizing’. Regardless of whether
we fold this story into a progressive narrative, however, we must bear in mind the brutality
and exploitation of this form of modernity.
For subsequent Indian anticolonial nationalists, the 1857 Uprising and the way it was put
down showed both the possibilities and the pitfalls of violence as a method of resisting im-
perialism. Hindu nationalists were also influenced by the memory of the Indian Uprising,
in a very direct fashion. Hindutva developed as a response to British ideas of Indian effem-
inacy and British hypermasculinity. It latched onto this discourse and reinterpreted it as the
need to assert India’s masculine strength, drawing on a narrative of the Indian Uprising as a
‘First War of Independence’ by committed nationalists. This narrative of this event was built
by Vinayak Damodar Savarkar (1949), who argued in 1909 that it was a unified and nation-
alist revolt; and who ignored and underplayed the divisions between those engaged in the
Uprising to fit it into his project of provoking a hypermasculine Hindu nationalism.
The brutality with which the Uprising was put down led some anticolonial nationalist
thinkers to adopt non-​violent tactics, most famously, Mohandas Gandhi. As Priya Chacko
(2012) has noted, modernity, in the form of science, large-​scale development projects, and
the building of large dams and nuclear reactors, became central to postcolonial India’s state
project under Jawaharlal Nehru. Engaging with the scientific trappings of modernity, while
also forging its own development path and claiming a peaceful civilizational heritage be-
came India’s interpretation of its postcolonial modernity. Nehru and Gandhi came to see
Western modernity as oriented ‘toward exploitation, violence and material betterment at the
expense of the community’s moral and cultural values’ (Chacko 2012, 9). Here, we can see the
differentiated understandings of modernity generated by the colonial experience. Relying
on a singular understanding of what constitutes modernity and modernization creates a risk
of missing the ways in which modernity and the violence of empire were interpreted differ-
ently by colonizer and colonized.

The Global Indian Uprising: Debates about

Race and Ordering the Empire

The events of 1857 had a broader meaning for the British empire at large, and with it, inter-
national politics of the period. I will now move on to consider the global afterlives of the
Indian Uprising, by looking at the way it led the British to reconsider and reshape their em-
pire. This was the case both in terms of the governance structures of the empire, the way
the empire was imagined, and how India and Indians fit within it. This affected both spe-
cific legal and defence regimes, as well as imperial debates about how the empire should
be ordered. The Raj, as shown by Thomas Metcalf (2007), became crucial in governing and
 The Indian Uprising of 1857    625

exporting British power around the Indian Ocean region. Those who had stayed loyal to the
empire were positioned as culturally and racially superior soldiers, leading them to be used
as police and military assets around the region (Metcalf 2007, 102–​135). In Singapore, the
Uprising initially led to Indians being seen as a ‘menace’ and a threat, but the so-​called ‘mar-
tial races’, particularly Sikhs, were later used as police in Malaya (Rai 2013). They were placed
at a higher position in British racial thought, and were able to become agents of colonization,
despite being colonized themselves.
Australia provides an immediate example which illustrates the flaws of Britain’s global re-
sponse and the way that the empire was organized and defended. The Australian response
was slow and hampered by infighting. Since their foundation, the Australian colonies were
deeply dependent on shipping coming via India. Many of the goods that were used to build
and furnish the Australian colonies came through ports like Calcutta and Bombay. The de-
bate was between those who wanted to send troops, seeing India as central to the broader
security of the empire, and those who saw it as distant and not in the interests of the colony to
make a significant contribution.
In April of 1858, nearly a year after the original Uprising had started, the Governor of
New South Wales, William Denison met with his Legislative Assembly (New South Wales
Executive Council, 1858). Word of the Indian Uprising, and the violence of the Indians
involved, had reached Sydney, and Viscount Charles Canning (1858) in India had written
to Denison to request support. Denison, as an imperial representative, wanted to forward
all available troops to India, specifically in the form of the 77th regiment of the British
army, along with 100 horses and a regiment of artillery. This was to cost New South Wales
(NSW) between £3,500 and £4,000. The fear in the Australian colonies was that the Sikh
regiments of the Indian Army, only recently placed under British control, would join the
growing Uprising. This, as we know, did not eventuate. Denison had not received word
from London to divert all available troops but given the severity of the news reports
from India, he felt he had the authority to take drastic action. However, he also believed
that to approve this sum of money, there would have to be a vote in the Legislative
Assembly. His Executive Council (1858) believed that the Legislative Assembly would
‘gladly devise the opportunity of showing by such a contribution the sympathy which is
felt by the people of NSW for their fellow countrymen in India in their time of danger
and necessity’.
As the oldest of the Australian colonies, New South Wales was the only one to consider
sending support to crush the Uprising. Although Denison believed the Legislative Assembly
would see that Australia depended on imports from and connections with India, the
Assembly instead created a committee to study the necessity of the expense. One Victorian
newspaper, The Argus (1858, 5), wrote of the contribution being discussed by NSW and
argued for Victoria to make a similar contribution. They asked:

What is Victoria prepared to do? Will the 40th regiment be at once despatched to the banks
of the Ganges to add fresh laurels to those which that gallant corps has already so copiously
won in many a well fought field? . . . what is Victoria to do, in this critical state of India, towards
augmenting the British forces in that country?

The article closed with support for Denison’s call ‘to establish a local corps of a colonial char-
acter’ (The Argus 1858, 5).
626   Alexander E. Davis

As the Legislative Assembly’s study dragged on, word arrived that the Sikh members
of the Indian Army had stayed loyal to the empire, and the move was scrapped. The delay
meant that the Australian Colonies sent little if any assistance. It was in the Imperial interest
to finance a battery of artillery, but not necessarily in the perceived interests of British
colonists living in Australia. The Indian Uprising was an early military crisis that revealed
the weaknesses in the organization of the empire. The Australian colonies imperial elite
slowly became convinced that they required their own, permanent military defence force,
rather than relying on visiting British soldiers. These Australian forces could be sent to de-
fend imperial interests abroad if they were needed. Support for imperial conflicts became
the centrepiece of Australian foreign policy through to the end of the Second World War,
when it was replaced with support for the US (Davis 2019).
For the Australian colonies, the event was a reminder of their intense isolation, and the
slow and cumbersome administrative practices that connected them to the British em-
pire. Although there was a displayed desire to contribute to imperial defence, the colonies’
ability to do so was limited by infighting and what in Australia has become known as ‘the
tyranny of distance’. Yet, the mission to reorganize the empire and its defences remained
(Kennedy 1971).
Ultimately what this story shows is that the web of connections between the imperial
metropole of London and Whitehall and its far-​flung settler colonies populated by vast
numbers of colonized peoples was under-​theorized and misunderstood by British imperial
elites (Ballantyne 2003, 112–​113). The creation of the British Raj ensured that India became
a key node in an already deeply globalized imperial system. The Indian Uprising, which
provoked reorganization in the British empire, had global ramifications worth reflecting
on for our purposes. It revealed not only the weaknesses of colonial governance, but also
Britain’s inability to draw its empire together to defend itself. The creation of the Raj, and the
formalization of imperial structures led to debates on imperial federation in the 1860s on-
wards, with the position of India a key subject of discussion (Davis 2019, 29–​49).
Debates on India’s position amongst thinkers calling for an imperial federation to
formalize the empire’s structure, led to discussions of whether or not India, and other
colonies, could ‘progress’ to the level of British society. For some imperial federationists,
India was crucial for its size and attached prestige, but had to remain subjugated. For
others, imperial federation had to be racially distinct, and contain only Britain and its
loyal settler colonies (Bell 2007, 149). These ideas were connected to debates on social
Darwinist ideas of racial progress, and segregationist ideas in which some races were
seen as stagnant and some as stuck in the past. Before the 1857 Uprising, it was assumed,
broadly, that India was the past of Europe, and needed to be dragged along some kind of
evolutionary scale (Inden 1990, 66–​68). The events of 1857 were interpreted and imagined
in deeply racialized ways which fed into British racial thought and had implications for
global colonial governance. The British press reported on the violence perpetrated by the
‘uncivilized’ rebels who were thoughtlessly massacring their betters. This was used to con-
done the massive violence in response to the Uprising and fed into the idea that India
needed ‘civilizing’. It also led to the broader take-​up of the idea that Indian society and
British society did not necessarily share the same path to modernity. After 1857, this was up
for debate in imperial circles (Mehrotra 1961, 37). These debates on the ordering of Empire
went well beyond India and placed all Asian peoples on the second rung of an imagined
racial hierarchy.
 The Indian Uprising of 1857    627

As John R. Seely (2009, 176) put it in his musings on the future of the British empire,
and the possibility of imperial federation: ‘India is all past and, I may almost say, has no fu-
ture’. Another influential imperial thinker, Lionel Curtis, one of the strongest proponents
of imperial federation, concluded that India needed to be governed through authoritarian
structures, but thought that some form of progress was possible. Indians were to be slowly
introduced to self-​government (Davis et al. 2021, 35–​39). Notionally, the equality of non-​
Western peoples with their Western counterparts at some far-​off time in the future was
recognized. Non-​Western peoples were held in the ‘waiting room of history’ (Chakrabarty
2000). As Curtis saw it early in the twentieth century, the possibility of India becoming an
equal nation in the Commonwealth would take generations (Davis et al. 2021). For colonized
peoples, the message was arguably simpler. As Bender (2017, 144) put it, when talking about
New Zealand, and South Africa, as well as India, the events of 1857 ‘unleashed intense fear as
those in the colonies lived in anticipation of violence’.

Conclusion: The Indian Uprising and

the Global Colonial Order

Despite the passing of more than a century and a half, the Indian Uprising and the British re-
sponse to it have not been forgotten or forgiven. In 2007, a group of British tourists seeking to
memorialize the 150-​year anniversary of the Indian Uprising and the sacrifices of European
soldiers in India were pelted with stones and bottles at The Residency in Lucknow (Wagner
2011, 760). The Indian Uprising still provokes enormous passion, not least for its intensity
and violence. Its ongoing significance lies in the causes and direct consequences of the event
itself, and in the long-​running ideas it generated.
The causes of the Indian Uprising were manifold. It was the culmination of cultural, eco-
nomic, political, and ideational changes as a result of colonization. Its actors included a
sprawling transnational corporation, loyal and disloyal Indian soldiers, villages, a decaying
empire, India’s Princely States, and the British Crown. The violence it unleashed contributed
to a reinterpretation of global structures of race and empire. The Raj itself led to the creation
of many of the institutions and infrastructure that today make up the postcolonial Indian
state. But modernity, and its associated institutions and technologies, were interpreted dif-
ferently by Indians and the British, because of the ways in which this history is read between
colonizer and colonized. The Indian Uprising should only be folded into narratives of mod-
ernization when we bear in mind both the violence underpinning this development, and the
differentiated ideas of modernity that it helped produce.
A textured, granular reading of the events leading up to and following from the Indian
Uprising reveals not only the extreme violence that underpins India’s postcolonial mod-
ernity, but also the process by which it fed into imperial governance and the interpretation
of modernity. This analysis also reveals the way that the reorganization of the British em-
pire was based on an increased British anxiety about rebellion, and, indeed, their inability
to understand colonized peoples. The global aftermath of the Indian Uprising shows us how
global ideational structures were created not only by the event itself, but also by the inter-
pretation of those events both by the colonizers and by the colonized. The ideas and debates
628   Alexander E. Davis

that the Indian Uprising generated played key roles in making the international system we
live with and study today. Above all, then, the Indian Uprising demonstrates to us the colo-
nial genealogy of the international and the extreme violence that underpins it.

Notes
1. I have chosen to refer to the event in question as ‘the Indian Uprising’ to reflect that those
involved were not just mutinous soldiers, and that the event was a far broader uprising
within parts of Indian society. Calling it a mutiny masks the extent to which Indians
rejected colonial rule. This also avoids framing their motivations as solely rooted in Indian
nationalism.
2. On the US case, see Vitalis (2015). On the imperial version of race in the making of IR
across the British empire, see: Davis et al. (2021).

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 Chapter 43

T he Berlin a nd Hag u e
C onferenc e s
Claire Vergerio

Both the Berlin Conference of 1884–​85 and the Hague Conferences of 1899 and 1907 occupy
an important place in narratives about the development of modern international relations
and modern international law.1
While the extent of their practical impact remains debated, they have come to sym-
bolize some of the key international developments of the so-​called belle époque (1871–​1914).
The Hague Conferences are depicted as a beacon of progressive thinking, embodying the
attempt to limit the horrors of warfare through the codification of the laws of war and the
establishment of the first permanent court of arbitration, as well as the broader turn towards
our modern international system based on multilateralism, codified international law, and
the rise of global civil society. The Berlin Conference, by contrast, is considered to represent
the darker side of late nineteenth-​century developments in international relations and inter-
national law, cementing the centuries-​long love affair between jurists and imperialism as well
as the violent subjugation of the African continent. As such, they represent two conflicting
understandings of the role of international lawyers—​or publicists—​in the development of
our modern world: one progressive and humanitarian, the other brutal and imperialistic.
What is striking, however, is that for all the literature on each conference, there is—​to my
knowledge—​no piece that explicitly examines the links between the Berlin Conference and
the Hague Conferences. Scholars interested in telling a positive story about the development
of international law focus on the Hague conferences, while the more critically minded ones
intent on highlighting international law’s complicity with empire hone in on Berlin. The few
works that mention both of them (mainly Koskenniemi 2001) offer a more nuanced picture
of international law and its Janus-​faced past but they do not explicitly relate the conferences
to each other. In other words, the literature makes it seem as if the conferences belonged to
entirely separate spheres of the development of international law.
Our current inability to discuss Berlin and The Hague in the same breath stems at least
in part from our presentist tendency to view humanitarianism and imperialism as intui-
tively opposed. Yet, as many scholars have now shown, liberal humanitarian concerns and
the drive towards imperial expansion were in fact eminently compatible in the minds of
many intellectuals and practitioners of the period (Bell 2007; Pitts 2009, 2012, 2018). Taking
632   Claire Vergerio

stock of this literature, this chapter seeks to challenge the existing, disjointed approach to
the conferences, and in doing so, to shed further light on the ambivalent character of belle
époque international law. Following a brief overview of the main debates about Berlin and
The Hague, I make two core claims about the links between the conferences.
First, I argue that a number of the most prominent publicists of the period were involved,
either directly or indirectly, in both the Berlin and the Hague conferences. While we know
that the Institut de droit international, the first professional organization for international
lawyers founded in 1873, was generally invested in both the colonial question and in the issue
of limiting the excesses of warfare, the fact that it was actually the same publicists taking
leadership roles in both of these areas should give us real pause for thought. Second, I suggest
that in light of this overlap, the conferences shared some important similarities that should
be further investigated. They were notably all driven by the shift towards a humanitarian
and universalist approach to international law, and they gave pride of place to philanthropic
concerns and to the participation of private actors. I thus conclude by claiming that we
should move away from the siloed study of the Berlin and Hague conferences and examine
the two in tandem, since when it comes to the general development of modern global gov-
ernance, they arguably constitute two sides of the same coin.

The Berlin and Hague

Conferences: An Overview

While the actual impact of the Berlin and Hague conferences has become increasingly
debated, with numerous scholars arguing that they failed to achieve their short-​term goals,
they have nonetheless come to be seen as foundational moments for the modern, twentieth-​
century international order. As such, they can both be considered as founding myths of
modern IR and International Law: they provide critical benchmarks in our understanding
of the development of the modern world, but they appear questionable once one engages
with their more granular history. In this section, I provide a brief overview of what the
conferences entailed, and what main scholarly debates continue to unfold around them.
In doing so, I draw on the works of historians, lawyers, and IR scholars, who have all
written about these conferences but have tended to do so in slightly different ways. At one
end of the granularity spectrum, the more common approach for historians has been to pro-
duce highly detailed works—​often monographs with heavy primary-​source research—​that
focus entirely on either the Berlin Conference or the ones in The Hague, and that connect
them to individual aspects of modernity, such as the rise of civil society. At the other
end of the spectrum, IR scholars have generally discussed these conferences in broader
brushstrokes, drawing overwhelmingly on secondary sources, and as part of larger, more
holistic narratives about the emergence of the modern world order. Lawyers have fallen
somewhere in between, with the conferences being sometimes discussed in passing as part
of a broader set of developments (e.g. Miéville 2005, 253) and sometimes examined in much
greater depth through primary sources (e.g. Craven 2015).
Regardless of their orientation in terms of granularity, scholars working within this area
have virtually all sought to connect the conferences with the ‘modernity problematique’.
 The Berlin and Hague Conferences    633

Underpinning their various debates, the same question recurs: to what extent did the
conferences constitute a watershed in the development of the modern world order?
Part of the disagreements pertain to the way we should understand the purpose of these
conferences. The other part relates to whether these conferences actually achieved what they
sought to do. In both cases, recent contributions to the literatures on Berlin and The Hague
have sought to transcend these debates and provide nuanced syntheses of these conferences’
impact.

The Berlin Conference of 1884–​1885

The Berlin Conference took place between November 1884 and February 1885 on the ini-
tiative of Otto von Bismarck, the first chancellor of the German Empire. It is generally
considered to have laid down the legal terms of the ‘Scramble for Africa’, described by Joseph
Conrad as ‘the vilest scramble for loot that ever disfigured the history of human conscience’
(Conrad 1924). The conference, the common story goes, enabled Europeans and a few of
their imperial rivals to “peacefully” split the African cake amongst themselves, avoiding
the great bloodshed that would otherwise have resulted from inter-​imperial competition.
Granular accounts of the conference, however, have put forward a number of much more
specific narratives that clash with one another. Most importantly, scholars strongly dis-
agree about what the conference’s true goals were, whether it managed to achieve them, and
whether it should be imbued with any real historical importance (for an excellent summary
of this debate, see Craven, 2015; for general historical accounts of the conference, see espe-
cially Crowe 1942 and the more recent Förster et al. 1988; the best compilation of primary
sources is still Gavin 1973).
A number of scholars (Anghie 2005, 90–​97; Griffiths 1986; Miéville 2005, 253; Westlake
1894, 129–​189) consider the Berlin conference to have marked a turning point in the his-
tory of imperialism and in the trajectory of the African continent. According to them, the
General Act of the conference constitutes the point of origin for the contemporary configur-
ation of African borders as it created the legal framework for the formal partition of Africa.
The General Act of the conference, they tell us, turned central Africa into terra nullius, suc-
cessfully placing the African natives under an ‘authoritative framework of positivist juris-
prudence’ (Anghie 2005, 91) and legalizing the exploitation of the local African population,
with catastrophic consequences for the continent.
Other scholars (Bley 2005; Crowe 1942; Katzenellenbogen 1996)2 see these claims as
grossly exaggerated and emphasize both the more restricted aims of the conference and the
extent to which it failed to achieve them. They argue strongly against taking the Berlin con-
ference as a founding moment for the partition of Africa, pointing out that African borders
were fixed in the decades after the conference, not during the conference itself, noting that
the famous provisions relating to the acquisition of territory pertained only to already
established claims of sovereignty on the coastlines of Africa (Crowe 1942, 4). Ultimately, they
contend that the conference’s goals were not colonization and exploitation but the establish-
ment of a free trade regime, the internationalization of territory, and the pursuit of philan-
thropy. On this basis, these scholars echo the general public sentiment in the aftermath of the
conference: Berlin, if anything, was an utter failure. After the conference, in complete oppos-
ition with its aims, monopolistic systems of trade were set up, the centre of Africa became
634   Claire Vergerio

Belgian, and the Congo basin turned into the scene of some of the most shocking brutalities
of colonial history.
In recent years, scholars have tried to reconcile these two conflicting accounts of Berlin.
Some emphasize that while the conference is not the cornerstone of the partition of Africa,
it is nonetheless significant because it established the administrative state as the sole le-
gitimate form of political organization on the continent, forcing it to adapt to one specific
understanding of modernity (Eckert 2009). More ambitiously, others (Craven 2015; Epple
2016) claim that we can overcome these tensions between our narratives if we pay closer
attention to ‘the relationship between the apparent aspirations embodied in the text [of the
General Act] and the modalities of their realization’ (Craven 2015, 35). In other words, many
of the existing dichotomies—​between narratives of success or failure, of colonial or anti-​
colonial aspirations, of the pursuit free trade or that of monopolies—​result from the gap
between the aspirations and the material implications of the General Act itself (this echoes
Crowe 1942).
For example, while the aspirations displayed by the conference participants stemmed
from a genuine philanthropic belief in civilization’s universal potential, their practical out-
come was to draw a line between those who were civilized and those who were not and could
thus be forcibly intervened against (Epple 2016). Even more concretely, while participants
genuinely sought to avoid colonization by pushing for internationalization and trying to es-
tablish a free trade regime, what they promoted in theory was unsustainable and bound to
lead to the exact opposite in practice (Craven 2015). Establishing a free trade regime required
significant expenses, which could only be covered if a colonial power had the right to levy
tariffs and taxes. Thus, the establishment of Leopold’s Congo Free State, widely regarded as
the symbol of Berlin’s failure, was actually ‘its most logical extension’ (Craven 2015, 55).
These new syntheses show us that Berlin was highly significant even though it ultimately
confounded the original expectations of its authors. They provide a more coherent under-
standing of the past and highlight the numerous contradictions that existed at the heart of
what late nineteenth-​century diplomats, lawyers, and intellectuals were trying to achieve.
I will return to this point, but before doing so, I will now provide a similar overview of our
current understanding of the Hague conferences.

The Hague Conferences of 1899 and 1907

The ‘international peace conferences’ held in The Hague in 1899 and 1907 have not led to
quite as much debate as the Berlin conference, though some disagreements do exist, again,
regarding their aims and their impact in practice (for in depth histories of the conferences,
see Abbenhuis 2018; Abbenhuis, Barber, and Higgins 2017; Dülffer 2007; Eyffinger 1999,
2007a, 2007b; for primary sources, see Rosenne 2001). In the broadest sense, the 1899 con-
ference, which was called by Tsar Nicholas II, marked the culmination of efforts to codify
the laws of war on land based on earlier efforts, most notably the Lieber Code of 1863, the
St Petersburg Declaration of 1868, the Brussels Declaration of 1874, and the Oxford Manual
of 1880. The 1907 conference built on the achievements of its 1899 predecessor, expanding
regulations predominantly in the area of naval warfare (Rindfleisch 2007). A third confer-
ence was meant to be held in 1915, but it was cancelled in light of the outbreak of the First
World War (for a discussion, see Abbenhuis 2018). The conferences are most commonly
 The Berlin and Hague Conferences    635

known for having tried to limit the horrors of warfare through both the codification of the
laws of war and the attempt to establish international arbitration as an alternative to the in-
stitution of war (see e.g. Best 1999; Hobe and Fuhrmann 2007).
For long, the stark contrast between the conferences’ high aspirations and the tragic end
they met with the catastrophe of the First World War led them to be dismissed by scholars as
events of little consequence (Hucker 2015), even though they had been perceived by public
opinion as great successes at the time (Abbenhuis 2018). The literature then developed into
two broad camps: works by military and diplomatic historians who read the conferences
as a failure, and works by international legal scholars who interpreted the conferences as
the starting point for groundbreaking developments in international law (see Abbenhuis
et al. 2017 for an overview of this continuing divide). Over the past 20 years, the literature
emphasizing the importance of the conferences has grown significantly, and they are now
associated with a number of both minor and major themes in the development of modern
international relations. While scholars have emphasized their foundational character
within specific areas, from disarmament and arms control (Keefer 2007) to the principle of
distinguishing between civilians and combatants (Kleffner 2007; for a more critical take, see
Nabulsi 1999) and the punishment of war crimes (Segesser 2007), what is even more striking
is the place they occupy within broader narratives about the development of the contem-
porary international order.
In the broadest sense, the Hague conferences have been contextualized as an attempt to
fill the vacuum left by the declining European Concert as a great power framework at the
end of the nineteenth century (Schulz 2007). Since the European states system was under
great tension, the argument goes, the conferences were organized as an alternative means of
securing peace. In this respect, they can be viewed as an attempt to repair the defects of the
dissolving international system, with the efforts of the new internationalist peace movement
being eventually sabotaged by militaristic elites (Schulz 2007). More specifically, though, the
key in these narratives is to highlight not what the conferences accomplished (its immediate
contributions were rather modest), but the process they started (Eyffinger 1999), particularly
in terms of the emergence of twentieth-​century global governance: the first Hague confer-
ence is seen as ‘undoubtedly a crucial watershed in the development of modern fundamental
institutions’ (Reus-​Smit 1999, 141), generally for three main reasons.
First, the Hague Conferences are considered to have marked the emergence of core inter-
national organizations and set into motion the replacement of a system based on natural
law, dynastic diplomacy, and unequal sovereignties, with one based on open multilateral
conferences, contractual international law, and sovereign equality (Buzan and Lawson
2015, 85–​89; Hobe and Fuhrmann 2007; Hueck 2004; Reus-​Smit 1999, 140–​145; for a more
reserved assessment see Clark 2007, 61–​82).3 Embracing principles of procedural justice,
states adopted universalist and legislative ideas including shared governance with uni-
versal participation and sovereign equality, as well as diplomatic practices such as one-​
state-​one-​vote that would come to form the basis of the contemporary global governance
system. They attempted to organize regular multilateral conferences on that basis, which
were only interrupted by the outbreak of the war (see especially Reus-​Smit 1999, 140–​145;
though for a critique of the idea that the second half of the nineteenth century marked the
triumph of multilateral treaty-​making, see Keene 2012). In terms of formal organizations,
the conferences sought to create institutions that would help peacefully resolve international
disputes (Buzan and Lawson 2015, 213–​114; Caron 2000; Hayashi 2017) and they created the
636   Claire Vergerio

Permanent Court of Arbitration, which is considered to be the precursor of both the League
of Nations and its Permanent Court of International Justice, later to become the contem-
porary International Court of Justice (Abbenhuis 2018; Buzan and Lawson 2015, 89; Davis
1975; McCormack 2001).
Additionally, the Hague conferences are closely associated with the expansion of inter-
national society, as the charmed circle of countries that were to benefit from these new
principles and institutions widened once and for all beyond its European and North
American core (Buzan and Lawson 2015, 201). The conferences—​especially that of 1907,
where participation expanded massively from 26 to 46 countries—​ were attended by
representatives from all around the world (except Africa) including from Japan, Siam, Persia,
the Ottoman empire, and several Latin American states, marking a shift from the traditional
European ‘Concert of Nations’ towards a more inclusive ‘comity of nations’ based on more
universal norms and values (Eyffinger 1999; Finnemore and Jurkovich 2014; Schlichtmann
2003),4 although the divide continued to apply between ‘civilized’ nations who could partici-
pate and ‘uncivilized’ ones who could not.
Finally, the Hague Conferences are widely discussed as having marked a turning point
between the ‘old’ and the ‘new’ diplomacy due to the rise of global civil society (Clark
2007, 61–​82). They were strongly shaped by peace groups and the media, which had rela-
tively open access to the conferences (Buzan and Lawson 2015, 95; Clark 2007, 61–​82)
and exemplified the greater influence of civil society movements and citizens trying to
pressure their politicians and diplomats (Eyffinger 2007a), along with the growing role
of public opinion both domestically and internationally (Best 1999; Hucker 2015). These
new participants in international politics were a particularly important faction during
the conference of 1907 (Finnemore and Jurkovich 2014; Herren-​Oesch and Knab 2007),
and while scholars have debated the impact of their presence (Lesaffer 2013; Rindfleisch
2007)5 the most recent literature has reiterated the extent to which the conferences
where as much diplomatic events as events of public agency (Abbenhuis 2018; though
for a differing opinion, see Hueck 2004).6 Through the combination of a newly globally
connected media and a powerful message regarding peace, disarmament, and con-
flict resolution, public pressure had a strong effect on the outcomes of the conference,
highlighting the new weight of public opinion in global governance (Abbenhuis 2018).
Recent works have also noted that the Hague Conferences constituted the moment when
states adopted the concept of the ‘international community’ in both diplomacy and
in international law, reflecting the increasingly universalist aspirations of the parties
involved (Roshchin 2017).
Overall, while some disagreements exist regarding the impact of the Hague conferences,
they are now widely seen under a positive light as events that brought about some of the most
important developments in early twentieth-​century global governance. By contrast with the
Berlin conference, which is mainly evoked to deplore international law’s complicity in the
darkest hours of European colonialism, the Hague conferences are depicted predominantly
as a laudable turning point in international relations, a real beacon of progress whose ad-
mirable aims were undermined by the outbreak of the First World War. Yet, since the Berlin
Conference and the first Hague Conference were less than 15 years apart, it is remarkable to
note that the two sets of events are almost never discussed in relation to each other. In the
remainder of the chapter, I attempt to show the extent to which the two sets of events were in
fact linked.
 The Berlin and Hague Conferences    637

Berlin and The Hague: Two Sides of

the Same Coin?

The Berlin and Hague conferences were, of course, very different in their content. Yet,
they both have to be contextualized within the broader development of the discipline of
International Law. As has now been widely discussed (Koskenniemi 2001; Nuzzo and
Vec 2012), modern international law emerged over the course belle époque, with an ini-
tial flurry of foundational developments in the 1860s and 1870s, and a consolidation of
its trajectory from the 1880s onwards. Two core themes were at the heart of the new dis-
cipline from the start: the limitation of the horrors of war, through arbitration and the
codification of the laws of war, and, soon enough, the application of international law
beyond the confines of Europe, both with regards to non-​European sovereigns and in
terms of how best to legislate imperial expansion. Not only were the same institutions
involved in both endeavours, as has already been shown, but actually, many of the same
individuals were either present at or extensively involved with both the Berlin and the
Hague conferences.

The Broader Context: The Birth of the Discipline

of International Law
Following the first attempts to codify the laws of war and the foundation of the first
international scientific legal journal, the Revue de droit international et de legislation
comparée (1868), the first professional organization for international lawyers, the Institut
de droit international, was founded in September 1873, along with the Association for
the Reform and Codification of the Laws of Nations (the present-​day International Law
Association). The Institut’s purpose, broadly speaking, was to turn International Law
into a widely recognized science and a professional field of its own. But more specific-
ally, the creation of the Institut was intimately linked to the conflicts of its time, and par-
ticularly to the Franco-​Prussian War of 1870–​7 1. Indeed, it was the failure of both sides
in the Franco-​Prussian War to abide by the terms of the 1864 Geneva Convention that
gave Gustave Rolin-​Jacquemyns (1835–​1902) and Gustave Moynier (1826–​1910), with the
encouragements of Francis Lieber (1800–​72), the author of the famous Lieber Code of
1863, the impetus to create a conference and eventually a permanent institution or an
academy of international law (Koskenniemi 2001, 158–​159).
Once these initial institutions were established and efforts to codify the laws of war and pro-
mote arbitration as an alternative to warfare were moving forward steadily, the international
lawyers of the period—​known as publicists—​turned their attention to the non-​Western
world. Two questions formed the core of their agenda: that of the scope of international law
and notably its applicability to ‘the Orient’ (Koskenniemi 2001, 132; Pitts 2018, 68), and that of
how to manage the process of imperial expansion, which was now in full swing. The Institut
was against meddling into the controversial matter of ‘politics’, better left to European diplo-
macy, but absolutely fine with influencing colonial affairs (Koskenniemi 2001, 62). Most of the
publicists thus became extensively invested in both the regulation of warfare and in the legal
638   Claire Vergerio

architecture of (mainly) European empires. As is now a well-​established point in the literature

on the development of the discipline of International Law, the Institut itself was deeply involved
in both the Berlin conference and the Hague conferences via publishing and philanthropy (on
Berlin, see Koskenniemi 2001, 98–​178; on The Hague, see Olmstead 2017, 50). What I now wish
to show is the extent to which it was in fact some of the same people who were involved in both
endeavors and drove both the conferences at Berlin and at The Hague.

A Very Small World

Most of the core members of the Institut, including some of its founders, were pillars of the
efforts to codify the laws of war, promote arbitration, and legislate imperial expansion, most
urgently the situation in the Congo. The following table provides a brief overview of some of
the key figures involved and some of their respective duties.

Institut member Involvement in Hague Conferences Involvement in Congo case and

Berlin Conference
Tobias Asser o Delegate for The Netherlands to both the o Obtained Knighthood in the Order
(1838–​1913) 1899 and the 1907 Hague Conferences of King Leopold of Belgium for
o Founder and member of the Permanent preliminary work on Congo (1883)
Court of Arbitration (1900–​13) o Delegate for The Netherlands at
o Winner of Nobel Peace Prize (1911) Berlin conference (1884–​85)
Auguste Beernaert o Delegate for Belgium to both the 1899 o Belgian prime minister at Berlin
(1829–​1912) and the 1907 Hague Conferences Conference
o Member of the Permanent Court of o Oversaw creation of the
Arbitration (1900–​12) independent State of the Congo
o Winner of Nobel Peace Prize (1909) as Belgian Prime Minister (1885)
Friedrich Fromhold o Author of famous Martens clause (1899) o Prepared Russian position at
(Fyodor Fedorovich) o Delegate for Russia to both the 1899 and Berlin Conference, emphasizing
Martens the 1907 Hague Conferences Russian stakes in light of possible
(1845–​1909) o Member of the Permanent Court of extension of principles to Asia
Arbitration (1900–​09) o Delegate for Russia at Berlin
o Nominated for Nobel Peace Prize (1902) conference
Gustave Moynier o Key drafter of Geneva Convention (1864) o Directed the attention of the
(1862–​1910) and later amendments Institut to the Congo (1878)
o Founder and long-​term president of the o Founded monthly magazine
International Committee for the Red Cross ‘L’Afrique explorée et
(1868–​1910) civilisée’ (1879)
o Founding member of the Ligue internationale o Presented essay about Congo
et permanente de la paix (1868) to Institut and all European
o Wrote proposal for permanent court of governments (1883)
arbitration (1872) o Consul of Congo Free State
o Supported organization of 1899 Hague (1890–​1904)
Conference but unable to attend for health
reasons
o Nominated for Nobel Peace Prize (1901,
1902, 1903, 1905)

Sources: Tobias Asser (Eyffinger 2011; n. a. 1914); Auguste Beernaert (Demoulin 1966; Eyffinger 1999,
133–​134; Mélot 1932); Friedrich Fromhold Martens (Eyffinger 1999, 177–​179; Mälksoo 2014; n. a. 1909);
Gustave Moynier (Bugnion 2011).
 The Berlin and Hague Conferences    639

This non-​exhaustive table points to the considerable amount of overlap that existed not
only in terms of who wrote about the issues raised at the Berlin and Hague conferences,
but in terms of who was an active participant and shaped policy at both sets of events. As
such, it seems untenable to discuss these events in isolation from each other, as if one could
somehow separate the motivations that drove them and assess their legacies independently
from each other. With few exceptions, the norm continues to be for scholars writing on the
Hague conferences and those working on the Berlin conference not to draw any links be-
tween their respective areas of scholarship. And yet, how can one appreciate the full legacy
of the Hague conferences, depicted across much of the literature as a crucial turning point
in the development of the modern international order, without taking stock of the fact that
they were driven in large part by the same individuals who gave us the Congo free state and
its notorious atrocities? Publicists such as Asser, Beearnert, Martens, and Moynier, who were
either nominees or winners of the Nobel Peace Prize in the first decade of the twentieth cen-
tury, were operating largely on the basis of the same principles that had motivated their in-
volvement in the Congo just two decades earlier. In light of these continuities, it would be
well worth further looking into the similarities between Berlin and The Hague. The next
section provides a preliminary foray into this question.

Berlin and The Hague: Exploring Commonalities

Due to the considerable overlap in terms of who was involved at both the Berlin and Hague
conferences, the first element of commonality is, unsurprisingly, the general aspirations of
the conferences. Though their immediate goals were substantively different, they were both
driven by a strong humanitarian and universalistic spirit. While this may be more obvious
in the case of the Hague conferences, which, in addition to their core aim of limiting the
horrors of war, explicitly promoted the idea that international society had the obligation to
improve conditions of human beings around the world (Clark 2007, 61–​82), it was also a
strong impetus in the case of Berlin.
In the broadest sense, the publicists viewed their attempt to legislate the situation in the
‘uncivilized’ Congo as a way to ‘illuminate the terms under which European international
law might be rendered universal’ (Craven 2012, 37). As the discipline of International Law
was taking root, this was their chance to turn European international law into something
truly global. Even more explicitly, European powers justified their intervention in large part
on philanthropic and humanitarian grounds: they were there to prevent slavery, improve life
conditions, and treat cultures and nationalities equally (Epple 2016). It is of course tempting
to interpret these grounds, along with the other themes of neutrality and free trade, as
‘mere ideological screening devices that enabled attention to be diverted from the concrete
processes of partition and rule that were to occur in their shadow’ (Craven 2015, 49; for in-
stance see Gann’s chapter in Förster et al. 1988; Gathii 2006; Nuzzo 2012). However, a strong
case has been made for why this is an oversimplistic reading of the conference (Craven 2015,
49–​59). Most of the publicists involved genuinely believed that they were acting in a humani-
tarian spirit, and in fact, though many initially failed to denounce the egregious violence on
the ground, a number of them also sought to eventually distance themselves from the Congo
after the atrocities committed there came to light.7 More often than not, their contradictions
were not primarily the product of hypocrisy but of genuine tensions in their predominantly
liberal ideology.
640   Claire Vergerio

A second and related commonality between the two conferences is the influence of pri-
vate actors and public opinion, both driven again by a generally humanitarian and philan-
thropic outlook. As I have noted previously, this has been extensively discussed in the case
of the Hague conferences, with much attention paid to the international peace movement, to
non-​governmental organizations such as the International Committee of the Red Cross, and
to the very tangible impact of public opinion. At Berlin, there were of course a number of
enterprises, traders, and explorers trying to influence the outcome of the conference, but the
most conspicuous private actor was still the scientific and philanthropic organization known
as the Association internationale du Congo (AIC), whose ‘flag’ and claims to sovereignty in
the Congo had even been recognized by the United States (US) in April 1884 (Craven 2015,
37; on the AIC more broadly, see J. Stengers’ chapter in Förster et al. 1988). While the AIC did
not have an official place at the conference (Craven 2012, 10), its role was nonetheless signifi-
cant: it concluded two ‘side agreements’ appended to the text of the General Act with France
and Portugal, it was recognized as a legitimate actor in the Congo by a host of ‘declarations’
and ‘conventions’ finalized during the conference, it was able to adhere to the General Act
itself, and it eventually became the administration of the ‘Congo Free State’ (Craven 2015,
41–​42). Public opinion also played a major role in the domestic realms of the main European
powers, with the public closely following colonial developments and the press actively
relaying information about the Congo (Press 2017, 166–​218). Politicians were highly aware
of the stakes involved; shortly before the conference, Bismarck notably warned that ‘public
opinion in Germany lays so great a stress on . . . colonial policy that the Government’s pos-
ition . . . actually depends on its success’ (Press 2017, 184). Thus, at Berlin too, private actors,
public opinion, and the press played a significant role in shaping the course of diplomatic
developments.
A third commonality to note within this preliminary foray is the rather underappreci-
ated role of the US at the conferences. While some work has been done on the US’s role at
the Hague conferences (see especially Eyffinger 2007a, 2007b), notably highlighting the
US delegation’s impact on the content of various clauses of the conventions, Theodore
Roosevelt’s influence on the establishment of the Permanent Court of Arbitration, and
Andrew Carnegie’s financing of the building that would host it, the Peace Palace (Eyffinger
2007a), there seems to be surprisingly little research into its role at Berlin. This lack of
attention could perhaps stem from to the fact that the US did not ratify the General Act
due to domestic opposition. Yet, the few exceptions (Alexandrowicz 1973, 19; Munene
1990) point us in a fascinating direction, arguing that the US helped King Leopold so-
lidify his claims on the Congo and that it also profoundly shaped Bismarck’s approach. In
light of the growing literature on the founding and early years of the American Society of
International Law (1906) (see especially Amorosa 2019), it would perhaps be fruitful to
place the US’s involvement at both Berlin and the Hague within the broader context of the
professionalization of the discipline in the US in order further remedy the siloed approach
to these conferences and the tendency to focus predominantly on the major European
powers there.
Along these lines, a final area for further research is the role of non-​Western actors at the
conferences. While there are some works on The Hague (e.g. Schlichtmann 2003 on Japan;
Schulz 2017 on Latin American states), the same cannot be said for Berlin. Some research has
emerged on, for instance, Sweden and Norway’s roles at the Berlin conference, but there still
seems to be a great dearth of information of the role of African actors (though Förster et al.
 The Berlin and Hague Conferences    641

1988, 401–​526 provides a starting point; for a more recent foray, albeit in French, see Hébié
2015). Excavating the links between Berlin and The Hague is bound to affect our narratives
about the development of the modern world order, if only by decentring what is still often
a heavily Eurocentric (and triumphalist) story anchored in the achievements of the peace
conferences. Broadening our lens to further recover the agency of African, Asian, and Latin
American actors is a logical step further in that direction.

Conclusion

The Berlin and Hague conferences occupy a prominent role in narratives about the devel-
opment of modern international relations and modern international law, one mainly as a
story of violence, greed, and empire, the other as an almost exclusively positive tale of hu-
manitarianism and multilateralism. This chapter has attempted to provide a brief overview
of the main debates regarding these conferences, and it has argued for the importance of
examining these gatherings as two sides of the same coin rather than as entirely separate
events. Not only were the main publicists at the conferences part of the same epistemic com-
munity, there were in fact a number of them who were directly involved in both Berlin and
The Hague. This calls for further engagement with the context out of which both conferences
were able to emerge, and, more specifically, it highlights the need to develop accounts of the
rise of twentieth-​century global governance institutions that take can stock of both Berlin
and The Hague. Any account that builds on one but not the other risks putting forward a
truncated understanding of where the modern international order comes from, whether it
be of a critical or of a more laudatory bent.

Notes
1. I would like to thank my research assistant, Jelto Makris, for his invaluable assistance
with the preliminary research for this chapter. The chapter has also benefitted from
funding from the Dutch Research Council (NWO) in the context of a VENI grant,
VI.Veni.191R.049.
2. See also the heavily criticized but still widely cited (Pakenham 1992). Pakenham fails to
engage meaningfully with any of the scholarly literature written by his contemporaries
(Low 1994).
3. Clark emphasizes that the conferences did not give rise to these norms per se, but simply
gave a stage to many new norms that emerged in the second half of the nineteenth century.
4. Schlichtmann notably contrasts the attitude of the Japanese, who had high hopes about the
conference and were ready to follow binding agreements on disarmament and peaceful
settlement of international disputes, with that of the Germans, who were much less co-
operative and almost boycotted the conference in the early stage.
5. Rindfleisch claims that they contributed to the collapse of planned agreements because
they pushed diplomats to make promises they could not fulfil (contrasting this with the
successes of the London Naval Conference), whereas Lesaffer emphasizes their successes,
particularly in the case of the peace movement and its dual pursuit of disarmament and
arbitration.
642   Claire Vergerio

6. Hueck claims that the voices of peace activists, revolutionary committees, and independ-
ence movements were often overemphasized and that they remained a minority among
lawyers who, for their part, were mostly guided by national interests.
7. One of the most famous examples is that of the Belgian Prime Minister Auguste Beernaert,
whose relationship with King Leopold II was severely strained over the issue.

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 Chapter 44

T he First Worl d Wa r
and Vers a i l l e s
Duncan Kelly

The Versailles Treaty, signed on 28 June 1919, by the Allied Powers and Germany, formally
ended the First World War, but left open as many problems as it tried to solve. France was
weaker, Britain and Germany poorer, America alone, and a mandates system of colonial
internationalism amplified racial inequalities across the global colour line. The actual pro-
ceedings, dominated by diplomatic competition between the Big Four (America, France,
Great Britain, and Italy), began with a flurry of optimism as Woodrow Wilson, the first
American President to leave his country during office, was feted as the leading figure of a
democratic future of national self-​determination following peace without annexations.
Nevertheless, proceedings in this image were quickly mired in administrative and political
chaos. Decision making worked on an ad hoc basis, amid another virulent wave of influenza
affecting three of the big four. With no agenda to speak of, and no credibly settled sense of
which issues to raise and which to ignore, the negotiations practiced a sort of hyper-​modern,
avant-​garde legalism to cope with earth-​changing decisions that needed quick and novel
forms of justification. At the same time, a very archaic and rather shambolic sense of what
‘great power’ politics required, governed attempts to restore an old-​world balance of power
to a new world order with American hegemony at its centre. They were both products of, as
well as problems for modernity.
Indeed, as Nathaniel Berman suggests, the rhetoric of reconstruction across International
Law and politics following the First World War, resembled nothing so much as a form of
modernism. Forced to confront and incorporate dynamic and often-​irrational passions
of nationalism, which had conventionally been side-​lined under the legal fiction of the
modern state as the sole source of law and power by virtue of its individual ‘personality’
or sovereignty, international legal practice had to reorient itself. In so doing, hybrid forms
of reasoning and practices emerged to deal with the problems of reconstruction through
plebiscites, territorial restructuring, and administrative solutions to general questions of jus-
tice and (particularly minority) rights. Political reconstruction effectively took place in and
through the margins of the modern state (Berman 1992, 362f).
That attempts to curate a peace began without a roadmap, should not be too surprising.
After its initial furies, the First World War quickly began to unfold without a script
 The First World War and Versailles    647

(Stevenson 1991). From nationalist struggles in the Balkans, diplomatic and military escal-
ation rapidly took a European conflict into a global war. Plans and strategies geared around
the Western Front had failed, prompting new forms of economic and military cooperation
between Britain, France, and America from 1916. In December of that year, German and
American ‘Peace Notes’ precipitated a powerful propaganda war for public opinion and
sympathy, as to whether Allied ‘democracy’ or German ‘autocracy’ provided the grounds
for a victorious peace. As this evolved, novel forms of justification were offered as to what
was acceptable in this so-​called war to end all wars. Technical arguments about the legality
of economic blockades and unrestricted submarine warfare seemed easier to contemplate,
and justify, than large-​scale political compromises. This can be seen in the way that Wilson
and the Americans responded to the revolutionary challenges in Russia towards the end of
1917; first, with hope that anti-​imperial and anti-​autocratic politics would be bolstered on the
Eastern Front, then turning to horror and affrontery that the Bolsheviks’ really did mean to
both take Russia out of the war, all the better to highlight the hypocrisies of imperial politics
during their treaty negotiations with the Quadruple Alliance at Brest-​Litovsk in early 1918.
The Paris Conference of late 1917 and into 1918 framed an Allied response to these events
after another year of massive casualties for minimal gains across the Western Front. But it
was quickly overtaken by Wilson’s drafting of the infamous fourteen points, and then four
principles (essentially the determination of territorial settlements according to the interests
of populations rather than great power politics, and for ‘well-​defined’ national aspirations
to be satisfied). Looked at from any angle, the war never simply involved binary choices for
its participants. There was neither all out planning for Armageddon, nor unproblematic co-
operation; neither sleepwalking towards the inevitable, nor a clear and determinate plan of
attack that followed a distinct order and script, perhaps not even in the infamous German
plans to quickly overthrow France, having routed their military through Belgium. This latter
thought was proffered as an article of faith by numerous military generals and was compat-
ible with the pursuit of German hegemony in Eastern Europe and parts of Africa. The point
of a military ‘first strike’ had a principally West European focus, and there was a high de-
gree of ideological continuity on these points between national liberals and the radical right.
But the extent to which this signalled the primacy of domestic or foreign policy remained
opaque (Ferguson 1994, 729ff, 733f, 740f; 1995).
The First World War, alongside the peace conference and treaty signed at Versailles,
were clearly pivotal moments for history and international relations, parts of what François
Hartog terms an evolving ‘regime of historicity’. Hartog’s terminology provides a double
heuristic guide for what follows (2015). First, because he claims that the period between 1789
and 1989 was one in which the sense of historical past and the present were geared towards
an account of the future as something new and open, my focus is on how contemporaries
saw their options during the years of conflict and reconstruction in something like their own
terms. These were moments in which future-​oriented plans and projects, utopias even, had
become thinkable because they had been temporalized (rendered historical) by modernity
itself (Koselleck 2002). Second, however, Hartog suggests that since 1989 something akin to
a permanent presentism now holds court, a different dynamic where past and future have
merged, and can find meaning only with reference to the present. This has led to a profound
‘crisis’ of historical time. In what follows I adapt this thought, to simultaneously focus on
several of the ways in which the war and subsequent peace settlement have continued to be
rethought and repurposed as the embodiment of different sorts of historical and political
648   Duncan Kelly

crises by later scholars, particularly students of International Law and International Politics.
For in their re-​writing and re-​visioning of the origins and implications of wartime crises
from the perspective of the present, we see the importance of the other theme of this volume;
how granular attention to distinct moments helps to signal the symbiosis between history
and International Relations (Ginzburg 1994; Fussell 1975; Reynolds 2013). So, I begin with
one way in which discussions of IR, Law, and History immediately following the war, fixed
the conflict as a battle between forms of ‘idealism’ or ‘realism’.
In 1920 the American journalist and war correspondent George Abel Schreiner published
The Craft Sinister, an attack on the delusions of high diplomacy contrasting German
Realpolitik with avowedly moral forms of British Idealpolitik (Schreiner 1920, 270ff). The
propaganda function of a well-​worn thesis about two German nations was pervasive, and my
essay returns to it later. But the standard German response during the war and into the 1920s
rebuffed British claims to moral superiority as naïve, given the self-​evident hypocrisies of
its imperialist politics and history. Indeed, two of the intriguing aspects of German political
thinking about global interdependence during the final years of the war and into the 1920s
developed here. The first was an early recognition of the transition toward American geo-
political and financial hegemony, and the way this constrained the choices open to German
decision makers (cf. Offer 1989; Clark 2014).
The second was the way German writers appealed after 1919 to a very general anti-​
imperialist, or more specifically anti-​colonial nationalist rhetoric. In one way, this chimed
with Woodrow Wilson’s obsession with dethroning the ‘old-​world’ empires of Europe in the
name of internationalism and democracy. In another, it helped augment Germany’s claim
to be a vital constituent part of the world economy and its political architecture, so much
so that the imposition of draconian terms after the war would be an economic as well as
a political miscalculation. Both arguments required and produced a very discordant set of
strategic tonalities. Wilson’s domestic racism and eventual antipathy towards Bolshevism,
alongside his imperial ambitions for the United States, became clear; but when overlaid with
a moralized language of rights, freedom, and democracy, he offered both a beacon of hope to
anti-​colonial movements on the one hand, while fostering equally numerous anti-​colonial
rejections of his political presumptions (cf. Manela 2007; Chakrabarty 2000). Among the
most significant figures who saw both these sides of the war as part of the dissonant ideas of
1914, was the Germanophile critic of American racism and diagnostician of the global colour
line, W. E. B. Du Bois (Troeltsch 1916; Vitalis 2017; Williams 2018).
As it became clear that the victorious great powers had no real interest in equalizing
citizenship for soldiers of colour returning home, whether in America, France, Britain,
or elsewhere, it was not without irony that Du Bois sought possible strategic guidance for
his Pan-​African vision through a tactical re-​appropriation of German scholarship (Barkin
2005). He did so by emphasizing its focus on diversity, scale, and the importance of historical
perspective, as well as registering the German commitment to fomenting and supporting
anti-​imperialist politics in India, Ireland, and the Ottoman Empire in particular.
During the 1920s, Weimar Germany was both a European power that might support anti-​
colonial nationalism, while it simultaneously tried to regain a foothold at the table with the
other so-​called Great Powers, in the evolving mandate system of the League of Nations.
No other major power was more critical of imperialism and colonialism in the imme-
diate postwar years, unsurprisingly perhaps (Wagner 2016; Graf 2016). For while war saw
the formal end of some (though not all) empires, and the strengthening of others, in the
 The First World War and Versailles    649

Habsburg and Ottoman cases most obviously, such endings nevertheless saw the continu-
ation of legislative and administrative forms of governance that were de facto carried over
from well-​established and entrenched imperial practices. In each case, the end of hostilities
put issues of racial justice, religious toleration, and equality, back into the domestic policy
bailiwick of states and empires (Wilson having infamously vetoed the decision to support a
Japanese request for a racial equality clause to be inserted into the treaty). In Germany, for
example, provisions in specific areas were advanced and on occasion, as in Article 113 of the
Weimar Constitution, combined the so-​called ‘Jewish question’ with a broader defence of
minority rights (Linares 2019, 72ff, 137ff).
Similarly, the normative justifications that ran through competing, stylized visions of an
international order based on right and justice versus might and militarism, seen through
the prism of international organizations like the League of Nations, also had a binding force
(Sluga 2019; Spanu 2019). The victors presumed a future world order was theirs to frame
by right, and that defeated nations would be made to fall into line. This meant the line be-
tween ending the war and creating a new international order was ‘blurred from the begin-
ning’, it could not presume equality between victors and vanquished. Even the insertion
of a treaty within the treaty to provide a covenant for the League of Nations, was part of
this transformed justificatory reality for old-​world power politics, newly fixed at the bar of
International Law, according to open criteria of engagement, and the legalistic attribution of
responsibility (Payk 2018, 814, 816f).
While the Big Four, Wilson especially, had little practical interest in self-​determination
meaning the quality of having your own state, as opposed to having a participatory role
in democratic self-​government, the new facts of territorial reconstruction in borderland
disputes and the parcelling out of colonial ‘possessions’, were justified with recourse to
modernist legalisms (Stevenson 2001, 197). The peace settlement permitted the normative
contours of such ideas and solutions to problems of reconstruction to frame future inter-
national politics, and not the other way around. This laid out a seemingly inevitable path to
decolonization at the level of legal right, which great power politics tried to stave off for as
long as practically possible, but the tension between legalism and political judgment marked
the nature of the peace, just as much as it had framed interpretations of the war. Sometimes
the logics of each pushed in contradictory directions. As analysts of economic war aims have
noted, while economic objectives were ‘omnipresent’, they too were subordinate to a ‘polit-
ical vision of international relations’ that was itself transformed by legal languages (Henri-​
Soutou 1989, 847f). Realism and idealism were simultaneously combined and interchanged
in theory and practice. And as recent studies show, it is misleading and dangerous to read
off either the outbreak of war in 1914, or its seeming end in 1918, in Whiggish fashion as
somehow inevitable or necessary (cf. Emmerson 2014, 2019; Gopnik 2014, 17–​18; Otte 2014;
Butterfield 1931, c­ hapter 6; Schroeder 2014, 188f). Major international histories of the pol-
itical economy of stabilization and reconstruction after war suggest the same (Dunn 1985;
Maier 1975; MacMillan 2014; Clark 2014; Tooze 2017). However, such stabilization as began
to occur did so only as European and international powers were able to build on and en-
trench the Dawes and Locarno plans, which were themselves required only after the failures
of Versailles (Cohrs 2008, 6ff). The temporal relationship between cause and effect, or
success and failure, of reconstruction is very complex.
Bismarck once symbolized modern German Realpolitik as pragmatic realism about power.
The war aims of the Wilhelmine Reich were nevertheless presented by critics as a distorted
650   Duncan Kelly

form power politics (Machtpolitik), one without ethical limits—​the irony being that most
German military leaders and politicians were worried about the practical weakness, rather
than strength, of the German nation-​state. Geopolitical fears of encirclement, an iterated
fear from the wars of liberation to the First World War, fixed strategic dilemmas about
whether an alliance with England against the Franco-​Russian axis, or a defensive security
strategy hedged around the defeat of the Ottoman Empire, would be most advantageous. In
related fashion, political and diplomatic historians (in Germany and elsewhere) had begun
reworking the structural as well as the intellectual origins of the First World War before
the fighting even stopped, setting out claims in documentary sources those interpretations
upon which future histories would be written, and new international organizations justified
(Rietzler 2014a, 2014b; Clavin 2005). This broad curation of historical evidence by national
publics, would eventually fix the popular narrative of war as an opposition between democ-
racy, against autocracy and militarism. (Thiers 2005, 23, 26, 31).
Meanwhile in America, although an independent account of Realpolitik (akin to realism)
and developed by International Relations theory, came only later, it was also based on a re-
jection of German war aims. Another journalist, the syndicated columnist Walter Lippman,
called for an injection of lower-​case (and thus anti-​Teutonic) realpolitik into the foreign
policy shield of the American republic. Earlier, during the First World War, he sought to
include a clause in Wilson’s fourteen points about the importance of international organiza-
tion (Sluga 2019). Such issues then cycled through the century as international history and
International Relations repurposed the language. For example, while the ‘Bismarck Debates’
of the 1950s and 1960s transformed the reputation of the wily Prussian statesman, historians
from A. J. P Taylor and William Langer to Henry Kissinger, gave new and more granular
texture to Realpolitik because the realities of Suez and Soviet threats required responses of
greater nuance than the either-​or of realism versus idealism (Bew 2015).
For historians of international political thought and international relations, the
ambiguities of scale (domestic, international, global), and a sense of the wider structures
and the limits placed around individual political agents through such constructs as ‘mod-
ernity’, ‘democracy’, and ‘nation state’, seemed to have been fixed following the First World
War. These turned into analytical presumptions about the developmental tendencies of
nation states within an unequal international system, or a focus on contingently legitimated
contexts and intentions that could unmask the intellectual architecture behind political
action (Hirschman 1991; Dunn 2014; Gamble 2009; Hont 2010; Runciman 2013; Gopnik
2011, 40–​47). The cognate move in international history was towards what James Joll termed
the ‘unspoken assumptions’ lying behind structural conflicts like the First World War, and
the extent to which politicians had either time, space, or the ‘freedom to choose’ alterna-
tive forms of action in wartime. He asked crucial questions about how far individual agency
rather than just macro-​social structuralism could explain the apparent implosion of inter-
national orders (Joll 1968, 1979; cf. Kern 1981).
Joll was surely inspired by the arguments of John Maynard Keynes about both the
constraints upon individual political capacity (exemplified by the fate of Woodrow Wilson
after Versailles when back in the United States), and about the power of ideas behind the
actions of leaders (cf. Keynes 1920, 35, 1974, 383f; Berg, 2004, 336, 679). His focusing on the
‘unspoken assumptions’ guiding or legitimating action in the past, in turn connects up
with cognate debates about method in the history of political thought and International
Relations theory since the 1960s (Pocock 2009, 3, 22, 77; Dunn 2001, 28). And for both sets
 The First World War and Versailles    651

of disciplines, another crucial intellectual figurehead was Max Weber, whose own political
writings evolved during the years of the First World War, out of a period of heightened self-​
consciousness about the challenge of various ‘crises’ of historicism (Goldie 2006;Iggers 1984).
As discussions at Versailles were planned, Weber wrote that ‘the politician has a far greater
responsibility towards the future, than they do for taking the blame for the past. This respon-
sibility for the future now means a responsibility for the peace, which rests with the victors
alone, and about which now is the time to speak’ (Weber [1919] 1988, 242). He offered these
sentiments as part of a talk ‘Against France’s Claim to the Palatinate and the Saar Basin’, at the
Karl-​Ruprechts Universität in Heidelberg on 1 March 1919, and published as part of a short
essay collection later that month. The words conjure tropes familiar to Weber’s political
writings—​responsibility, objectivity, and integrity—​while they amplify the long-​standing
concern he had with the relationship between political possibilities into the future. It was
a theme dating back to his inaugural lecture of 1895, when he took the tasks of national pol-
itical economy to be concerned with the quality (and perhaps even the breeding) of future
populations worthy of a nation whose fate was to be given the ‘chance’ to become a great
world power [Weltmachtherstellung] (Weber [1895] 1994).
For international historians as well as theorists of International Relations, Weber’s ideas have
long held a deep fascination, exemplified in his twin commitment to the major themes of this
volume—​macro-​questions of modernity and state development, and granular considerations
of the situated quality of political judgments in both domestic and international perspective.
For example, when writing about the necessary democratization of German politics in the
wake of defeat, where a Prussian-​dominated monarchy was transformed into a Republic al-
most overnight, Weber mobilized anti-​colonial nationalist rhetoric to both pursue federalism
and reject punitive settlements at Versailles. Writing just two months into the discussions that
were underway at the Paris Peace Conference, and only a month after his searing lecture on
the vocation of politics and the possibilities of institutional reform in Germany, his attempt
to connect political responsibility to questions of territorial integrity, constitutional reform,
and ecological resources (coal particularly), as the prerequisites for keeping open the chance
of world-​power status into the future, signalled a conceptual innovation in his thinking about
chance and fate (see Mommsen 2006; on ‘chance’, see Palonen 2011).
Prior to the armistice, Weber had offered a thin conception of sovereignty to match his
content-​less definition of the modern European state as the body which retains a mon-
opoly on the legitimate use of violence within a given territory. Afterwards, in a series of
powerful essays for the Frankfurter Zeitung under the title, ‘Germany’s Future Form of State’
[Deutschlands kunftige Staatsform], we find him writing that in practice, ‘President Wilson
and no one else at present is the Reichstag’, and that American power was now a force ‘as un-
stoppable as the rise of ancient Rome’ (Weber [1919] 1988, 146). From Wilsonian idealism
focused on the ‘moral’ conquest of enemies, American hegemony had become the gravi-
tational field around which German politics would now have to orbit (Weber 1917, 117, 123).
That German politicians quickly appealed directly to Wilson, to make good on a realistic
anti-​imperialist peace without indemnities and annexations in the wake of defeat, is well-​
known (Smith 2018, 19ff). Their strategy continued into the 1920s, resulting in admission
to the League of Nations in 1927 (Pedersen 2015). And by adapting wider anti-​colonial
languages of critique for a future-​oriented German national politics, Weber constructed a
critical topography of which groups had the ‘chance’ for power within the state under such
complex circumstances (radicals, revolutionaries, republicans, or true ‘statesmen’).
652   Duncan Kelly

Weber was exercised by the extent to which his proposals for the inner democratization of
German political structures required what Jörn Leonhard has called the ‘instrumentalising
of this constellation of laws’, forcing German democracy to follow a specific path (Leonhard
2019, 60). For if German thinking could not move beyond the idea that there was an op-
position between ‘Western’ democracy and German democratization, there would be a per-
petual impasse (cf. Plenge 1916; Pick 1999). Weber’s analysis of what peace into the future
required from ‘anti-​nationalist’, though not ‘anti-​national’ politics, was a recurrent theme
from 1917 onwards, a largely domestic vision nonetheless premised on the presumption of the
clear international limits to political choice. For if one thing was abundantly clear following
the war and into the reconstruction motivated by the settlement at Versailles, it was that the
‘power’ of public opinion as a judge of the morality of political action had taken on a new
level of significance. It was also the moment at which significant numbers of new ‘nations’
were becoming ‘states’, incorporated (with varying degrees of equality or brute force) into
the international order. These ‘successor states’ signalled the beginning of a new set of legal
and political debates under the aegis of self-​determination in a world both still manifestly
powered by, but simultaneously coming after, ‘empire’ (Smith 2018, 35ff; Halévy 1929). Such
claims remained vital when re-​purposed and historicized anew in later twentieth-​century
moments of decolonization, when the 50-​year ‘rift’ between International Relations and pol-
itical thought seemed most obvious (Getachew 2019; Armitage 2004). The turn (or re-​turn)
to empire in much recent scholarship, might even be a delayed response to what historians
of political theory had been claiming for a generation, which is that international relations
in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was effectively a form of political theory, and that
it is only the 50-​years’ rift of disciplinary division and specialization, which allowed these
subjects to diverge. Putting them back together at precisely the point when modern politics
and economics was transformed by war, to see the logics at work anew with reference to
property, financial crises, rampant inequality, empire, and ideology, therefore seems entirely
Germane today (Piketty 2019; Roberts 2013; Silber 2007, 4, 11, 41). Moreover, thinking this
way is not only an exercise in what Weber thought of as intellectual genealogy through the
construction of ‘ideal types’, but also an application of the constructivist sensibility outlined
in Nelson Goodman’s book, Ways of Worldmaking (Goodman 1978), which has become cen-
tral to histories of the political theory of empire, decolonization, and International Law (Bell
2014, 254–​279; Getachew 2019; Vadi 2017; Koskenniemi 2001). That latter frame of reference
is vital, for it was through the broad prism of International Law, that debates about strategy,
reparations, and guilt, were legitimated during the First World War, and it was through
international law that the international organizations which so dominated the landscape of
the 1920s, were able to shape and transform International Law in turn.
When modern historians write about International Law and the First World War, they
typically conclude that ‘International Law defined most clearly what was at stake’ in the
conflict, namely whether an international system of states grounded in national self-​
determination would retain its primacy, or not (Hull 2014, 317). When modern historians
of International Law and humanitarian intervention write about the First World War, they
in turn often posit a conflict between state sovereignty, the right of non-​interference, and
the construction of an international juridical conscience and conventional set of norms
and procedures. This is most apparent in discussion of the rise of humanitarian interven-
tion, and the ways that so-​called ‘civilized’ states claimed to deal with otherwise ‘barbarous’
ones (for example Lorimer, 1883; on which see Heraclides 2014). The related category of
 The First World War and Versailles    653

‘extra-​territoriality’ was also invented by European lawyers, to structure dealings with other
sorts of inter-​political federations, such as the Ottoman Empire, or China (Öszu 2016). Such
theories of sovereignty dealt with ‘extra-​territorial’ as legal fictions, to mask the messiness
of practical experience in imperial sovereignties, and to simplify the otherwise complex
policing of international boundaries (Benton 2010, 2018; Pedersen 2019; Pitts 2018).
Finally, when practicing international lawyers write about the impact of the First World
War upon their discipline, they often prioritize the practicalities of dealing with the ‘en-
largement’ of the sphere of law that contemporary observers like Elihu Root discussed as
both cause and consequence of the conflict (Root 1917, 289; Brown Scott 1916). A canon of
thinkers is standardly reconstructed (say, from Johann Kaspar Bluntschli through Lorimer
to Lassa Oppenheim), and a series of more or less new problems curated, particularly as to
whether questions of individual and national responsibility during and after the war are best
understood in legal or political terms. Many in the US agreed with §227–​228 of the Versailles
Treaty, for instance, that the German Kaiser was guilty of crimes against international mor-
ality, while also thinking his guilt should be determined by the political judgment of an
international community, rather than through the possibility of direct legal sanction (cf.
Shinohara 2014, 283).
If foundational or common International Law was thought to be based on common
consent (the Zeitgeist which Oppenheim proposed), then no agreed upon interest of ‘hu-
manity’ seemed capably of justifying either intervention or sanction across such connected
nations (Oppenheim 1921; Rougier 1910). Nevertheless, British and French lawyers had been
mulling over possible forms of economic war with Germany for at least a decade, since the
Morocco Crisis (Hull 2014, 141, 148). Again, the most obvious and drastic form this sort of
economic warfare took was the tight blockade around Germany, from 1915 onwards. But as
Hull suggests, Britain modified its blockade strategy in line with the perception it had of
developments in International Law. In this way, it both took refuge, at least through Edward
Grey, in its awareness of the great dangers ‘doctrinal clarity’ might engender. Or as Attorney
General F. E. Smith suggested after March 1915—​what ‘we are trying to do—​I think for good
reasons—​is a flagrantly illegal thing. Such matters cannot easily be expressed in a legal form’
(Hull 2014, 195, 198, 206; cf. Smeltzer and Kelly 2021).
As Arnulf Lorca outlines in his analysis of Marcus Garvey’s Universal Negro
Improvement Association, or Lajpat Rai’s petitioning for Indian independence, contentious
juridical politics in the wake of the First World War were part and parcel of wider arguments
about whether a standard of ‘civilization’ was a useful or relevant measure with which to
judge International Law (Lorca 2011, 2014). The author generates from this a typology of
how International Law dealt with three major issues of justification. First, when civilization
as a standard had been met, and therefore states could and should be seen as part and parcel
of the international community governed by equality under the law. Korea made this case
based on historical longevity; Garvey and Rai also made it based on the rights of blood, just
as did Clemenceau—​civilization and its benefits were to be shared by all who had fought
(cf. Cabanes 2014). Second, where there had been a change of circumstances as a direct con-
sequence of the war, rebus sic stantibus, such as happened in Egypt and elsewhere in the
Middle East, recognition of this change in circumstance should permit renewed entry into
the international community. Third, several states were keen to ‘destabilize’ this divide, par-
ticularly a defeated Germany, which practiced strategic anti-​imperialism (Gerwarth and
Kitchen 2015).
654   Duncan Kelly

Of course, in Paris at the peace conference none of the ‘semi-​peripheral’ states were
granted presence or representation, so the limits of anti-​colonial nationalism against the
forces of great power politics, seem unsurprising. But with that defence of traditional state
power, there was a correlate transition towards statehood as the new and basic requirement
for membership into a community or family of nations governed by International Law. This
in turn became a powerful motivating call for such ‘semi-​peripheral’ states to overcome
their disappointment from Versailles, by mobilizing demands for ‘sovereign equality . . . in
international organizations’ against otherwise restrictive standards of entry, because this
required international legal recognition as a sovereign state be given a hearing in the first
place. Thus, the beginning of the twentieth century saw yet another replay of the opposition
in the basic argumentative structures of International Law, a dialectic pitting statist ‘apology’
for the status quo, against ‘utopia’ concerning the possibility of a more benevolent or univer-
salist model of International Law, one in which the figure of the international lawyer in par-
ticular takes on the persona of activist critic or wise counsellor (Koskenniemi 2005).
Alternatively, consider once more the propagandistic story about International Law
and the Great War—​the thesis that there were two Germany’s, namely the militaristic state
inspired by Prussianismus and Hegelian metaphysics, and the good Kantian Kulturstaat,
committed to republican peace, whose genealogy ran through the classics of German
Enlightenment. Its structure lies behind the claim that Germany fell afoul of International
Law from 1914 onwards, precisely because it was the national embodiment of a Prussian-​
inspired Machtsstaat for whom force was destiny (Heller 1921). Nevertheless, since the
1870s, what Isabel Hull calls ‘war positivism’ in German international legal discussion, had
prioritized rapid economic and political advance in the face of international competition.
This was a means of overcoming political and structural weaknesses (Hull 2014, 318). The
synthetic justificatory claims of military (Notwehr) or political forms of necessity (Notstand)
or emergency, were then re-​deployed to provide an oppositional conceptual structure to jus-
tify action in the First World War. Either military victory would be rapid and total, or collapse
and destruction would follow. Resources were not deep enough for lengthy engagements.
At the same time, because political and economic advance or development was thought to
follow from industrial progress and neo-​mercantilist political economic strategy (including
colonial acquisition where possible), without that the German state would similarly de-
cline into mediocrity and retrogression. If the Wilhelmine state had begun to see itself as a
‘singular hegemon’ because of these distinctive presumptions, then the push to war might
best be understood as the product of domestic weakness rather than the primacy of foreign
policy (cf. Fischer 1968; Petzold 2013; Ferguson 1995). But the resolution of such tensions
between domestic weakness and military-​technological prowess, required military victory
and economic development to overcome political backwardness, making International Law
merely a ‘scrap of paper’ (Otte 2007).
Now whether the German nation-​state was guilty of breaking the laws of a family
of European nations, and what that family of nations presumed about membership
of such a purportedly ‘civilized’ space, structured Allied discussions of International
Law. Contemporary French republicans, for example, were quick to challenge German
justifications for war, seeing them as flagrantly illegal, an affront to a world governed by
questions of right, law, and democracy. Indeed, most memorials of the Great War in parts
of France and Corsica as well as in Britain, readily portray the Allies as victorious in a war
fought for such ideals (Fox 2015).
 The First World War and Versailles    655

The idea of law and its interpretation became a leading trope of resistance to, and critique
of, German militarism, especially after the invasion of Belgium. Both British and French
institutions took on key public roles in explaining the centrality of law to justify the Allied
cause, prompting a move towards the language of law governed by the needs of humanity. In
fact, humanity became a ‘political horizon, philosophical and nearly religious’ (Thiers 2005,
38), with a long and newly reconstructed genealogy permitting a defence of the metaphorical
Allied city against the barbarians (polemos). This was a view not dissimilar to that outlined
by the leading international lawyer Ernst Freund. In his wartime address on ‘living’ constitu-
tional principles to the American Political Science Association, he proposed that legislative
values as much as technical expertise had to be fostered in the pursuit of a democratic law for
the needs of humanity (Freund, 1916; Nippold 1923, 61). It is a view that still stands behind
certain (predominantly French) discussions of modern democracy as akin to a secularized
version of a theological promise, one in which the never to be realized hope of equality and
liberation of the oppressed is enough to keep the structures of an unequal system broadly
moving in a more progressive direction, away from tyranny and towards freedom, even if
there is no final end time where freedom is ever actually realized (Lefort 1988).
Some more recent Francophone debates around the limits of democracy have tended to
re-​focus attention on the structural inequalities of wealth and income across the globe and
within states, to show that massively increasing wealth inequalities in Europe and America
during the nineteenth century, were only reduced by significant orders of magnitude be-
cause of the First World War (Piketty 2019). Now nobody, surely, would wish for catastrophic
military conflict on one side, or the terrifying effects of the global climate emergency on the
other, to be the only means available for offsetting the renewed rise over the last fifty years of
such dramatic levels of inequality as had not been seen since the Belle Epoque. Yet we con-
tinue live in a world where powerful democracies entrench fantastical levels of economic
and political inequality within their boundaries, often prosecuting endless wars in the name
of democracy as an ideal, against avowedly autocratic forms of rule, and which are justified
with reference to International Law in the name of humanity. The question remains, then, of
whether we have gotten very far past the structures of international politics, economics, and
law, that focused the attention of contemporaries in and around the First World War?
It is of course important to remember that political choices and options often exhibit path-​
dependent logics. At the same time, the role of historically informed discussions of polit-
ical choices nonetheless shows that there is nothing natural, or inevitable, about political
judgment and international relations. While keeping space for political imagination open
remains crucial, whether democratic politics within modern capitalist states today retain
the capacity to deal with crises of the order or magnitude facing them in terms of climate,
inequality, and war, is more than a little uncertain. The history of international institutions
across the twentieth century in dealing with international political questions, offers only
fleeting consolation. And the old confidence of those (largely empire-​liberals) who pursued
schemes of expert ‘international government’, or ‘imperial federation’ as the safest route out
of the First World War, has rightly lost much of the cachet it once held, even in this current
period of rampant techno-​populism in many liberal democracies (Toews 1987; Dunn 2018;
Woolf 1916).
Conversely, the history of roads not taken in the aftermath of war, with numerous species
of federationist and pan-​regional options poised to go beyond the confines of an already
seemingly defunct model of the nation state, certainly retain their capacity to instruct us
656   Duncan Kelly

today. They emerged in a world in which the binary oppositions of democracy (specific-
ally liberal democracy) versus autocracy were not the only ones available, even if that op-
position has become fixed in the wake of so much reflection upon the First World War (cf.
Burbank and Cooper 2019). Recent scholarly and political turns towards global perspectives
in law, politics, and International Relations, cannot yet provide us with secure grounds to
be confident about collective futures being secured by their expanded vision. But returning
to a more open, and indeed global, intellectual history of World War One and its imperial
lineages on its own terms and in its own time, could help revitalize this space in our political
imagination in ways that suggest alternatives beyond such either/​or binary choices. If we can
do that, there might be sounder reasons for hope that a shared global future need not only
exist within the ideological straitjacket of a putatively liberal international order of states. By
thinking globally, we might once again learn how best to act locally.

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 Chapter 45

Sy kes–​Pi c ot
Megan Donaldson

The Sykes–​Picot agreement (1916) is often associated with an annotated map signed by
the English MP, Orientalist and diplomat Marc Sykes, and the French diplomat François
Georges-​Picot (Figure 1), illustrating a proposed Anglo-​French disposition of the Arab
provinces of the Ottoman empire.1 The confident line-​drawing has been taken as exemplary
of imperialist diplomacy, attempting to fashion political order from above and afar. Neither
the map nor the larger agreement actually determined the post-​First World War settlement
in the Middle East. Yet the agreement has retained a central place in the historical and polit-
ical imagination of this region. It is enmeshed in themes that have been foundational to both
history and international relations, including shifting modalities of imperialism; cultural
and religious difference; and nationalism and state-​making. As a discrete ‘moment’ it offers
a very particular, and partial, avenue into the intersecting histories of European imperialism
and the Arab world. Read in this way, for both what it captures and what it obscures, the
Sykes–​Picot agreement offers a promising lens on this volume’s organizing themes of ‘mod-
ernity’ and ‘granularity’.
The first part of the chapter begins with the map, situating the agreement in histories of
European imperial vision and wartime strategy. The second part turns to a messier terrain
in which Arab and other political actors are pursuing political projects of their own, and
traces competing influences on the interwar territorial settlement. The third part takes up
the theme of modernity, suggesting that a closer look at Sykes–​Picot poses questions about
the affinity in both IR and history scholarship between notions of modernity and the emer-
gence of the (nation-​)state. The fourth part reflects on how a notion of granularity might
open new understandings of Sykes–​Picot, but also on how the Sykes–​Picot agreement might
challenge what we understand by granularity.

Sykes–​P icot, the ‘Eastern Question’, and

European Imperial Visions

Though the Sykes–​Picot agreement was on its face an Anglo-​French transaction, the series
of letters constituting the agreement was embedded in a longer tradition of thinking about
 Sykes–Picot   661

Figure 1 Map as signed by Sykes and Picot, 8 May 1916, UK National Archives MPK 1/​426.

the Ottoman territories, in which Russia also had a central role. Since the nineteenth
century, ‘the Eastern Question’—​what should become of Ottoman territories after the
envisaged collapse of the empire and caliphate—​was a recurring diplomatic preoccupation.
The Ottoman Empire had figured in the European balance of power since the sixteenth
century, initially as a major military force. By the eighteenth century, the empire posed
less of a direct threat, and the nineteenth century saw territorial losses to local struggles
for autonomy and European imperial expansion in the Black Sea, the Balkans, and North
Africa. Britain and France resisted Russian expansion into Ottoman territories, fighting
against Russia in the Crimean War (1854–​56), and restraining Russia’s territorial gains in
the Russo-​Turkish War of 1877. Britain itself occupied Egypt in 1882. In the Balkan war of
1912–​13, Bulgaria, Serbia, Greece, and Montenegro left the Empire with only a tiny foot-
hold in Europe. To the Anglo-​French diplomatic mind, Sykes–​Picot was a continuation of
longstanding logics of conquest and rivalry, part of the answer to the question pending in
1914: if the ‘sick man of Europe’ declined further, to whom might the spoils fall, and with
what effects for the European balance?
662   Megan Donaldson

Britain and France had agreed with Russia in 1915 that Russia was to have Constantinople,
and thus control of the Straits, in exchange for French and British spheres of interest in the
Middle East (Documents on British Foreign Policy (DBFP), Vol. 4, 635–​638). The Sykes–​
Picot terms complemented this so-​called Constantinople Agreement, giving greater speci-
ficity to Anglo-​French claims. The core provisions, agreed in January 1916, were put first to
Russia. Russia consented in an exchange of letters of April 1916, subject to annexations of
territory on the Black Sea coast and Kurdistan, and on the understanding that each state
might maintain pre-​existing religious and educational institutions on the territory of the
other (DBFP, Vol. 4, 241–​243).
Having secured Russian consent, the French ambassador in London and the British prime
minister exchanged letters in May 1916 referring to the signed map (DBFP, Vol. 4, 244–​247).
The zones marked ‘A’ and ‘B’ were designated as areas in which France and Britain were
‘prepared to recognise and protect an independent Arab State or a Confederation of Arab
States . . . under the suzerainty of an Arab chief ’, with zone A being a French sphere of influ-
ence (involving priority of right of enterprise and local loans, exclusive supply of advisers at
the request of the Arab State or Confederation), and zone B being a British sphere. Britain
and France were referred to as ‘protectors of the Arab State’. In the blue (dark-​shaded, north
of A in Figure 1) and red (lighter-​shaded, east of B) zones respectively, France and Britain
were to ‘be allowed to establish such direct or indirect administration or control as they de-
sire and . . . may think fit to arrange with the Arab [State/​Confederation]’, and prohibited
from ceding these rights to any third power other than the Arab state. Palestine was to be
subject to an ‘international administration’ of a form devised through consultation with
Russia, and thereafter other allies, and Sharif Husayn of Mecca. Other provisions dealt in de-
tail with ports, water rights, railways, and customs tariffs.
The brief mention of the Sharif links the Anglo-​French plans to parallel correspondence
in the preceding months between Henry McMahon (British High Commissioner in Egypt),
and Sharif Husayn, guardian of the holy places of Mecca and Medina, in the Hejaz. After
the Ottoman government had entered the war and the sultan as caliph had proclaimed a
jihad, calling on Muslim subjects of the Entente powers to rebel, the Sharif had emerged
as a potential British ally. It was thought he might undermine the religious authority of the
sultan’s proclamation, foster revolt against Ottoman forces (increasingly important after the
failure of the Gallipoli campaign in January 1916), and ensure that a Young Arab reformist
movement in the Ottoman Army would incline towards Britain.
In correspondence which may have been drafted by his son, the Sharif invoked the ‘whole
of the Arab nation’; and invited Britain to recognize ‘the independence of the Arab countries’
within a certain territory (comprising roughly the Arabian peninsula and the whole of what
was later Palestine, Transjordan, Syria, and Iraq; the only specific exclusion being Aden),
and approve the ‘proclamation of an Arab Khalifate’ (that is, supplanting the Sultan as ca-
liph). In return the Sharif offered British priority in economic enterprises and an alliance
against foreign powers attacking either party—​most critically, at this point, Ottoman forces.
Husayn pressed a reluctant McMahon for precise negotiations on the territorial claims. In
a letter of 24 October 1915, McMahon noted that districts of Mersina and Alexandretta, as
well as portions of Syria lying to the west of the districts of Damascus, Homs, Hama, and
Aleppo, ‘cannot be said to be purely Arab’ and should be excluded from the territory sought.
The letter stated that, ‘in regard to those portions of the [remaining] territories . . . in which
Great Britain is free to act without detriment to the interests of her ally, France’, Britain was
 Sykes–Picot   663

‘prepared to recognise and support the independence of the Arabs’ (Cmd 5957, 1939). (This
phrasing was mistranslated, and the Arab version suggested that, aside from the specific-
ally excluded areas, Britain was free to act without regard to France (Barr 2007, 312–​313)).
Whatever the true nature of the reservation, it was subject to further stipulations, including
that this be without prejudice to existing treaties with Arab chieftains (ruling in, e.g. Muscat
and Oman, Qatar, Bahrain, Kuwait, and Nejd); that the new Arab state rely exclusively
on British advice and advisers; and that special administrative arrangements be made in
Baghdad and Basra to accommodate Britain’s ‘established position and interests’ there.
The Sharif in reply insisted that the districts of Aleppo and Beirut—​where Britain
accepted French interests—​were ‘purely Arab’ even if Christianized to some extent. He
acquiesced to special administrative arrangements in Baghdad and Basra, but for a short
time, and subject to compensation. The British response was ambivalent: on Baghdad more
detailed consideration would be required, and on Aleppo and Beirut the interests of France
were involved, and a further communication was promised. At the same time McMahon
urged the Sharif to ‘attach all the Arab peoples to our united cause’. The Sharif was uncom-
promising in reply: though Beirut and its coastline was left for the present to the French out
of the need to protect the Anglo-​French alliance in the current war, ‘it is impossible to allow
any derogation that gives France, or any other power, a span of land in those regions’. This
was met with further platitudes from the British. The promised British communication con-
cerning Syria was never sent.
From the British perspective, the McMahon–​Husayn correspondence and the Sykes–​
Picot agreement were part of the same general design: to offer Husayn prospects sufficient
to elicit Arab mobilization against Ottoman forces, while managing potential conflict be-
tween Husayn and France (and, to a lesser extent, between Britain and France) over their
relative positions. Nevertheless, the McMahon–​Husayn and Sykes–​Picot terms were in
tension. Basic concordance was achieved insofar as Aleppo, Hama, Homs, and Damascus
were excluded from direct French control under Sykes–​Picot, on the basis that they had been
promised to Husayn, but there were clearly differences concerning the nature and extent
of Anglo-​French control over various tracts of territory earmarked for a future Arab pol-
itical entity. Some British officials at the time, and historians since, have maintained that
the Sykes–​Picot terms were reconcilable with undertakings given to Husayn (Friedman
1970, 87). However, the reluctance to inform Husayn immediately of the Sykes–​Picot
terms suggests that contemporaries felt there was tension between the commitments and,
by 1919, many officials saw contradictions (Kedourie 2000, 124–​126, 203–​220). The pos-
ition of Palestine, while not of concern to McMahon or Husayn during the initial exchange,
would also be the subject of extensive later controversy. On the official British view in the
1930s, Palestine was excluded from a future Arab state, inter alia because it was part of those
portions of Syria lying to the west of the district of Damascus. On the Arab view, the refer-
ence to Damascus meant the town itself and immediate surrounds rather than the whole
administrative district. As Palestine was not to the west of Damascus in this sense, it was
included in the territory of the future Arab state (Cmd 5974, 1939).
The Sykes–​Picot agreement reflected the conceptual apparatus of nineteenth-​century im-
perial diplomacy, seen also in Asia and Africa. The agreement paid close attention not only
to borders, the precise location of which was sometimes secondary, but to ports, railways,
and sea routes: territorial divisions did not preclude a regional vision informed by military
strategy and economic exploitation (Loevy 2016). Categories such as ‘spheres of influence’
664   Megan Donaldson

and direct rule were part of a repertoire of imperial governance, as was a certain coyness
about the nature of the authority in issue (after the original Anglo-​French exchange of letters
concerning the Sykes–​Picot map, the French suggested that the reference to ‘protectors’ be
struck out, as possibly suggesting that what was involved was ‘a sort of protectorate’, when
the parties had only intended to ‘guarantee the full independence of the new State’ (DBFP,
Vol. 4, 248–​249)).
The diplomatic form of Sykes–​Picot, too, was in keeping with nineteenth-​century prece-
dent, in its secret, sometimes contradictory, promises (Donaldson 2016, 127–​129; 2017, 578–​
581). Knowledge of the Sykes–​Picot commitments circulated only slowly and partially, even
within European governments. Husayn was not told of the Sykes–​Picot agreement until
May 1917, and may still not at that point have seen the text of the letters (Kedourie 2000,
124–​125, 160–​166). The Sykes–​Picot agreement was publicly revealed after the Bolsheviks
published a Russian internal memorandum summarizing the transactions, the gist of
which was reported in Britain in November 1917, with a full English translation in January
1918 (Manchester Guardian, 19 Jan 1918, 5). The McMahon–​Husayn correspondence was
publicly known by 1920 but the British resisted publication, from fear of controversy about
whether Palestine had been included in the territory promised, and because British support
for an Arab caliphate might have aroused anger among Muslim subjects in India. It was not
published officially by the British until 1939 (Cmd 5957, 1939; Kedourie 2000, 249–​266).

Post-​O ttoman Visions of Political Order and

Sykes–​P icot in the Postwar Settlement

There was a rough continuity between pre-​war British imperial desiderata, the Sykes–​Picot
terms, and the settlements of the mid-​1920s, in which French interests were concentrated
in Syria, and British in Mesopotamia, each with (formal and informal) influence over new
Arab polities. But there was no direct transposition of the Sykes–​Picot terms. The Sykes–​
Picot and McMahon–​Husayn commitments had met with some skepticism even among
French and British officials at the time of their making (Barr 2011, 32–​36; Friedman 1970,
93–​94). Subsequent developments, such as the Balfour Declaration, and military and pol-
itical initiatives in the Middle East, further undermined the plausibility of Sykes–​Picot as a
precise blueprint. New articulations of principle among the Allied Powers, particularly on
self-​determination and the renunciation of secret diplomacy, weakened the legal and rhet-
orical authority of the agreement, and the mandate system subjected territorial claims to a
new international template. Perhaps most critically, Ottoman forces carved out the territory
of modern-​day Turkey, and populations across the region proved resistant to Anglo-​French
arrangements.
While Sykes–​Picot and other wartime territorial arrangements acknowledged (and
tried to instrumentalize) Arab political agency, they assumed that the ultimate resolution
of the ‘Eastern Question’ rested with Christian Europe. These transactions combined older
European strategic imperatives (Russian acquisition of warm-​water ports and control of the
Straits; French expansion in the Mediterranean; British protection of sea routes to India)
with new attention to resources like oil (although thinking about oil was often less focused
 Sykes–Picot   665

than one might have expected: Fitzgerald 1994). Yet actors within the Ottoman Empire,
too, had a dynamic sense of the region’s future. Both ‘Arab nationalists’ (a complex cat-
egory discussed further below) and the ‘Young Turk’ movement anticipated a future polit-
ical order distinct from existing Ottoman structures, often looking to the Austro-​Hungarian
dual monarchy as a loose inspiration for Turco-​Arab co-​existence on a sort of federal model
(Mestyan, 2021; Yenen 2020). Husayn envisaged a new Arab caliphate; and groups such as
the Kurds and Armenians had political projects of their own—​visions which would play out
in the interwar period and beyond.
In a first phase of postwar negotiations, running roughly 1918–​20, something like the
Sykes–​Picot design was still in British and French contemplation. The Bolshevik Revolution
and peace of Brest-​Litovsk released the Allied Powers from the Constantinople Agreement
undertakings to Russia; and Britain occupied Mesopotamia, Palestine, and Syria (allowing
Faysal and his Arab forces to take Damascus). In September 1918 Britain and France agreed
three ‘zones’ of Occupied Enemy Territory Administration: South (Palestine, controlled by
the British); West (coast of Syria and Lebanon, controlled by France); and East (interior of
Syria, controlled by Faysal and his Hijazi Northern Army jointly with the British). These ad-
mittedly temporary arrangements reflected readjustment of Franco-​British claims. France,
which had played less of a role in the victories in the Levant, relinquished aspirations to a
‘greater Syria’ which would have included Palestine (and some British figures felt that France
ought to lose Syria altogether). France also agreed to accord part of the oil-​rich area around
Mosul, originally in the French zone of the Sykes–​Picot map, to Britain. Britain and France
had to settle for League mandates over Iraq and Palestine (Britain) and Syria (France), ra-
ther than bilaterally agreed acquisitions of territory and spheres of influence. However, this
scheme still divided Arabic-​speaking peoples (particularly between Syria and Palestine) in a
way that was deeply unpopular.
The British paid lip-​service to Arab independence. In a declaration of November 1918,
Britain and France committed to ‘emancipation of the peoples so long oppressed by the
Turks and the establishment of national governments and administrations deriving their
authority from the initiative and free choice of the indigenous populations’ (Cmd 5974,
1939, 50). However, there was little meaningful political consultation with Arab peoples.
Faysal attended the Paris Peace Conference as head of the Hejazi delegation, and the
British hoped he could appeal to American espousal of self-​determination as a check
on French claims. But France in particular rejected Faysal’s claim to speak for a larger
Arab population. Though Faysal was allowed to speak in favour of independence and
unity for Arabic-​speaking peoples, or at least their power to choose their own manda-
tory (Foreign Relations of the United States (FRUS) Paris Peace Conference 1919, Vol. 3,
889–​894), he was excluded from negotiations. The ‘King-​Crane Commission’ established
on American insistence to investigate the desires of the populations in occupied areas
reported in August 1919 that there was no appetite for a French mandate (Faysal having
made an effort to distance Maronite Christians and others sympathetic to France from
these consultations, to give greater weight to what he claimed was the Arab majority);
and recommended that the United States (US), or Britain, would be more welcome. On
Anglo-​French insistence, the report was withheld from publication. Faysal was excluded
from the San Remo Conference of May 1920, which confirmed the mandate allocations,
because he refused to accept the separation of a smaller Syria from Palestine, and the
Balfour Declaration.
666   Megan Donaldson

In a second phase of negotiations, a strengthening Kemalist campaign in Anatolia forced

further divergence from the wartime secret treaties. In August 1920, Britain, France and
Italy had signed a treaty of peace with the Ottoman sultan (the Treaty of Sèvres) dictating,
among other things, a zone of French influence on the south coast of Asia Minor (over
which they had claimed direct control under Sykes–​Picot), north of the French mandate;
and virtual control of Turkey’s economy by the Allied Powers. Yet Ottoman forces were still
fighting, pushing the French southwards from claimed territory in Asia Minor. There was
also widespread armed resistance across the occupied territories to both occupation and
partition, inspired in part by the Anatolian example. In March 1920 the Syrian National
Congress proclaimed Faysal King of a greater United Syrian Kingdom (including Palestine),
and denounced Zionist settlement; and many former Ottoman army officers were actively
fighting the French. As the cost of the Middle East occupations rose and the British sought
to conciliate France, they abandoned Faysal, and the French took Damascus by force in
July 1921, deposing him. There were clashes between Arabs and Jews in Jerusalem. In May–​
June 1920, armed opposition to the British erupted in Iraq, and was repressed only by aerial
bombardment.
By late 1921, it was becoming clear that the Sèvres Treaty was a dead letter. In October
1921 France withdrew from Anatolia and, by the Treaty of Ankara, recognized Kemal’s na-
tionalist government in exchange for Turkish recognition of the French mandate in Syria.
By September 1922, Turkish forces had pushed Greek forces out of Smyrna (the Greek ini-
tiative having been encouraged by the Allies), and were marching on Allied positions in
Constantinople. There was no political will in Britain for enforcement of the Sèvres terms,
and negotiations began towards a new peace. Kemal initially demanded that Arab-​majority
areas of the former Ottoman Empire be offered a referendum on their futures. But in the
final Treaty of Lausanne (July 1923), Turkey renounced claims to former Ottoman lands in
exchange for recognition by the powers of Turkish sovereignty, within new borders vastly
more favourable than those of Sèvres.
As emerges from the foregoing, it was not Sykes–​Picot which determined the borders
of the Middle Eastern mandates, and later states (Dodge 2004; Bâli 2016). Even after 1923,
many borders remained unresolved. They would be established through negotiation but
also conflict with local populations, such as the Kurdish minority around Mosul, territory
disputed in the 1920s between Turkey and Britain/​Iraq (on Iraq’s borders, see Pursley 2015b).
Nevertheless, broad features of Sykes–​Picot did endure: the political division of Arabic-​
speaking peoples, and imposition of foreign rule.
The negotiations of the 1920s left much of the Middle East under mandatory rule, a system
which in places was less representative of local populations than late Ottoman governance
(Provence 2017, 86–​87). Across the Middle East, mandatory rule elicited a spectrum of op-
position among civilian elites, and episodes of armed resistance, inspired in part by Kemalist
insurgency, and assisted by a roving generation of former Ottoman army officers. Faysal,
deposed from his position in Syria, was installed as King of Iraq, in the face of local sus-
picion of his closeness to the British. His brother Abdullah was courted by the British (in
part to prevent him from joining resistance to the French in Syria); and in May 1923 Britain
recognized the Emirate of Transjordan, part of territory administered by the British under
the Palestine mandate, under Abdullah. In Iraq, Faysal balanced uneasily between Britain
and his own Cabinet members, who were veteran Ottoman army officers and suspicious of
British intentions. The proposed mandate text was supplanted by treaties of 1922 and 1924,
 Sykes–Picot   667

nominally between independent powers but giving Britain a formal role in government,
and allowing Britain access to air bases in the country. These treaties, unpopular in Iraq and
forced through, were then accepted by the League Council in lieu of the proposed mandate.
An Anglo-​Iraqi treaty of 1930 paved the way for Iraq’s admission to the League of Nations
as an independent state, but, given extensive allowance for British air bases and the like, is
perhaps better seen as a novel mode of internationally brokered informal empire (Pedersen
2015, 262–​286). A 1928 treaty recognized the existence of an independent government in
Transjordan (but did not remove Transjordan entirely from the mandate system). In Hejaz,
Britain broke from Husayn: he was increasingly resistant to cooperation, and his proclam-
ation of himself as caliph in 1924—​a status he considered had been acknowledged in the
McMahon–​Husayn correspondence—​was a provocation to the Wahhabist ruler of the Nejd,
bin Saud, another British ally. Britain ultimately stood back as bin Saud defeated Husayn,
ruling as King of Hejaz and of Nejd until the proclamation of a unitary Kingdom of Saudi
Arabia in 1932.
Though Faysal and Abdullah both retained pan-​Arab ambitions, Britain’s eagerness to di-
minish its direct role in the early 1920s meant that military conflict between the populations
and installed governments in Iraq and Transjordan was largely averted. In the British
Palestine mandate, however, and French Syria, there were major proto-​nationalist and
sectarian revolts. In Palestine, long-​standing disputes over access to the Wailing Wall (and
underlying Arab fears of growing Jewish predominance) prompted riots in 1929; and in the
late 1930s a wholesale revolt against the British mandatory administration, seeking Arab in-
dependence and an end to Jewish migration. In Syria, there had been considerable resistance
to the French invasion in 1920, much of it focused in urban areas. However, the key military
challenge to French rule came with the ‘Druze revolt’ of 1925–​26, which took root in rural
areas among the Druze minority and former Ottoman army officers.
There was heavy reliance by mandatories on martial rule during periods of crisis, and
on aerial bombardment during the Druze revolt in particular. The handling of both the
Palestine and Syrian cases, with their asymmetric violence, attracted international criticism
from exile groups and humanitarian constituencies. The Permanent Mandates Commission
of the League of Nations offered a novel arena for contestation of this quasi-​imperial ad-
ministration, but, itself permeated with imperialist expertise and sensibilities, rarely
challenged the underlying assumptions, and was guarded in its commentary (Pedersen 2015;
Wheatley 2015).

Modernity and the Making of

(Post-​O ttoman) States

The basic political and territorial structures consolidated during the interwar period had
a surprising longevity. The Second World War brought Arab hopes that the ending of the
Syrian mandate would presage a fundamental reconfiguration—​the union of Iraq, Syria,
Transjordan, and Palestine. Although variations of pan-​ Arabist confederations were
attempted in different moments, Syria and Transjordan emerged to a fragile independence,
and have remained independent states since. Palestine, following the failure of a United
668   Megan Donaldson

Nations (UN) partition plan, descended into war, with the creation of the state of Israel
generating further conflict with Arab territorial claims.
The Middle East remains a terrain of sectarian and political conflict, and an object of great
power rivalry. The significance of Sykes–​Picot in the trajectory linking 1916 to the present is
a matter of contestation. However, Sykes–​Picot has become not only a historical episode in
this trajectory, but a shorthand for different arguments about what has shaped the history of
the region. It retains a totemic importance in a wide range of political visions. Sykes–​Picot
as anathema spanned the rival post-​Second World War pan-​Arabisms of the Hashemite
rulers and Nasser, functioning as a shared symbol of foreign imposition and political div-
ision. It was cited, for example, in the 1958 creation of a United Arab Republic of Egypt and
Syria and, it was hoped, Iraq. More recently, it surfaced in some justifications by Al Qaeda
of the need for defensive jihad. Islamic State of Iraq and the Levant (ISIL) propaganda made
much of the ceremonial destruction of a section of the Iraq–​Syria border, presenting this as
the triumphant final break with Sykes–​Picot and the re-​founding of a united Arab caliphate
(Tinsley 2015). In the wake of the 2003 invasion of Iraq, Sykes–​Picot was revisited in Western
discourse, too, as commentators invoked the ‘failure’ and ‘artificiality’ of states in the region
as an explanation for continuing instability, and sought to imagine some more viable and
stable political map.
These invocations of Sykes–​Picot serve political projects in the present as much as they
capture the possibilities of the past. For postcolonial Arab states (and, in a different way,
groups such as Al Qaeda and ISIL), an ultimately inoperative agreement overriding Arab
sovereignty is a more compelling foil than Husayn’s efforts to forge Arab and Muslim unity
with and through British sponsorship. Western references to Sykes–​Picot, while castigating
European governments for the clumsiness of its territorial allocation (and often, also, Arab
leaders for failing to make successful states within these territories), are coupled with new,
rationalized proposals for boundaries, reanimating a posture of imperial power (Pursley
2015a; Neep 2015).
Many of these invocations of Sykes–​Picot are arguments, fundamentally, about the na-
ture and limits of the states which should have emerged from the Ottoman Empire. What
these invocations have in common is a sense of a historical process interrupted, turned
from its natural or desirable course. In this regard, discussions of Sykes–​Picot converge with
tendencies in IR and history to accord the state an axiomatic importance, and to assume
a close relationship—​both chronological and definitional—​between ‘modernity’ and the
(nation-​)state. Precisely because it has proved so tempting to understand Ottoman history
and post-​Ottoman possibilities through this framework of (interrupted) modernity and
state-​making, the Ottoman Empire offers a good ground on which to interrogate the frame-
work itself.
The Ottoman Empire’s liminal status—​conceived as in, but not ‘of ’ Europe (Naff 1984,
143)—​has sometimes posed a challenge to the theorization of the international order, and
of Europe itself (see, e.g. Dunne and Little 2014, 99; Özsu 2012; Tusan 2010). However,
the conceptual linkage in IR and history between modernity and the emergence of states
consolidates a picture in which the Ottoman Empire stands apart from Western Europe.
The treatment of the Ottoman Empire in a foundational work of English School IR (Naff
1984) emphasizes the way in which the Ottoman Empire, in part because of the concep-
tual structure of Islam, operated on fundamentally different understandings of the state,
law, and government to Western European powers, and the barriers that this created to
 Sykes–Picot   669

full participation in diplomatic relations and a (European) law of nations. This parallels
a narrative of the Ottoman Empire left out of European scientific and technical progress,
trapped in archaism and corruption. The sense of the Empire as a declining relic then gives
a certain organic logic to the emergence from it of younger and more vigorous ‘nations’, in
the Balkans and elsewhere. Revisions of the basic ‘expansion’ narrative of international order
have insisted that Europe was itself shaped in the encounter with extra-​European peoples;
and was not a cluster of uniform states but encompassed multiple hybrid forms (Welsh 2017).
Nevertheless, the revisionist narrative still assumes a basic modularity in the category of
statehood, and does not necessarily complicate the sense of nations as natural components
breaking through a moribund imperial edifice.
The Ottoman case brings to the surface a recurrent ambiguity spanning IR and history
about what exactly is captured in shorthand references to ‘the state’: whether these accounts
are stressing the unitary state as a political form (as opposed to, say, composite monarchy, or
the layered and differentiated jurisdiction characteristic of empire); or whether they refer
rather to various techniques of rule (bureaucratic administration, taxation, and the like)
which, while associated with a centralizing impetus, are capable of being operationalized
across an array of political forms. This slippage may have substantive consequences. In rela-
tion to the Ottoman Empire, the notion that the nation-​state form goes hand in hand with
certain techniques of rule, as Buzan and Lawson put it, the nineteenth-​century phenomenon
of ‘rational state-​building’ as ‘the process by which many administrative and bureaucratic
competences were “caged” within national territories’ (Buzan and Lawson 2013, 621) may
entrench assumptions that the endurance of the caliphate as a loosely imperial form went
hand-​in-​hand with torpor in techniques of government, whereas Ottoman modernization
over the long nineteenth century actually had much in common with wider European trends
(Provence 2017, 10–​32).
Finally, the Ottoman case puts in question whether nation or state function as universal
analytical categories. ‘Nationalism’ was available in the early twentieth century, and today, as
a sort of ‘modular’ political category (Anderson 2006, 4). But Antonius’ classic account of a
recognizable ‘Arab national movement’ with roots in the late nineteenth century (Antonius
1939) has been criticized. The label of ‘Arab nationalism’ has often been used without any
precise account of the extent to which cultural or other affinities have translated to a de-
mand for the political form of a nation-​state (Dawisha 2016, 4–​12). There remain important
questions about the relationship between Arab identity and Ottoman loyalty, and the way in
which Arab solidarity took shape in response to pressure on Ottoman identity from Turkish
self-​assertion, European imperialism, and later Zionist settlement (Khalidi 1991). The task
may not be to look for Arab instances of nationalist movements agitating for independence
but rather ‘to account, theoretically, for local patriotic ideas that were not premised on a
fundamental rejection of [Ottoman] empire’; patriotic ideas which crystallized not across
a language group as such but in distinct ways in urban hubs like Cairo, Beirut, Tunis, and
Damascus (Mestyan 2017, 7; see also Khoury 1983, 1987). Even by the First World War, to
the extent that there was an Arab ‘national’ identity, there was not a neat relation between a
sense of nation-​ness and an aspiration for the political form of an independent state. Though
the Husayn letters invoked the ‘Arab nation’, this may well have been a translation in more
than one sense: a framing of claims in a language intelligible to Europeans, relative to Arabic
terms which refer more loosely to community, or region.2 Moreover the question of the ca-
liphate mandated a layered authority in which the state itself would not be a final authority.
670   Megan Donaldson

The Ottoman case highlights not only the possible distortions which categories of nation
and state impose on Arab political thought, but the way in which these concepts were them-
selves in flux in the interwar period—​not settled concepts over which Europe enjoyed in-
tellectual mastery. The League in many respects accommodated, rather than challenged,
European imperial understandings. Yet, in opening the possibility of statehood brokered
by an expanded international community, through newly institutionalized and public
processes, the League also revealed considerable uncertainty about what counted as a state,
and how to make states (Donaldson 2020). The notion of self-​determination posited that a
nation (understood in ethnic, sectarian and historical terms) ought to find expression in a
state. Large-​scale population transfers, like that between Greece and Turkey, vindicated an
ethnically and culturally essentialist view of nationhood (Robson 2017). In other respects
post-​First World War peace-​making in fact veered away from an ethno-​sectarian basis of
statehood, seeking through the ‘minorities’ regime basic collective protections for minorities
within states (Mazower 1997); indeed, in places like Syria, the idea of the nation-​state and the
conception of majority and minority populations evolved together (White 2011). Questions
about the relation between ethnic or sectarian identification and statehood remain vexed
today. Sykes–​Picot is less a betrayal of primordial ethnic, linguistic or religious identities
which might otherwise have found expression in distinct states (Dodge 2016) than an invita-
tion to think about how precarious is the connection—​empirical and conceptual—​between
these identities and modern states.

Granularity and Perspective

This chapter opened with the 1916 map signed by Sykes and Picot: a choice of scale which
foregrounds certain figures and their sense of scale and perspective. In this final section, I ex-
plore how the volume’s second organizing theme, granularity, illuminates the agreement as
a ‘moment’, and how the agreement might challenge the notion of granularity at stake in his-
tory and IR.
Across both disciplines, a focus on granularity in the sense of changes of scale offers
possibilities for seeing the agreement in different guises. It invites scrutiny of what is lost in
moving from one level to another; for example, the difficulty of generalizing, as this chapter
has sometimes done, about developments across a highly diverse region. It might open the
way for shifts of frame, from global imperial patterns in treaty-​making or approaches to terri-
tory, to regionally specific strategic questions, to more localized political resistance. A global
frame might advance enlightening comparative work: just as Arab thinkers themselves
looked to Austro-​Hungary as a model, we might in history or IR probe further whether there
are similarities between the fraying of imperial authority and emergent political identities
in Habsburg and Ottoman empires (see, e.g. Reynolds 2011); between the weaknesses of a
standard account of nationalism for both the Spanish Americas (Chiaramonte 2012) and the
Arab peoples; or between, for example, pan-​Arabist and pan-​Africanist projects of unifica-
tion or federation post-​Second World War, and their relation to imperial boundary-​drawing.
That said, an understanding of granularity as primarily a question of scale would posit
an (illusory) vantage point beyond the phenomena being examined. The Sykes–​Picot
agreement illustrates the importance also of perspective: the point from which, and how,
 Sykes–Picot   671

one apprehends the phenomenon in question. It prompts questions in particular about how
mapping and treaty-​making fix actors’ perspectives, and shape later analysis.
Colonial-​era cartography seems to have helped shape European and even Ottoman
perceptions of Lebanon and Palestine as distinct entities; conversely, the fact that there was
no major map of the ‘greater Syria’ to which Arab nationalists aspired may have hindered
the prosecution of these claims (Kaufman 2015). On Sykes–​Picot specifically, commen-
tary has often emphasized the abstraction of the ‘line[s]‌in the sand’ (Barr 2011). However,
while the diagonal splitting of the ‘A’ and ‘B’ spheres of influence was largely arbitrary, other
lines reflected pre-​existing Ottoman administrative divisions and local affiliations, as well
as European imperial desiderata. It may be the pseudo-​precision of the lines, rather than
their exact location, which warrants critical scrutiny. By contrast, Arab territorial claims
remained in looser written formulations (unsurprisingly, given Britain’s reluctance to enter
into negotiations). This is not to say that, had the McMahon–​Husayn undertakings been
reduced to a map, Britain would necessarily have avoided the conflicting commitments.
Certainly, however, the absence of a McMahon–​Husayn map was a factor in the precarity
of those undertakings, and the prolonged controversy over the parties’ original intentions
regarding Palestine.
The ‘agreement’ label attached to Sykes–​Picot arrangements (often in juxtaposition to
the McMahon–​Husayn ‘correspondence’) hints at the role of legal discourse in drawing out
some acts and actors as important, and marginalizing others. On prevailing legal doctrine,
a course of correspondence between ministers or high officials could constitute a treaty
binding a state in law, but the McMahon–​Husayn correspondence, still inchoate in key
respects, did not enjoy this status, at least to the European legal mind. Of course, by the time
the Sykes–​Picot arrangements were being consulted in 1919, their legal force was not the pri-
mary issue (Donaldson 2016, 130). Yet whether enjoying legal force or not, or in practical
terms superseded by events, agreements have influence simply as points of reference, and
they channel contestation about interests or rights. It is striking how much discussion about
the future form of the Middle East since 1916—​both within government bureaucracies and
in broader public discourse—​has taken the form of readings and re-​readings of the Sykes–​
Picot agreement, Husayn–​McMahon correspondence, and Balfour declaration (although
issues like translation, the interrelation of written undertakings and oral explanations, and
the parties’ different rhetorical traditions, which bear on the parties’ initial understandings,
have received less systematic attention).
The centrality of these texts makes them a logical framing for both history and IR, but
also tends to foster certain perspectives over others. It directs attention to particular actors,
without always acknowledging that their authority might be partly constituted by, rather
than merely reflected in, the text: Husayn’s kingship, and certainly the position of his sons in
Iraq and Jordan, was perhaps as much a product of the McMahon–​Husayn correspondence
than a precondition of it (Mestyan, 2023). The reification of a particular text or transaction
can reinforce a disposition to treat the arrangement as punctual, logical and consequential,
rather than—​as is the case with Sykes–​Picot—​part of shifting negotiations, somewhat ar-
bitrary in content, and highly contingent in effect. More generally, the focus on texts pulls
to the fore those who operate in writing and through recognizably European diplomatic
conventions, rather than, say, non-​elite populations, whose conceptions of political order
leave few written traces, but whose actions give shape and force to political movements
(Provence 2005, 22; Eddé 2004).
672   Megan Donaldson

Notes
1. I am grateful to the editors, and to Adam Mestyan, for comments on a draft, and to
Mestyan for exchanges which have sharpened the analysis in the third and fourth parts, in
particular. All errors remain my own.
2. I am here indebted to an exchange with Adam Mestyan.

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 Chapter 46

World War T wo a nd
San Fran c i s c o
Daniel Gorman

The Second World War (WWII) was both a global catastrophe and a moment of rebirth. The
war and the San Francisco Conference (1945) at which the United Nations (UN) was created
were emblematic of a broader mid-​twentieth-​century process that saw ideas of modernity
internationalized on a truly global scale. The year 1945 is totemic for both international
historians and International Relations (IR) scholars. As IR scholars increasingly incorp-
orate historical contextualism into their work, and international historians become more
conscious of the theoretical assumptions guiding their work, it has become possible to draw
insights from both disciplines to critically reassess 1945 as an ostensible ‘year zero’ for our
present international system (Cello 2017; Lawson 2010; Sluga and Clavin 2017).
The 1940s marked the point at which the modernist concepts of territorial sovereignty
and a collective awareness of global challenges converged. Granular studies of WWII and
the UN that emerged from it reveal how actors around the world became integrated in a
single international system, and how legacies from the interwar period shaped this new
order. This was not a teleological process, however, but one where produced as much conflict
as cooperation. It is only by contextualizing the war and the origins of the UN that we can
periodize them within a broader historical context of modernity. Similarly, IR theory can be
enriched by interpreting the 1940s as a period where the decline of older political discourses
(such as internationalism and imperialism) overlapped with the intensification of modernist
norms of sovereignty, multilateralism, and bipolarity. An attention to the concept of granu-
larity underlines that context and periodization matter. They allow us to fully understand
the scale, scope, and texture of the war and the norms and structures of international affairs
which emerged in its wake.
This chapter unfolds in five parts. The first section outlines how international historians
and IR scholars have used WWII and the creation of the UN as global moments. The second
section examines the convergence of regional international systems in the first half of the
twentieth century as a necessary prelude to WWII. The third section assesses WWII as a
moment of international transformation, highlighting both changes and continuities in
international affairs. The fourth section analyses the San Francisco Conference as a signal
moment of closure and creation, both a peace settlement and a blueprint for an emergent
676   Daniel Gorman

multilateral international system. The final section identifies legacies of WWII and the San
Francisco Conference in International History and IR.

Global Moments?

The end of WWII in 1945 is a benchmark date in traditional IR theory. Liberal theorists de-
scribe it as the moment when the United States constructed a new cooperative world order
organized around multilateral institutions, notably the UN, and its own hegemonic power
(Ikenberry 2000). For offensive realists, 1945 demonstrates that great powers like the United
States act aggressively in pursuit of hegemony as a response to the endemic insecurity of
international politics (Mearsheimer 2001). Constructivists challenge these rationalist
assumptions by incorporating International History into broader systemic and unit level
analyses of how wartime actors’ interests and values shaped the constitution of the postwar
international order. They place WWII and San Francisco within longer-​term, parallel and/​
or interconnected political processes and praxes. Some constructivists problematize ration-
alist assumptions about 1945 as a singular global transition moment by arguing that states
organize hierarchies within the anarchic international system, and that the postwar period
witnessed a transition from an imperial world order based on European ‘standards of civ-
ilization’ to one where imperialism was delegitimized and replaced by a new international
hierarchy (Hobson and Sharman 2005). English School scholars position WWII in a broader
historicist analysis of how states use war to regulate norms of international justice and order
(Buzan and Lawson 2014).
Constructivism shares with Critical IR theory an interest in analysing the moral
underpinnings of ideas of international order. Critical IR theory itself was partly a creation
of WWII, as some of its central thinkers emigrated from Nazi Germany to the West. Hannah
Arendt’s seminal work on the crisis of political rights in an age of barbarism provided a crit-
ical theory of modernity. For Arendt, equality ‘is the result of human organization insofar as
it is guided by the principle of justice. We are not born equal; we become equal as members
of a group on the strength of our decision to guarantee ourselves mutually equal rights’ (1958,
301). Frankfurt School writers such as Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, Erich Fromm,
and Herbert Marcuse, meanwhile, analysed the war as part of their modernist project of
incorporating theories of the internationalization of technology and mass culture into clas-
sical Marxism (Yalvaç 2017). These ideas have informed the discourse-​focused work of sub-
sequent Critical Theorists from Jurgen Habermas (2007) to Andrew Linklater (2007).
For many international historians, the war and the creation of the UN was the ‘apogee of
twentieth century internationalism’ (Sluga 2013, 79). The first generation of UN histories,
written by diplomats, activists, and political scientists, were organizational histories. The end
of the Cold War (another conventional transition moment in both International History and
IR), and the short-​lived triumphalism of the ‘end of history’, prompted several largely adu-
latory UN histories in the 1990s and 2000s (Meisler 1995; Schlesinger 2003; Kennedy 2006).
It is only in the 2010s that historians have treated the UN and international organizations as
key historical actors (Kott 2011; Roehrlich 2018). International History has emerged as a cap-
acious sub-​field that draws upon social, cultural, and economic history, and social science
concepts, alongside more traditional diplomatic history.
 World War Two and San Francisco    677

Modernism, International Convergence,

and the Causes of WWII

The international system of the nineteenth century consisted of regional orders

interconnected by significant but uneven tendrils such as the trade in goods and slaves, mi-
gration, war, imperialism, and telecommunication networks. By the early twentieth century
the forces of modernism (notably industrialization, capitalism, technological innovation,
international law, and the normalization of the nation-​state model) had begun to fuse these
regional systems under the portmanteau of European ‘civilization’ (Buzan and Lawson 2015).
The global shock of World War One (WWI) cracked the foundations of this European inter-
national order, but the postwar peace treaties preserved European international hegemony.
What was new was the twin emancipatory influences of Wilsonian and Marxist-​Leninist
self-​
determination. Yet while these political visions promised alternate international
orders, they belied the spectres of American racism and Soviet mass violence (Smith 2017;
Throntveit 2017).
Several interwar developments in international cooperation and conflict anticipated
WWII and the international system that emerged from its ashes. The League of Nations-​
related international organizations such as the International Labour Organization, and non-​
governmental bodies such as the International Committee of the Red Cross established a
‘denser’ international political sphere. This new space produced a modern international civil
service (Ikonomou and Gram-​Skjoldage 2019), and emergent international norms such as a
prohibition against aggressive war embodied in the Kellogg-​Briand Pact (1928) (Hathaway
and Shapiro 2017; Gorman 2017). Yet its collective security provisions failed to solve the cas-
cade of international crises in the 1930s, from Japan’s invasion of Manchuria (1931) through
the Abyssinian crisis (1936) and the Spanish Civil War (1936–​39) to Hitler’s serial aggression.
The very periodization of an ‘interwar’ era indicates how international historians have
conventionally divided the 1920s and 1930s from WWII and its aftermath. Yet many interwar
developments continued through and after the war. International organizations continued
to function (some like the International Criminal Police Organization (INTERPOL) even
centred in the fascist bloc), while international civil servants who began their careers be-
fore the war became important figures in the UN. Imperial powers clung to their empires by
tentatively embracing policies of colonial development, and by variously accommodating
and repressing colonial nationalists (Burbank and Cooper 2019; Maiolo 2016). However,
the marginalization of non-​European societies, from imperial Japan and divided China to
colonized communities across the globe, created emancipatory pressures within the inter-
national system that were unleashed by WWII.
The question of how to periodize WWII is connected to our interpretation of the war
within a modernist framework. WWII is positioned as a key moment in the evolution of
IR theory, separating the ostensible ‘first Great Debate’ of the interwar years between
idealism and realism, and the ‘second Great Debate’ after the war between behaviouralists
and traditionalists. To the extent that these retroactively defined debates accurately capture
IR’s evolution, they use the ‘real world’ caesura of WWII and its peace settlement to peri-
odize the discipline’s intellectual history. This chronology begs the question of whether the
war shaped IR’s theoretical trajectory. E. H. Carr (2001) counselled that both idealism and a
678   Daniel Gorman

realist attention to power are necessary components of practical international affairs. While
theorists such as Hans Morgenthau and Reinhold Niebuhr opposed anti-​liberal ideologies, it
is not immediately evident that the war itself explains the postwar ascendance of realism and
behaviouralism (Williams 2013). Indeed, in contrast to liberal internationalists, the English
School, and neo-​Marxists, postwar realists were notably silent on decolonization and self-​
determination (Guilhot 2014; Hall 2011). While the ‘great debates’ periodization of IR’s
history has been much criticized, no convincing alternative disciplinary genealogies have
replaced it, and it continues to feature as an organizing feature in IR textbooks.
International historians have heeded Warren Kimball’s (2001) call to study WWII on its
own terms, rather than as a prelude to the Cold War. Amy Sayward (2017) describes the tem-
poral and spatial origins of the UN as a ‘borderland’, spanning the war and postwar years,
and national and international political space. For Richard Overy (1994), the causes of
WWII constituted a collective crisis of modernity. The war and the creation of the UN was
both a symptom of and response to this crisis. Modernity is a slippery historical concept,
however. Historians conventionally conceptualize modernity as a condition, an ontology
which can lead them to conflate modernity’s temporal and empirical signifiers (Wittrock
2000). Modernity as a ‘package’ of industrialization, democracy, and the centrality of the
state is a Eurocentric concept applied to the ‘rest of the world’. It does not map neatly on
to the histories of societies outside of Europe, spatially or conceptually, and should be
problematized through comparison to alternate ‘modernities’ elsewhere in the world
(Conrad 2012).
Above all, modernity denotes an awareness of history, and ones’ capacity to either shape it
or be shaped by it. This encourages people and organizations to plan, to forecast, and to an-
ticipate. In Susan Sontag’s words (2003, 109), ‘one of the characteristics of modernity is that
people like to feel they can anticipate their own experience’. Allied war leaders, diplomats,
activists, and intellectuals anticipated continued instability, death, and destruction unless
a new international system was created. The formation of the UN was their immediate re-
sponse to the extraordinary global experiences they had collectively endured. WWII and
the San Francisco Conference can thus be understood as part of a longer-​term international
history of modernity, and as a crucible in which a new international system emerged, albeit
one with important continuities with that it replaced.

World War Two—​Moment of International

Transformation (Changes and Continuities)

The collapse of the interwar international system is among the most studied subjects in
both International History and IR. The failure of the League of Nations (notwithstanding
the measured successes of its functional organizations), the rise of totalitarianism and the
politics of radical (and racial) ideology, and the ultimate failure of collective security as the
bulwark of international system feature prominently in both disciplines’ literature. The
‘German question’ looms at the heart of many international historians’ work on the war and
its causes (Steiner 2011; Weinberg 1994). Germany is also central to IR analyses of WWII’s
causes, but its role, like that of other actors, tends to be interpreted across various levels of
 World War Two and San Francisco    679

analyses, rather than in the holistic analyses of international historians that reveals that tex-
ture of historical events.
IR scholars interpret WWII within broader conceptual frameworks of international
affairs, while international historians produce granular studies (from grand narratives
to micro-​histories) of the war’s causes in historical context. Yet, despite these respective
epistemologies, there is a long tradition of productive integration between the disciplines
in their studies of war and peace. Quincy Wright’s magnum opus A Study of War (1944),
Democratic Peace theorists, and the Correlates of War Project are instructive examples of
historically based IR studies that contextualize WWII in broader analyses of war in the inter-
national system. Structural realists and historians attentive to the politics of power see the
causes and conduct of WWII in analogous terms. Some historically informed IR work on
WWII and the UN’s creation use methods of process-​tracing and path dependency that pro-
vide models for productively blending theoretical and empirical analysis. Also important
is the ‘narrative’ turn in IR theory, which recognizes narrative International History ‘not as
an adjunct or empirical resource, but as a theoretical perspective in its own right’ (Roberts
2006, 703).
The UN’s wartime origins are found in the Atlantic Charter (1941). The Charter is sig-
nificant for three reasons: it asserted self-​determination, sovereignty, and international col-
laboration as norms of a postwar international order; it marked America’s abandonment of
isolation and embrace of international leadership; and it anticipated the UN through its goal
of establishing ‘a wider and permanent system of general security. The Atlantic Charter’s
principles were embedded in the Declaration of the United Nations (1 January 1942), the
first time the concept of a ‘United Nations’ formulated by Franklin Roosevelt was used in
an international agreement. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill next met at Casablanca in
January 1943, where they agreed that Germany must be forced to accept unconditional sur-
render. Their personal relationship has been examined by scholars interested in the role of
emotions and friendship in IR. This attention to affective relations parallels the work of inter-
national historians on historical actors’ mental imaginaries, subjective internationalism, and
personalities and habitus (Hoef 2018; Finney 1997; Jackson 2008).
As the war progressed, the Allied Big Three (Roosevelt, Churchill, and Soviet Premier
Joseph Stalin) shifted from the ‘peace by dictation’ vision of a Great Power concert evinced
in the Atlantic Charter to a cooperative model of international organization which
recognized that ‘vertical hierarchies’ between great and lesser powers were also neces-
sary to ensure international peace (Morris 2013; Clark 2011, 48). They met in Tehran later
in 1943, where Roosevelt present the plan for a United Nations Organization (UNO) to
Stalin. The Dumbarton Oaks conference in 1944 resulted in the creation of new institutions
to stabilize the world economy (the International Monetary Fund and the International
Bank for Reconstruction and Development [the World Bank]), as well as a detailed plan
for a UNO that was subsequently debated at the San Francisco Conference in 1945. In the
interim, the Big Three met at Yalta in February 1945, where Roosevelt persuaded Stalin to
support the UN and join the war against Japan. Stalin secured Soviet hegemony in eastern
Europe. Churchill was largely marginalized, save his proposal for a postwar occupation of
Germany. The terms of the Allied occupation of Germany, as well as a proclamation of terms
of surrender for Japan, were agreed to at Potsdam in July–​August 1945. Some historians see
Potsdam as the opening salvo in the Cold War, yet it can also be interpreted as the last nego-
tiation of the peace settlement, setting out postwar international norms such as the ordering
680   Daniel Gorman

of territory, sovereignty, alliances, and balance of power for postwar order (Reynolds 2007;
Neiberg 2015).
This granular survey of wartime diplomatic debates demonstrates that the war’s end in
1945 was not a singular ‘moment of creation’, but the culmination of a long history of world
order thought and politics. Institutions created during the war, such as The United Nations
Relief and Rehabilitation Agency (UNRRA) and the Food and Agriculture Organization
(FAO), were key precursors to the UN (Staples 2003; Reinisch 2011). The UN’s framers
also drew on the panoply of world order ideas produced by intellectuals, publicists, and
politicians in the 1930s and early 1940s (Rosenboim 2017).
The United States was the driving force in shaping the postwar world. Roosevelt’s for-
eign policy advisor Sumner Welles had called for an ‘Association of Nations’ in early 1941.
The American State Department planned, hosted, and ran the San Francisco Conference,
and the UN headquarters were subsequently placed in New York. Balance of power
theory has informed both international historians’ and IR scholars’ analyses of the 1940s.
The war marked the emergence of a bipolar world order dominated by American and
Soviet hegemony, and hastened the collapse of formal imperialism in world politics.
Colonial nationalists used the war opportunistically to advance their individual visions of
independence.
Studies of the war itself have been left largely to security studies scholars and military
historians, rather than IR scholars and international historians. This division of labour has
obscured the interconnections between the global war and the emergence of a truly global
international order. International historians have paid greater attention than IR scholars
to the nature, conduct, and lived experiences of the war itself. This can be seen in the two
disciplines’ respective analysis of the Holocaust. International historians have interpreted
the Nazi genocide as a crime against humanity, a mass slaughter committed by a state within
the context of imperial expansion, and a prototypically modernist crime through broader
themes such as statelessness or comparative genocide studies (Hilberg 1961; Snyder 2015;
Moses 2008). The comparative absence of the Holocaust in IR scholarship is a symptom of
the field’s state-​centrism and neglect of questions of empire (especially by rational choice
theorists), the influence of domestic variables (thus the enormous significance of German
and European anti-​Semitism is undertheorized in much IR scholarship), and questions
of morality (a variable that transcends system or unit analyses). It has been left to post-​
positivist and critical IR scholars to grapple with the influence of the twentieth-​century’s
moral abyss on international relations (Levene 2005).

San Francisco Conference—​Birth of a

New International System

The UN was created at the United Nations Conference on International Organization held
in San Francisco from 25 April–​26 June 1945. Unlike at Versailles in 1919, all the Great Powers
were committed to building and participating in a new international system in 1945. Fifty
states sent a combined total of 260 delegates to San Francisco. The Conference Secretariat,
presided over by the American State Department official Alger Hiss, oversaw four conference
 World War Two and San Francisco    681

commissions and twelve technical committees which debated the Dumbarton Oaks UNO
proposal. The Big Three’s respective foreign policy priorities were reflected in the UN’s
eventual design: security for the Soviets; the creation of an international community for
the Americans; and international stability for the British. Systemic IR explanations for the
UN’s formation stress alliance politics and the nature of international system transition.
Historians understand San Francisco within broader wartime contexts. Delegates created a
UN with six primary organs. The United Nations Security Council (UNSC) was comprised of
the five Great Powers (France and China joined the Big Three) plus rotating non-​permanent
members. It embodied a realist perspective on international security. The United Nations
General Assembly and the Economic and Social Council (each comprised of all member-​
states) reflected liberal visions of international cooperation. The Trusteeship Council, the
International Court of Justice, and the Secretariat formed the foundation for functional inter-
national governance.
The UN’s goals were distinctly liberal internationalist: peace; international order through
multilateralism; human rights based on natural law; and socio-​economic development. It
also pursued the short-​term goal of eradicating Nazi and Japanese imperialism through the
United Nations War Crimes Commission (Plesch 2017), an important precursor and ad-
junct to the postwar International Military Tribunals held at Nuremberg (November 1945–​
October 1946) and Tokyo (May 1946–​November 1948). These liberal goals were balanced by
a realist view of security. Power was concentrated in the UNSC, the UN’s ‘executive body’.
Franklin Delano Roosevelt (FDR) had envisioned a limited procedural role for smaller
powers. The General Assembly would give voice, but little power, to member states. In the
event, as was the case at Bretton Woods (Helleiner 2014), Global South states exerted some
influence at San Francisco. They ensured that the secretary-​general would be elected by the
General Assembly, and the Latin American delegations lobbied successfully for the inclu-
sion of international human rights language in the Charter.
The UN was thus an international organization that provided political space and (limited)
resources to confront pressing postwar international problems such as the displaced persons
crisis and global hunger, but which ultimately reflected the strategic interests and hierarch-
ical international order of the Great Powers. National sovereignty was the UN’s bedrock
principle, co-​equal with but systemically prioritized over visions of international equality
and self-​determination. Debates concerning whether the UN should have an independent
international police force fell by the wayside, while the UN’s assumption of the League of
Nations’ mandates under the Trusteeship Council undermined its rhetorical support for
self-​determination. It was not until 1960, when postcolonial states had attained a majority in
the General Assembly, that the UN officially embraced decolonization.
The UN Charter is a binding legal instrument which sets out its members’ rights, powers,
and obligations. Virginia Gildersleeve, Dean of Barnard College, prepared the draft of the
Charter’s introductory passage, including the key language ‘We the Peoples’ which spoke
to the UN’s universalist vision. So did members’ agreement that Charter obligations
superseded other treaty obligations (Article 103). The Charter reflects the tension in inter-
national affairs between universalism and cooperation, and state sovereignty and national
interest. These tensions were apparent in the debates at San Francisco, including those con-
cerning membership, the UNSC veto, trusteeship and colonialism, and the use of force. Only
Allied states were invited to San Francisco, but Latin American states pressed for universal
membership, and the Soviets pushed for Ukraine and Byelorussia. All three were admitted
682   Daniel Gorman

as members after contentious debate. The veto question, ostensibly settled at Yalta, almost
wrecked the San Francisco conference. The Soviets wanted an expansive veto, encompassing
the decision to debate an issue as well as its outcome, while the Americans wished a more
restrictive veto. Furthermore, most smaller states resented and opposed the veto. Delegates
agreed upon a compromise whereby the veto could be used at any stage of debate once an
issue was on the UNSC agenda.
The colonial agenda was muddled at San Francisco. The British and French opposed
any language promising self-​rule (the French even bombed Syria during the conference).
The Filipino representative Carlos Romulo was instrumental in securing the inclusion of
‘independence’ in the Charter as a goal for non-​self-​governing peoples. The Great Powers
sought to continue their wartime military alliance through a UN Military Staff Committee
and the ability to use collective force to maintain international security. The outbreak of
the Cold War and the atomic age, however, quickly undermined the UN’s ability to exer-
cise collective force. The exception was during the Korean War, when the UNSC authorized
military support for the Republic of Korea, which had been invaded by communist North
Korea. While collective security has proved elusive, ­chapters 6 and 7 of the Charter have
provided mechanisms for the peaceful settlement of disputes and the enforcement of inter-
national peace in the face of aggressors which have become more relevant in an age of ‘new
wars’ (Kaldor 2012). The UN has supported humanitarian intervention, the responsibility to
protect, and international criminal justice in response to the rise of civil wars and domestic
crimes against humanity.
Humanitarian intervention is justified by its supporters as an application of universal
human rights. Human rights were a powerful aspirational goal at San Francisco, yet of min-
imal practical importance to the Great Powers. The UN’s role in internationalizing human
rights is the subject of intense scholarly debate. The decade of the 1940s, rather than San
Francisco itself, emerge as a coherent period in the history of human rights. Human rights
were on the agenda at The General Assembly’s first session in 1946. The UN Commission
on Human Rights, chaired by Eleanor Roosevelt, subsequently drafted the United Nations
Declaration of Human Rights (1948). The same year, the Polish jurist Raphael Lemkin
prepared the draft resolution of The Convention on the Prevention and Punishment of the
Crime of Genocide (1948). The Geneva Conventions of 1949 expanded international legal
protection for combatants, especially wounded and imprisoned soldiers. This postwar burst
of human rights activism was a response to the mass suffering of the war, yet the nascent
international human rights regime that emerged lacked enforcement and compliance tools
and privileged Western conceptions of rights. While UN human rights deliberations in the
1940s were unquestionably Eurocentric, the principle of self-​determination as a human right
had already been taken up by anti-​colonialists for their own purposes during the war years
(Borgwardt 2005; Ibhawoh 2014).
The creation of a ‘UN system’ or ‘UN world’ was central to the expansion of global gov-
ernance after 1945, a subject upon which both IR scholars and international historians have
converged (Jolly et al. 2009; Mazower 2013). Many of the League of Nations’ international
governance functions were transferred to the UN, an example of the continuities in inter-
national affairs across the putative 1945 divide. Management theorists (a key early influence
was the American organizational theorist and social worker Mary Parker Follett) and func-
tionalist theorists (Huber et al. 2019, 12–​17; Mitrany 1943; Haas 1964) stressed the import-
ance of shared knowledge in this process, anticipating the later work of global governance
 World War Two and San Francisco    683

scholars (Murphy 1994). Meanwhile, the UN Information Office, created in 1942 and the first
agency to use the ‘United Nations’ moniker, was an incubator for practices of public diplo-
macy that have become central to modern politics.
The UN thus provided the political and conceptual space for states and non-​state actors
to collaborate, especially in the fields of economic, cultural, and social policy. The history
of transnational networks work encourages historians and IR scholars to immerse them-
selves in the archives of international organizations, and to see the UN as a site to study
the interconnected histories of postcolonialism, social movements, feminism, population
studies, and many other subjects (Amrith and Sluga 2008; Duedahl 2016). IR scholars also
see the UN as a key element in the history of transnational activism (Davies 2014). The rules-​
based multilateralism embodied in the UN system and other international organizations
after WWII operated in parallel to, and sometimes in tandem with, bipolar Cold War pol-
itics. While political scientists have not been averse to historicist analyses of the origins and
legacies of the UN, IR studies of postwar multilateralism have occurred primarily within the
broader paradigms of the Cold War and, more recently, global governance (Gaiduk 2013;
Weiss and Roy 2016).

Legacies

The postwar international order did not emerge whole in 1945. Rather, the 1940s was a tran-
sition period. Cold War relations had not yet ossified, the UN system developed piecemeal
into the 1950s, decolonization introduced new Global South ‘non-​aligned’ states as sovereign
actors in international relations, and the defeated Axis powers had to be re-​incorporated
into the international system. The wartime liberal internationalist ethos that drove the cre-
ation of the UN was not universally accepted in either the academy or diplomatic circles.
Realist scholars such as Nicholas Spykman (1942) and Morgenthau (1948) faulted wartime
‘idealists’ for ignoring what they saw as the primacy of power in international affairs, holding
an uncritical faith in mechanical institution-​building, and conflating politics and law. These
views came to dominate both postwar American IR and foreign policy, alongside George
Kennan’s famous ‘Long Telegram’ (1946). Yet despite realists’ disagreements with liberal
internationalists regarding the nature of world order, not all postwar realists were entirely
pessimistic about international affairs. Niebhur (1944) shared with liberal internationalists
the modernist conviction that moral convictions had a role in foreign policy. Realists, after
all, are concerned primarily with the behaviour, rather than the nature, of states, and Cold
Warriors opposed the Soviet Union on moral as well as systemic grounds.
Critiques of the postwar international order also came from the colonial world. Self-​
determination featured prominently in wartime deliberations of Allied war aims, yet in
1945 self-​determination for colonized societies proved a promise delayed. As the Nigerian
nationalist Nnamdi Azikiwe lamented, ‘there is no New Deal for the black man’ at San
Francisco (Getachew 2019, 72). For colonized people, WWII was about liberation, not inter-
national governance. The war inspired postwar Afro-​Asian collaboration, while the UN’s
social and economic organizations and programs provided postcolonial nations a voice in
international affairs, material aid, and the normative power to delegitimize colonialism.
These subjects have attracted much attention from historians who have taken up Dipesh
684   Daniel Gorman

Chakrabarty’s (2000) imperative to ‘provincialize Europe’. The place of the Global South in
IR remains undertheorized outside of Dependency, World Systems, and postcolonial theory,
but IR theorists have begun to ‘decolonize’ their discipline and recognize the work of Asian,
African, Latin American, and other racialized political thinkers (Acharya and Buzan 2019;
Vitalis 2017). International History and IR are only beginning to include scholarship by
writers from, rather than Global North scholars writing about, the Global South (Beckert
and Sachsenmaier 2018). The further development of an emerging ‘Chinese school’ of IR,
and the work of the Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL) critical school,
are promising loci for such work.

Granularity and Modernity

The 1940s witnessed the international convergence of modern concepts of sovereignty,

multilateralism, the nation-​state model, international law, and industrial capitalism. Actors
were aware of living through a period of global crisis, and turned to the quintessentially
modernist concept of planning. This dynamic can be seen in the UN’s aspirational goals.
A granular study of WWII and the origins of the UN demonstrates how the two events
were interconnected, how the scale and scope of international politics expanded in the
1940s, and how the integration of grand narratives and specific historical studies reveals
the significance of multiple global modernities and the convergence of moral and political
imperatives.
WWII was not analogous to other international wars or their settlements. Its scale and
scope, the moral atrocities at its core, and the contested and universal nature of its peace
settlement set it apart from its conventional modern analogues: the Napoleonic Wars and
the Congress of Vienna; WWI and the Treaty of Versailles (the other postwar peace treaties
are often overlooked by international historians and IR theorists alike); and the end of the
Cold War. Attention to the particularity and complexity of WWII and the UN’s origins does
not invalidate comparative analysis, but it does suggest that the war and its peace settle-
ment should be understood as particular global events, contextualized within the modernist
conditions of the mid-​twentieth century, and incorporated into broader theoretical analyses
of war and peace with the recognition that not all wars are alike.
The topography of the 1940s looked different from different vantage points. The Western
Allies sought collective security through the executive authority of the UNSC. The Soviet
Union had suffered the most Allied casualties and chafed at what it perceived as an Anglo-​
American peace treaty. Latin American states, as noted previously, pressed their visions
of rights and accountability, while the seeds of dissent from the colonial world, absent
and spoken for at San Francisco, were planted in the language of ‘We the Peoples’ and self-​
determination that spoke to the moral narratives that emerged postwar. Such thick descrip-
tion and attention to multiple historical perspectives enables scholars to better understand
where specific norms, values, institutions, and practices of the postwar international system
came from. They also allow us to avoid the faulty syllogism (prevalent especially in struc-
tural realism) that large-​scale international crises ipso facto cause structural changes in the
international system, and instead ask why a certain set of conditions, variables, and actions
led to specific changes at specific times. If states and other international actors create the
 World War Two and San Francisco    685

international system, anarchical or otherwise, within which they exist, we need to under-
stand what tools they use and what blueprints they follow.
The structural narrative of the decline of territorial sovereignty (the congruence of iden-
tity and decision space) as the organizing principle of international history, and the emer-
gence of a modern moral narrative centred around moral atrocities and struggles against
totalitarian barbarity, racism, and colonial oppression converged in the 1940s. This con-
vergence explains why Arendt’s Origins of Totalitarianism has become a totemic text of the
post-​WWII era, fusing these two narratives in an overarching interpretation of our shared
‘modern’ condition. The peace settlement at the end of WWII re-​emerged in the late 2010s
as the assumed origin of the rules-​based liberal international order threatened by populists
such as the American President Donald Trump, Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán,
and Brazilian President Jair Bolsonaro. To avoid simplistic analysis by analogy, it is im-
portant to understand the history of the 1940s on its own terms.
The UN provided a loose political framework for the conduct of international relations in
the postwar era. Its broader historical significance, however, rests in its aspirational and nor-
mative values. The UN was founded as both a ‘realist’ and ‘idealist’ institution. Its creators
hoped that it would provide a bulwark against further international war, with the UNSC and
its veto system designed explicitly as a Great Power tribunal. At the same time, the broader
UN system, highlighted by the General Assembly, evinced the spirit of universalism and
provided an ‘international commons’. The emergence of the postwar international order
institutionalized practices of international cooperation, some of which were legacies of both
the pre-​war period and the Allies’ wartime alliance. These practices included, but were not
limited to, multilateralism, liberal democracy, and free trade.
Given the wartime evolution of the UN idea and the immediate postwar years of strife,
reconstruction, and institution-​building, we can interpret the 1940s writ large as a succinct
global moment. This broader periodization allows for an appreciation and understanding of
the specific history of mid-​century international affairs, comparative empirical and theoret-
ical analysis of WWII and its aftermath, and a recognition of the continuities in international
relations and ideologies across the 1945 divide. While this periodization does not ignore the
many ways in which the war constituted a global caesura, it does encourage historians and IR
scholars alike to reconsider conventional views of the war as a conclusion to interwar strife
or a prologue to the Cold War.
The era of WWII serves as a global and quintessentially modern moment, a view that
combines international historians’ attention to the granular complexity of the 1940s with
IR scholars’ assessment of the decade as part of a broader pattern of structural shifts in the
international system during times of crisis. The latter longue durée view allows us to pos-
ition the 1940s within a genealogy of collective security (the serial and interconnected crises
of WWII) and multilateralism (UN) as fulcrums of the postwar international system. This
system emerged from the Western-​based wartime Alliance, and it was organized around
the Eurocentric concept of sovereignty. It also contained a moral imperative that gave rise
to debates about human rights, enabled non-​governmental actors to expand their polit-
ical significance, and encouraged colonized societies in the Global South to press for their
independence.
A temporal framing of WWII and the creation of the UN as part of a broader decade
of change reveals the modernist reality of states, political leaders, world order visionaries,
and international civil servants being conscious of living through a period of international
686   Daniel Gorman

dislocation. They worked with foresight to adapt and systematize existing practices of
international governance, and to create new ones, to meet the challenges of the postwar
world. The postwar international system was not qualitatively new; it built upon the bones
of the interwar system and the lessons of the wartime alliance. What was new was its spa-
tial framework. The scale and scope of postwar international governance was unprece-
dented, and it revealed a global if contested consensus that there were shared international
challenges that could not be ignored. As this chapter has argued, a multi-​level analysis of
individuals, states, and systemic factors reveals the 1940s as a world significant moment of
convergence when a truly synchronous international system emerged.

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 Chapter 47

The Bandung C onfe re nc e

Christopher J. Lee

In the spring of 1955, the city of Bandung, Indonesia, hosted an international conference of
twenty-​nine countries from Asia and Africa. Lasting a week from 18 to 24 April, delegates
confronted the task of addressing a range of issues their continents faced during the early
Cold War period. These issues included general questions of political sovereignty and eco-
nomic development for those countries that had achieved independence. For those still
under the last vestiges of colonial rule, the political work of liberation and decolonization
remained. Not least, the countries that participated encountered a new set of uncertainties
introduced by the Cold War and the rivalry between the United States (US) and the
Soviet Union (USSR). These uncertainties not only concerned the growing role of these
superpowers in the aforementioned affairs of the postcolonial world, but also the global
threat of nuclear weapons and the danger they posed to world peace and the progress of hu-
mankind. In sum, the Bandung Conference constituted a pivot point between continents,
political eras, and shifting concepts of political community as European empires declined
and new forms of transnational alliance and solidarity came into being.
This chapter examines these elements of the Bandung Conference in order to establish the
meeting’s importance in the history of international relations during the twentieth century.
Undertaking a granular approach, this chapter discusses the ambitions of the conference
and those who attended, the general importance of the summit in marking the rise of Third
World diplomacy, and, finally, the legacies of the meeting in terms of political and economic
modernization, which can still be observed today. Formally named the Asian-​African
Conference, the Bandung Conference, or simply Bandung as it has come to be known col-
loquially, was one of the largest diplomatic meetings of its kind, ostensibly representing 1.4
billion people or almost two-​thirds of the world’s population by some estimates, including
that by Ceylon Prime Minister John Kotelawala (1897–​ 1980) in his opening speech
(Kotelawala 1955; Jack 1955; Lüthi 2020, 278). Only the United Nations (UN), which had
76 members in 1955, was larger in numeric representation and in terms of geographic and
political magnitude. However, unlike the UN and its institutional predecessors, such as the
League of Nations, the Indonesian conference highlighted the rise of nation-​state diplo-
macy in the majority world beyond the Euro-​American West. The importance of this fact
was not lost on those leaders present, including such prominent statesmen as Prime Minister
Jawaharlal Nehru (1889–​1964) of India, President Gamal Abdel Nasser (1918–​70) of Egypt,
 The Bandung Conference    691

Premier Zhou Enlai (1898–​1976) of the People’s Republic of China (PRC), and President
Sukarno (1901–​70) of the host country, all of whom promoted personal, national, and inter-
national interests.
Yet, as this chapter demonstrates, the historical significance of the meeting did not rest
solely on those who attended—​a postcolonial version of ‘great man’ history and its problem-
atic elitism. Its symbolic magnitude was also temporary, given that a number of delegates
and new emissaries would participate in later conferences of even greater size and repre-
sentation due to the continuing expansion of the postcolonial world. Rather, the import-
ance of Bandung resides in its establishment of a lasting idea—​one often referred to as the
‘Bandung Spirit’, but one that can be more forcefully described as a collective argument
about the future. Despite internal differences and degrees of competition, the participants at
the Bandung Conference and its successors rejected the possibility of Western imperial con-
trol returning to Asia and Africa while concurrently embracing a program of postcolonial
modernity—​economic, political, and cultural in scope—​at national and intercontinental
levels. The Egyptian economist Samir Amin (1931–​2018) referred to this combined effort as
the ‘Bandung project’, an expression more concrete in purpose and scope than spirit alone,
while additionally noting its eventual failure (Amin 1994). Nonetheless, the promotion and
endurance of these mutual positions of spirit and project have contributed to the diverse
legacies of the meeting historically, institutionally, and in terms of the new modernity of
Third Worldism it introduced. To address these different elements, this chapter is divided
into three parts: first, a summary of the event itself; second, an examination of its imme-
diate institutional effects; and third, a discussion of the uses, interpretations, and myths of
Bandung that have persisted to the present.

The Event of Bandung

‘Is the original Bandung Conference best understood as merely a postcolonial ideological
reaction to the passing age of empire and its excesses, or [as] an ambitious effort to pro-
mote a regional idea and an agenda for regionalism?’ Amitav Acharya and See Seng Tan
ask in the introduction to their edited book on the meeting (Acharya and Tan 2008, 2). ‘Are
its principles of peaceful coexistence mere rhetoric, or have these facilitated, if only indir-
ectly, attempts by Asian countries to establish goodwill and improve relations with one an-
other?’ These and other questions by Acharya and Tan point to the main issues that surround
Bandung and the debates that have ensued over its meaning and importance. The Bandung
Conference is, of course, a singular event, but as a result of its sui generis status it has had nu-
merous meanings attached to it. The Bandung meeting has consequently defied simplistic
narration. It is, prima facie, a diplomatic summit, as closely analyzed by Acharya, Tan, and
others (Ampiah 2007; McDougall and Finnane 2010; Lüthi 2020). However, it has been fur-
ther interpreted as a turning point for human rights discourse and international law, a be-
ginning for modernization and international development, a nadir in the global history of
political Islam, and a foundational moment for a new epistemology of postcolonial know-
ledge and history (Afro-​Asian Networks Research Collective 2018; Aydin 2017; Burke 2010;
Eslava et al. 2017; Gerits 2016; Phạm and Shilliam 2016; Slaughter 2018). The irreducible
692   Christopher J. Lee

character of Bandung has convened a variety of themes and histories in a fashion echoing the
range of delegations present at the time.
Co-​sponsored by Indonesia, Burma (present-​day Myanmar), Ceylon (present-​day Sri
Lanka), India, and Pakistan, the Bandung Conference can be situated within several con-
centric contexts that are local, regional, and intercontinental in scope. In the first instance,
the meeting was a vital national occasion for Sukarno and Indonesia that helped cement
his power and his country’s prominence in world affairs. But it was correspondingly a pol-
itical catalyst for the region. The conference was a South and Southeast Asian diplomatic
endeavor, as signaled by its five benefactors who formulated the idea of an Asian-​African
summit at two preceding organizational meetings held in Colombo, Ceylon (28 April to 2
May 1954), and Bogor, Indonesia (28 and 29 December 1954)—​a group that became known
as the ‘Colombo Powers’. From a geopolitical standpoint, the Asian-​African Conference
served as a provisional counterpoint to the 1954 Geneva Conference that sought to resolve
conflicts in Southeast Asia and the Korean peninsula from the distant vantage point of
Europe (Goscha and Ostermann 2009; Prakash et. al. 2018; Simpson 2010). In this regard,
the Bandung Conference must be situated in the context of Asia more generally. Of the 29
countries in attendance, 23 total were on the Asian continent. These delegations, in add-
ition to the host countries, represented the PRC, Turkey, Japan, Lebanon, Jordan, Syria,
Iran, Iraq, Saudi Arabia, Yemen, Afghanistan, Nepal, Laos, Cambodia, Thailand, North
and South Vietnam, and the Philippines. The remaining deputations from Africa were
Egypt, Libya, Ethiopia, the Gold Coast (present day Ghana), Sudan, and Liberia. Though
instability in Southeast Asia had provided the incentive for holding the conference, the
program ultimately involved broader issues regarding American and Soviet influence in
Asia and Africa, the consequent importance of postcolonial sovereignty, and remaining
questions over the surge of decolonization then occurring, particularly in Africa. Indeed,
though the meeting tilted toward Asia in terms of the countries in attendance, the geo-
graphic destination of Afro-​Asianism as a diplomatic movement, makeshift ideology, and
set of transnational relationships was decidedly Africa, a trend that has continued to evolve
up to the present.
The origins and purposes of the meeting were therefore multifaceted, geographically and
politically, reflective of the expansive continental representation at hand and the political
changes then occurring across the world. The complexity of the Bandung Conference sub-
sequently necessitates a granular approach. Its diversity of perspective and ambition can
initially be witnessed at the personal level. Nehru and Zhou in particular pursued com-
plementary agendas that reflected the recent Panchsheel Treaty, which was reached on 29
April 1954 and which endorsed the Five Principles of Peaceful Co-​existence that intended
to resolve a border dispute between both countries following the PRC’s annexation of
Tibet beginning in 1950. These principles included mutual respect for territorial integrity
and sovereignty, mutual non-​aggression, mutual non-​interference, beneficial cooperation,
and peaceful co-​existence. This treaty would go on to inform the final communiqué of the
Bandung meeting. Beyond this recent diplomatic agreement, India and China were also the
two largest countries in terms of territorial size, with resources and economic wealth that
affirmed their influence in South Asia and East Asia. Combined with this dimension were
the remarkable political histories that both countries possessed. India held the distinction
of being the first major colony of Great Britain to achieve independence along with Pakistan
following partition in August 1947. Nehru and India attained an anti-​imperial symbolism
 The Bandung Conference    693

and moral authority widely admired by other countries. Nehru in fact had participated in
the 1927 League Against Imperialism meeting in Brussels, Belgium, so he understood well
the importance of inter-​colonial connections and the new possibilities that could emerge
at Bandung (Louro 2018). Although the Non-​Aligned Movement would not formally take
shape until the Belgrade Conference of Nonaligned States in 1961, Nehru promoted the idea
of ‘non-​alignment’ from the US and the Soviet Union at Bandung, marking the transform-
ation of a tactic of anti-​colonial resistance (non-​cooperation) to one of diplomatic principle.
Questions of political legitimacy also existed. The success and spectacle of the Chinese
Communist Revolution in 1949 had attracted global attention for the PRC, with Maoism—​
the revolutionary thought of China’s communist leader Mao Zedong (1893–​ 1976)—​
inspiring political activism across Africa and Asia. Like Nehru, Zhou perceived Bandung as
an occasion to consolidate the PRC’s standing among regional neighbors and globally. Yet,
he also sought wider diplomatic recognition for the legitimacy of the PRC, given that Taiwan
still retained UN acknowledgment and a formal seat as the Republic of China, a situation
that would last until 1971. The Asian-​African Conference provided a vital step toward inter-
national acceptance (Gao 2007). Other leaders faced questions of legitimacy of a different
type. For Nasser, Bandung offered the prospect of gaining international respect, enabling
him to ascend in status despite the ambiguities of the military coup that placed him and the
Free Officers in power in 1952 (Aburish 2004; Bier 2011; Gordon 1992). Furthermore, Nasser
was concerned with British influence in the Middle East after the signing of the Baghdad
Pact in February 1955 between Britain, Iraq, Iran, Turkey, and Pakistan—​the last four, it
should be noted, being present at Bandung. Nasser and Nehru had been in dialogue before
the Asian-​African Conference regarding the issue of non-​alignment, including mutual dip-
lomatic visits to Cairo and Delhi. The April 1955 meeting solidified this effort, with the elder
Nehru assuming a mentorship role. Indeed, Nasser was only 37 years old at the time, whereas
Nehru was 65.
For Sukarno, the Bandung Conference provided an unparalleled opportunity for the host
country. Prime Minister Ali Sastroamidjojo (1903–​75) of Indonesia had spearheaded the
effort to convene the meeting, reflecting the country’s ambitions. Bandung was one of the
most important cities in Indonesia, and it was where Sukarno had received his university
education and had started his political career, helping found the Partai Nasional Indonesia
(Prashad 2007; Shimazu 2014). Bandung offered a degree of security being outside of Jakarta,
while also being located close enough to the capital to facilitate coordination. Additionally,
unlike the other Colombo Powers, Indonesia had not been part of the British Empire and
remained something of an outsider within the group. As a result, it delivered a pragmatic
alternative to India—​a more likely venue given Nehru’s stature, though India maintained
tense relations with its regional neighbors. Sukarno played an indispensable role in setting
the tone to ensure the conference’s success along with Sastroamidjojo, who attended to more
prosaic organizational matters of scheduling and diplomatic arrivals. Sukarno’s opening
address captured the immediate symbolism of the conference. He declared:
What can we do? We can do much! We can inject the voice of reason into world affairs.
We can mobilise all the spiritual, all the moral, all the political strength of Asia and Africa
on the side of peace. Yes, we! We, the peoples of Asia and Africa, 1,400,000,000 strong, far
more than half the human population of the world, we can mobilise what I have called the
Moral Violence of Nations in favour of peace (Centre for the Study of Asian-​African and
Developing Countries 1983, 8).
694   Christopher J. Lee

As captured in the photography and media coverage of the event, Bandung provided a
diplomatic stage and spectacle for such speeches and global declarations (Shimazu 2014).
The final communiqué more firmly established the stated aims of the meeting, namely a
broad objective for economic development and cultural exchange, respect for human rights
and self-​determination, the condemnation of new and future forms of imperialism, and the
pursuit of policies that would promote world peace. The communiqué consisted of seven
parts. The first part, Section A, ‘Economic Co-​operation’, prioritized the establishment of
cooperative efforts and funds for development assistance, among other items. Second to eco-
nomic growth was Section B, ‘Cultural Co-​operation’, which recognized the cultural diver-
sity of Asia and Africa and the impact Western colonialism and racism had in suppressing
cultural development and progress on these continents. Section C, ‘Human Rights and
Self-​Determination’, supported the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights and spe-
cifically criticized ongoing practices of racial discrimination and segregation in the world,
especially apartheid in South Africa. Section D, ‘Problems of Dependent Peoples’, went
further to acknowledge the continued existence of colonialism in the world, and Section
E, ‘Other Problems’, listed the Palestinian question as well as political situations in Aden
and Irian (present day Western New Guinea). The final two parts of the communiqué—​
Section F, ‘Promotion of World Peace and Co-​operation’, and Section G, ‘Declaration on the
Promotion of World Peace and Co-​operation’—​captured the boldest aspirations of the con-
ference. These sections urged the future inclusion of Afro-​Asian states as members of the
UN and that global nuclear disarmament be pursued. Section G’s final ten-​point summary,
also referred to as the Ten Principles or the Dasa Sila Bandung, concluded with a final argu-
ment for human rights, state sovereignty, territorial integrity, racial equality, and the promo-
tion of economic and cultural cooperation, which would help transcend the recent imperial
past as well as enhance security in the future (Centre for the Study of Asian-​African and
Developing Countries 1983; Kahin 1956; Lee 2009).
In sum, as a granular approach toward the meeting reveals, the Asian-​African Conference
embraced wide-​ranging aims that reflected the expansive geography and politics of those
who attended. Though it originated from a set of regional crises like the conflict between
North and South Vietnam, it embraced a broader political vision that perceived the situation
in Southeast Asia as emblematic of a new and dangerous Cold War nuclear age. The final
communiqué underscored these concerns and indicated that Asian and African countries
were committed to future diplomatic efforts regarding the security of their respective
continents. Indeed, the Bandung meeting reflected the transformation of anti-​colonialism
from a type of insurgent politics to a method of statecraft. This continuity is important
to grasp, particularly for the first generation of postcolonial leaders, many of whom, like
Sukarno and Nehru, actively led liberation struggles. Anti-​colonialism as a political senti-
ment and worldview did not quickly subside, but instead took new shape to inform the inter-
national politics of the postcolonial period (Lee 2018).

Institutional Legacies of Bandung

The Bandung Conference had short-​term and long-​term consequences. As cited before, the
meeting took place during a critical period of transition between colonial and postcolonial
 The Bandung Conference    695

periods, amid a passing era of modern European imperialism and a new era of Cold War
rivalry between the US and the UUnion of Soviet Socialist Republics (SSR—​the latter
competition resulting in methods of informal imperialism or suzerainty, if often denied
as such. Furthermore, global decolonization was an uneven process with many liberation
movements, like those in southern Africa, continuing for several decades after the inde-
pendence of India (1947), Sudan (1956), and Ghana (1957), to pick several early examples.
Postcolonial diplomacy and statecraft as political practices consequently emerged during a
time of both uncertainty and opportunity, perpetuating the continuation of an anti-​colonial
discourse as part of a need for Asian and African countries to secure sovereignty and par-
ticipate in the global politics then taking shape. International meetings like that at Bandung
and global institutions like the UN presented public occasions for reiterating autonomy
and the principle of non-​interference (Getachew 2019). They substantiated these claims by
enabling interstate networks of trust and community, drawing from and aggregating forms
of political and economic capital. Indeed, the proliferation of the conference format among
newly independent countries can be understood through these incentives, given the relative
weaknesses these countries individually maintained as new nation-​states and the possibility
of collective strength through group alignments. Postcolonial diplomatic summits provided
new venues for sustaining political status and strengthening relationships among peers be-
yond the purview of former colonial powers. Routine, institutionalized summitry therefore
asserted self-​determination as not simply a right motivating pre-​independence struggles,
but as an abiding rule and technique of governance against present and future territorial
threats (Feinberg 2013; Groom 2013). This practice affirmed a new political modernity after
decolonization that was geographically more expansive and demographically more inclusive
than had existed in the past.
In this regard, the 1955 Asian-​African Conference was far from isolated. It can be
approached as part of a sequence of postwar Asian summits including the preceding Asian
Relations Conference in New Delhi (1947), the Asia and Pacific Rim Peace Conference
in Beijing (1952), the Asian Socialist Conference in Rangoon (1953), and, shortly after the
Bandung meeting, the second Asian Socialist Conference in Bombay (present day Mumbai)
(1956). These regional conferences in Asia proved to be generative in scope. As mentioned
before, though the geographic balance of the April 1955 meeting tilted toward Asia, the fu-
ture of Asia-​Africa relations soon shifted to the African continent. Nasser positioned himself
as a leader of the Third World, a standing enhanced by the support Egypt garnered during
the 1956 Suez Crisis (Louis and Owen 1989). In December 1957, the Afro-​Asian Peoples’
Solidarity Organization (AAPSO) was established in Cairo, marking a new inter-​continental
endeavor in the wake of Bandung. The AAPSO had wider involvement, incorporating a
range of organizations rather than solely official state delegations from Asian and African
countries. It also had Soviet support. Nonetheless, the conferences it organized continued
the Bandung Spirit through professional exchange, cultural promotion, youth participa-
tion, and women’s coalitions (Bier 2011). Furthermore, its meetings were held within an
expanding range of geographic locales such as Guinea (1960), Tanzania (1963), and Ghana
(1965).
Arguably the most significant institutional outcome of these early conferences was the
birth of the Non-​Aligned Movement (NAM)—​the name itself tacitly indicating an anti-​
colonial stance redefined for the Cold War era. Though non-​alignment was not backed by all
of the participants at Bandung or these other meetings, these preceding events still informed
696   Christopher J. Lee

the positions and prepared the conditions for the diplomatic lead-​up to the September 1961
founding of the NAM. Key figures at Belgrade included former Bandung participants like
Nehru, Nasser, and Sukarno, along with new figures such as Kwame Nkrumah (1909–​72) of
Ghana and host Josip Broz Tito (1892–​1980) of Yugoslavia. Zhou and the PRC were absent—​
an example of how the tentative political alliances at Bandung did not persist. In this case, the
1962 Sino-​Indian War put an end to stable relations between India and the PRC. A second
NAM conference was held in Cairo in October 1964 with delegations from forty-​seven
states in attendance, a growth attributed to the momentum of independence in sub-​Saharan
Africa. The NAM ultimately superseded the 1955 Asian-​African Conference—​especially
after a failed attempt at a ‘second’ Bandung to be held in Algiers in 1965—​by drawing upon it
symbolically but marking a different configuration of nation-​states that met routinely in the
decades ahead (Jansen 1966).
The idea of non-​alignment signaled the fecundity of other solidarities at play. In add-
ition to Afro-​Asianism, ideologies of Pan-​Africanism, promoted by Nkrumah, and Pan-​
Arabism, promoted by Nasser, marked efforts to unite different states under the banner
of broadly construed identities, geographic and cultural in scope, which were positioned
against the Euro-​American West. The 1963 founding of the Organisation of African
Unity (the African Union today)—​started after the All-​African People’s Conferences in
Accra (1958), Tunis (1960), and Cairo (1961)—​and the establishment of the United Arab
Republic (1958–​61), which unified Egypt and Syria, manifested these ideas institutionally
and territorially. But the broader idea of Third Worldism continued to make inroads across
continents (Byrne 2016). A series of conferences after Bandung that fostered different
versions of Third Worldism include the 1958 Afro-​Asian Writers Conference in Tashkent,
the 1961 Afro-​Asian Women’s Conference in Cairo, and the 1966 Tricontinental Conference
in Havana. From an institutional standpoint, the AAPSO was joined by other organizations
like the Afro-​Asian Writers Association (AAWA), which located its origins to the 1958 con-
ference in Soviet Uzbekistan, and the Afro-​Asian Writers’ Bureau, a PRC initiative based in
Beijing as a competitor to the Soviet-​supported AAWA. These projects drew upon local aes-
thetic traditions to construct postcolonial national cultures (Yoon 2015). Even more ambi-
tious, the 1966 Havana conference founded the Organization of Solidarity with the Peoples
of Africa, Asia, and Latin America (OSPAAAL), which drew upon the energy of the Cuban
Revolution (1953–​1959) and supported liberation struggles around the world in the decades
ahead (Mahler 2018).
A different set of institutional implications relate to how the Bandung Conference
redefined the chronology, locations, and meanings of international law. Recent scholar-
ship has argued that the Bandung meeting and its declarations challenged the long-​standing
consensus and influence of the Treaties of Westphalia (1648) over understandings of inter-
national law and its foundations. Not only did the Asian-​African Conference serve to
universalize definitions and claims over nation-​state sovereignty across a much larger geog-
raphy beyond Europe, but it also introduced themes of race and developmentalism as vital
components of legal and political discourse in the decades that followed (Abraham 2008;
Gerits 2016). As Luis Eslava, Michael Fakhri, and Vasuki Nesiah have co-​written, independ-
ence fueled a range of new initiatives for reconfiguring the economic structure of the global
landscape; these initiatives are among the most significant Bandungian contributions to
international law, both in terms of the ingenuity of the specific proposals, and the inspiration
to denormalize the inherited economic order (Eslava et al. 2017, 19).
 The Bandung Conference    697

The Economic Committee at Bandung, which was separate from the Political Committee
that worked on the final communiqué, undertook a critical position against the International
Monetary Fund and other Bretton Woods institutions established in 1945. Though the im-
mediate results of this stance were limited, the discussions at Bandung articulated an
ethos of postcolonial national development that informed such varied later efforts as the
Resolution on Permanent Sovereignty over Natural Resources (1962), the Declaration on
the Establishment of a New International Economic Order (1974), the Charter of Economic
Rights and Duties of States (1975), and the Declaration on the Right to Development (1986)
(Benjamin 2015; Eslava et al. 2017, 19–​22; Higgins et al. 1955; Prashad 2012).
The Bandung Conference and its successors therefore constituted a diplomatic coun-
terpoint to earlier European antecedents such as the Concert of Europe, established in the
wake of the Napoleonic Wars, and the League of Nations, founded in the aftermath of the
First World War. The location of postcolonial conferences in cities in Asia, Africa, and Latin
America indicated a new political geography and Third World modernity that had emerged
from the shadows of Western colonial rule. Indeed, these conferences universalized the
‘conference’ itself as an institutionalized modular form. In his classic study Imagined
Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism (1983), Benedict Anderson
argued that twentieth-​century nationalisms possess ‘a profoundly modular character’. They
‘draw on more than a century and a half of human experience . . . . the very idea of “nation” is
now nestled firmly in virtually all print-​languages; and nation-​ness is virtually inseparable
from political consciousness’ (Anderson 2006 [1983], 137). This description of modularity
can be applied to the international conference. The international conference as a practice
and form must be understood as developing concurrently with the rise of the nation-​state
since the early modern era and maturing particularly after 1945. This assertion is not to claim
that diplomatic meetings did not occur in premodern historical periods. Rather, by defin-
ition, the institutionalization of international conferences could only start once the modern
nation-​state form itself gained acceptance and widespread currency. The international con-
ference as a diplomatic format has therefore taken shape over two hundred years. Yet, it is
not merely an effect of the rise of the nation-​state. This diplomatic practice helped produce
the nation-​state through facilitating recognition of the rights of sovereignty and equal mem-
bership within a community of nations, among other tasks. The Asian-​African Conference
was a key moment in this global institutionalization after the Second World War (Lee 2015b).

Mythic Legacies of Bandung

Against this backdrop of diplomacy and institution building, it is important to underscore

other levels of connection and solidarity beyond statist narratives. The political multitude
that met in April 1955 involved an assortment of unofficial observers, Richard Wright (1908–​
60) being the best known of a group that also included African American congressman
Adam Clayton Powell Jr (1908–​72) and South African Communist Party leader Moses
Kotane (1905–​78) (Bunting 1975; Lee 2015a). These participants contributed to the Bandung
Spirit in different ways, underlining how the legacies of Bandung were not solely at the dip-
lomatic level. Wright’s well-​known account The Color Curtain (2008 [1956]) was published
only a year after the conference, and it remains one of the most influential perspectives on
698   Christopher J. Lee

the meeting despite its subjective limits and biases (Roberts and Foulcher 2016). However,
the symbol of Bandung quickly circulated well beyond firsthand participants. James
Baldwin (1924–​1987) wrote in his report on the first Congress of Black Writers and Artists
held in September 1956 that Alioune Diop (1910–​80), editor of Présence africaine, referred
to their Paris event as a ‘second Bandung’ and that Léopold Senghor (1906–​2001), the future
president of Senegal, invoked the ‘spirit of Bandung’ as a source for inspiring a black cul-
tural ‘renaissance’ (Baldwin 1993 [1961], 14, 23). Psychiatrist and revolutionary Frantz Fanon
(1925–​61) argued in a November 1958 essay for El Moudjahid, a periodical of the anticolonial
Front de libération nationale (FLN) of Algeria, that the ‘Bandung pact’—​akin to the Warsaw
Pact (1955)—​marked ‘the historic commitment of the oppressed to help one another and
to impose a definitive setback upon the forces of exploitation’ (Fanon 1988 [1964], 146). In
his wide-​ranging ‘Message to the Grass Roots’ speech delivered in Detroit in November
1963, Malcolm X (1925–​65) named the Bandung Conference as an occasion when Asian and
African nations came together against their common enemy: ‘the white man’ (X 1994, 5).
Finally, Oliver Tambo (1917–​93), president of the then-​exiled African National Congress
(ANC), summoned Bandung during the 1970s to drum up Afro-​Asian solidarity in support
of the anti-​apartheid struggle (Tambo 1979).
These assorted examples from the mid-​1950s up through the 1970s demonstrate a pol-
itics of citation and an evolution of meaning that sustained the idea of Afro-​Asianism and
the iconic symbol of Bandung for decades. If Afro-​Asian internationalism began to decline
at the diplomatic level by the mid-​1960s, it continued to be reinvented in different ways at
the popular level (Lee 2010; Lee 2019). Some scholars have expressed criticism toward these
uses of Bandung and simplistic notions of Third World solidarity more generally. Robert
Vitalis has examined the factual and interpretive hazards of mythologizing the Asian-​
African Conference, going so far as to argue that the Non-​Aligned Movement was not so
much a successor of Bandung, as commonly perceived, as it was its competitor (Vitalis 2013).
Lorenz Lüthi has similarly argued that the Afro-​Asianism at Bandung and the ideology
of nonalignment promoted by the NAM have too often been confused and taken as syn-
onymous, as have the terms ‘neutralism’ and ‘nonalignment’ (Lüthi 2016). These are im-
portant points that highlight the evolving character of these ideas and diplomatic strategies
vis-​à-​vis the Third World. Yet, while it is essential for scholars to differentiate such terms
as ‘Afro-​Asianism’, ‘nonalignment’, and ‘the Third World’ from one another, it is also im-
portant to understand how these terms and the ideologies behind them converged and were
creatively reinvented at the grassroots level. A problem with interpreting Bandung, as with
many studies of nationalism and diplomatic history, is that political elites can take centre
stage. The issue of hierarchy should be accounted for and resisted, particularly with re-
gard to decolonization and its sweeping effects (Munro 2017; Parker 2016; Plummer 2013).
Underscoring the importance of popular perspectives, Ali Mazrui has written, ‘The whole
concept of the Third World perhaps signified the emergence of a new form of populism—​
global populism’ (Mazrui 1978, 129).
Overall, the matter of mythology raises difficult, yet fascinating, questions about the
symbolism of Bandung for the postcolonial world and the Global South today. The task of
demythologizing Bandung should result in a stronger and more complete factual record.
But questions should also be raised as to why a mythology surrounding Bandung emerged
in the first place. Mythology is nothing new to modern politics as witnessed with contem-
porary nationalism, but it is unusual for a one-​time multinational event—​a status that
 The Bandung Conference    699

has enabled the political appropriation of the meeting and left it vulnerable to factual in-
accuracy. Nonetheless, conference participants had a stake in promoting the ethos of the
Bandung Spirit. Many of these promoters were not misinformed messengers but willful
agents invested in a specific political vision (e.g. Abdulgani 1981). As described earlier, the
mythos of Bandung began swiftly through its rhetorical citation by writers, intellectuals,
and the leaders of civil rights movements and liberation struggles during the Cold War.
More recently, the notion of Bandung-​as-​method has surfaced in different ways through
concepts of ‘Bandung modernism’ and ‘Bandung humanism’—​intellectual projects that
have revisited the cosmopolitan conviviality of the conference and the principles charted in
the Dasa Sila Bandung to rethink rights, aesthetics, and epistemologies of the postcolonial
period (Kalliney 2016, 48–​49; Scott 1999, 144). In a like-​minded gesture, a ‘Bandung histori-
cism’ might be proposed—​a historical methodology that circumvents the conformities and
hagiographies of insular nation-​state narratives and instead cultivates an intercontinental
sensibility that accounts for layered histories of connection and exchange, as well as for the
frictions and unruliness of Cold War internationalisms (Lee 2019, xxi). Bandung’s status as
a concept-​metaphor—​an intersectional moment of history and symbolic capital—​can con-
tribute to rethinking understandings of ‘modernity’ and its universality through histories of
the Global South.

Conclusion

As briefly touched upon earlier, the complexity of the Asian-​African Conference, whether
in terms of the ambitions of specific participants or the diverse itineraries of its meaning
and uses in the decades after, has resulted in debate as to how to evaluate Bandung as a his-
toric event. The nonconformity of Bandung and its sui generis nature have often rendered
it subject to either offhand dismissal or Third World folklore. Taking the former pos-
ition risks disregarding the innovative agency and motivations of postcolonial states and,
more broadly, the importance of diplomatic history beyond the Euro-​American context.
Indeed, underestimating the Bandung Conference—​and by extension conferences held
in Cairo, Accra, Havana, and elsewhere—​can sustain a Eurocentric view of the Cold War
(Prashad 2007; Westad 2007). Yet overdetermining the Bandung moment can also over-
look the political magnitude of the Third World with cities such as Algiers, Accra, Cairo,
Havana, and Delhi also serving as historically important sites, as well as those that have
received less attention, including Beirut, Dar es Salaam, Luanda, and Tashkent (Ahlman
2017; Byrne 2016; Djagalov and Salazkina 2016; Mahler 2018; Markle 2017). These dispersed
locales must be understood as interconnected. As metropolitan hubs, they reveal other
Afro-​Asianisms that crisscrossed not only the Indian Ocean world, but the Black Atlantic,
the Middle East, and Soviet Central Asia. Fanon once referred to ‘the Bandung-​Accra
axis’ that united Asian and African countries (Fanon 2018 [2015], 628). The Third World
and its inheritor, the Global South, must consequently be approached as geographically
noncontiguous, as archipelagoes of identities and interests, like Indonesia itself. As political
spaces and configurations, the Third World and the Global South do not conform to any
normative geography, hence their powerful capacity for reimagining alternative histories
and different aspirational futures.
700   Christopher J. Lee

A tension therefore ultimately emerges between highlighting the significance of the

Asian-​African Conference while also situating it within a broader political landscape.
It is important to not lose track of how many delegations at Bandung had pre-​existing
relationships with Cold War superpowers through agreements like the Manila Pact (1954)
and the Baghdad Pact (1955), both of which created regional alignments in Southeast
Asia and the Middle East that were sympathetic to American interests. Such relations
underscore once more the need to avoid oversimplified views that would have members
and promoters of the Third World share uniform policies and political consistency. Anti-​
imperial rhetoric continued to be applied to politically fraught situations in South Africa
and Israel during the 1970s and 1980s, though the politics of Third Worldism and the
Bandung Spirit itself became increasingly rhetorical in scope (Scott 1999). They marked
a critical position for creating political solidarity, rather than galvanizing a revolutionary
movement or achieving nation-​state sovereignty as such. In sum, when approaching
both the potential and limits of the Bandung Conference, the false imperative of sin-
gular historical judgment should be avoided, with the variety of understandings that a
granular approach can reveal being permitted instead. The Asian-​African Conference
demonstrates how international summits were not simply an effect of political conditions
like colonialism or decolonization. They could also generate change by fostering and
projecting new registers of thought and political imagination. Their modularity and
institutionalization, as touched upon before, enabled new interconnected forms of
global modernity to take hold. Utilizing conferences as a component for writing world
histories can disrupt the conformities of teleological narration defined by the nation-​
state in favour of narratives that display intercontinental convergence and multilateral
outcomes. Bandung and its successors insist on a re-​periodization of Cold War timelines,
emphasizing chronologies of collaboration and dissent against past and present forms of
global power (Parker 2006).
International conferences are ultimately ‘good to think with’, to use an expression of
Claude Lévi-​Strauss (Lévi-​Strauss 1963 [1962], 89). As events, they hold the potential
to step outside national storylines and cast light on contingent political communities.
The case of the Bandung Conference is instructive in this regard. The end of the Cold
War has witnessed the continuation of this phenomenon and the possibility of reviving
past projects, if in revised form. Engagement with China has been among the most sig-
nificant developments for the African continent thus far in the twenty-​first century
(Brautigam 2010; French 2014). Since 2000, the Forum on China-​Africa Cooperation
has hosted a series of conferences to encourage investment and trade between China
and African countries, with the Asian-​African Conference being a historical reference
point for this present-​day endeavor. The BRICS economic bloc—​unifying the economic
and political interests of Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa—​has simi-
larly attempted to challenge the hegemony of Euro-​American economies and financial
institutions through escalating economic growth in Asia, Africa, and Latin America.
The period since 1955 has therefore been one of maturation for the growth and strength
of current Asian-​African relations. This history of the present signals the evolving
legacies of the Bandung Conference, as well as the continued vitality of international
summits for enabling broader communities of political possibility, as once imagined
and initiated in April 1955.
 The Bandung Conference    701

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 Chapter 48

Facing Nucl e a r Wa r
Luck, Learning, and the Cuban
Missile Crisis

Richard Ned Lebow and Benoît Pelopidas

The possibility of thermonuclear war has in many ways shaped the agendas of History and
International Relations (IR). To some degree—​but not enough in our view—​it has built
connections between these fields of scholarship. The major problem confronting scholars
in both fields with an interest in nuclear questions is not empirical but ethical. If thermo-
nuclear war would be the greatest catastrophe humans could inflict upon themselves,
avoiding it must become our overarching political objective. For policymakers and scholars
alike this means facing up to the possibility of such a war, not denying it (Pelopidas 2020).
Admittedly, the scale and unprecedented nature of nuclear war makes it unusually hard to
imagine and analyse (Anders 1962; Amis 1987; Pelopidas 2022 c­ hapter 6).1 Most strategic
planners and scholars recoil from the prospect of such a war and consider its prevention as
the central goal of nuclear weapons and strategy. For their critics this is a political oxymoron.
Equally troubling are efforts by military and civilian strategists to reduce the problem of war
avoidance to a largely technical one. Efforts to pretend that their scholarship is detached and
value free inevitably lead to obfuscations and internal contradictions (Craig 2003 ­chapters 6
and 7; Pelopidas 2016, 327–​328).
Perhaps the most direct way to counter strategies of denial of the possibility of nuclear
war is to offer evidence that nuclear war has not been as remote as the conventional wisdom
supposes. We accordingly turn to counterfactual analysis as a means of exploring alterna-
tive pasts. Similar methods can be used to imagine diverse futures (Bernstein, Stein, Lebow,
and Weber 2007), and we need to account for the past, present, and future possibility of nu-
clear war. Rigorous counterfactual analysis can expose illusions of inevitability, control and
understanding, and bring to the fore possibilities that did not (yet) materialize (Clarke 2005,
­chapter 2; Lebow 2010, 2015; Pelopidas 2015, 2017, 251–​3; Pelopidas and Verschuren 2023).
Thinking about the future is critical because nuclear war planning as well as proposals for arms
control and disarmament are based on imagined future scenarios. Current thinking about the
future rarely goes beyond extrapolation. We must approach the future with more imagination
706    Richard Ned Lebow and Benoît Pelopidas

than mere extrapolation of present trends. We also need to study what political actors think
about the future. Their imagined futures determine policy choices as much as their imagined
pasts (Andersson 2018; Connelly et al. 2012; Pelopidas 2016, 330–​331, 2020, 2021).
Counterfactual analysis must rely on the best secondary studies and primary documents.
We accordingly act like historians in reconstructing critical events that might have led to nu-
clear war and discovering why they did not. This is the mirror image of the more common
use of counterfactuals to untrack wars that occurred, notably the First and Second World
Wars. As Max Weber recognized, so-​called facts never speak for themselves; they are
products of our frames of reference. We must make these frames explicit and also the pol-
itical, ethical, psychological, and technical assumptions on which they rest. They are often
superficial, inappropriate, politically motivated, or badly applied. They may rest on histor-
ical ‘lessons’ and analogies whose accuracy or relevance is questionable.
The Cuban Missile Crisis is an understandable focus of interest as it is generally assumed
that it is the closest we have come to nuclear war. Most accounts of the missile crisis are indis-
putably modernist. They are increasingly at odds with the evidence that has emerged over the
course of the last three decades—​as are the dominant narratives about the Cold War. They
do not give agency sufficient recognition, and when they do often misattribute motives in
their desire to construct a coherent and parsimonious narrative. Even when they downplay
agency they fail to recognize the most important and common constraint on agency: loss of
control arising from the impossibility of leaders to impose effectively their preferences on
the organizations they ‘control’. For all these reasons these narratives present the conflict, its
peaks and troughs, and ultimate resolution as reflections of underlying and changing geo-
political or economic conditions. They disregard the prospect that multiple, contradictory
narratives about the Cold War can be constructed consistent with the evidence.
The first section of our paper focuses on modernist Cold War narratives and their con-
ceptually and empirically questionable conceits. The second addresses the missile crisis and
problems of agency and control. We contend that mainstream nuclear scholarship has only
learned lessons compatible with its grand narratives. Instances of loss of control over nu-
clear weapons and their near use are downplayed or ignored as they are inconsistent with
these narratives. We conclude with thoughts on how to escape from the intellectual straight-​
jacket of modernity. This involves rejection of reductionist theories in favour of theoretically
informed bottom-​up accounts. When investigating the possibility of nuclear war, we must
engage not only with events and micro-​dynamics that might trigger such war, but also with
the long-​term trends, conceptions, methods, historical analogies, and imagined futures. The
latter are important because they produce conditions in which nuclear war becomes pos-
sible. Nuclear scholarship must recognize that it confronts uncertainty, not quantifiable risk,
embrace rather than decry counterfactual methods, rethink its narrow focus on policy rele-
vance, and engage the wider scholarly world and its practice of accountability.

Grand Narratives Of The Cold War

Grand narratives were once considered the pinnacle of historical scholarship. From Gibbon’s
Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire ([1776–​89] 2001) through Karl Marx’s Das Kapital
([1867] 1965) to Arnold Toynbee’s A Study of History (1945) and Winston Churchill’s History
 Facing Nuclear War: Luck, Learning    707

of the English-​Speaking People ([1956–​58] 1990) they propagated political and moral lessons
by ‘making sense’ of a complex past. These works have lost their sheen, and post-​modernists
have done their best to undermine the very project of grand narratives—​despite producing
their own (Lyotard 1979).
David Hume rightly observed that history is distinguished from chronicles by having a
plot. This is a story line that emphases certain developments at the expense of others and
even if it involves flash backs and asides tells a linear tale in the sense that it has a beginning,
middle, and end. Cold War narratives—​whether grand or petit—​conform to this pattern.
Petit narratives tell stories about Cold War events, like the Cuban Missile Crisis, and grand
narratives embed these events in efforts to make sense of the Cold War as a whole. The very
notion that there is such a thing as a Cold War, with a beginning, middle, and end, is another
story—​and only one of many that might be told about relations among the victors of the
Second World War. The Cold War in turn might be embedded in more embracing narratives
about the postwar world, the twentieth century, modernity, or even the Anthropocene. The
choice of petit or grand, and the character of the narrative reflect the ideological, political,
and psychological projects of their authors—​and often their desire for recognition, status,
and material rewards.
Narratives differ in their feature of repetition or progress. Until modern times there
was little expectation of secular progress. In part for this reason there were few histor-
ical narratives. Among the most prominent exceptions are Thucydides’ account of the
Peloponnesian War (1996) and Livy’s of the Roman Republic (1976). Both are stories of rise
and fall, and Thucydides frames his account of Athens as one instance of a more general
phenomenon.
Realist accounts of the Cold War follow Thucydides in depicting the Cold War as the latest
instance of class of events: a power struggle among leading political units in the aftermath of
a struggle against a common enemy. They differ from Thucydides in their greater emphasis
on the role of power in causing the conflict, shaping its evolution, and determining its out-
come. William Wohlforth (2003) represents this tradition in its purest form. The Cold War
ended, in his judgment, because Mikhail Gorbachev recognized that the balance of power
was becoming increasingly unfavourable to the Soviet Union and sought an accommoda-
tion before his bargaining position deteriorated further.
Realist narratives emphasize the rational calculation of actors and the authority and con-
trol of leaders. Their leaders are rarely constrained by domestic or organizational politics
when it comes to critical questions of national security, and do not entertain grossly inappro-
priate or inaccurate perceptions of their situation. For both reasons, realists argue, nuclear
war during the Cold War was never a very real possibility. John Gaddis’s (1987) account
for the so-​called ‘long peace’ is typical. So is its further theoretical elaboration by Kenneth
Waltz (1979) with his claim that bipolar worlds were more stable because it was easier to
calculate the balance of power than it was in multipolar worlds. Wars are often the result of
uncertainty or miscalculation of the balance. Rationalist accounts of war rely on the same
assumption (Powell 2006; Fearon 1995; De Mesquita 1981). The most extreme version is
Thomas Schelling (1987), who insists he lost no sleep during the missile crisis. If Khrushchev
attempted to further challenge the US, he insisted, the generals would have put a gun to his
head. The Soviet Union was outgunned conventionally in the Caribbean and at a strategic
nuclear disadvantage globally and had no choice but to capitulate. Grand and petit narratives
for realists are reinforcing.
708    Richard Ned Lebow and Benoît Pelopidas

The other dominant Cold-​War narrative had its roots in Christianity and more par-
ticularly in the third-​century Mesopotamian apostle Mani, who propagated the phil-
osophy of dualism. There were always opposing sides, as with good and evil, light and
dark, god and the devil. Hans Morgenthau (1948, 430), a committed realist, lamented
that the Cold War had quickly turned into Manichean struggle. The goal of leaders
and peoples was no longer managing an acute conflict but defeating the other side.
Protestant evangelicals like Billy Graham, conservative Republicans, many Cold War
liberals propagated this narrative (Lahr 2020). President Reagan referred to the Soviet
Union as ‘the evil empire’ (1983).
In Morgenthau’s view this framing made war more likely (1948, 430). To the degree the
‘other’ was regarded as the incarnation of evil, compromise became difficult to impos-
sible. Ironically, it also made the US more like its adversary, as Democratic and Republican
leaders increasingly pursued policies at odds with its proclaimed democratic values (e.g.
assassinations, coups, interventions, interference in elections, support of right-​ wing
dictators) (Lebow 2019). It gave rise to counter-​narratives about the Cold War from the lib-
ertarian right and non-​Marxist left, both of which stress the ways in which foreign policy has
subverted American society and politics (Paul 2009; Lebow 2019).
The liberal narrative of the Cold War arguably begins with George Kennan. His famous
‘Long Telegram’ (1947) portrayed the Soviet Union as a nasty and aggressive dictatorship,
but a careful one that could be contained by a prosperous and democratic West and Japan.
Sooner or later the Soviets would seek accommodation or collapse by virtue of internal
tensions and contradictions. The liberal narrative quickly gave way to a militarized version,
symbolized and fostered by NSC-​68, presented to President Truman in 1950. It became a
prop of the Manichean narrative. The liberal narrative resurfaced at the end of the Cold War,
with liberal intellectuals and academics proclaiming that the collapse of communism and
the demise of the Soviet Union and its empire was proof that the only rational response to
modernity was capitalist democracy (Rosecrance 1986; Friedman 1999; Ikenberry 2005).
Francis Fukuyama (1992) garnered much attention with his claim that the end of History had
arrived.
The Marxist narrative never had many adherents in the US and has been more popular in
the UK and Western Europe. It reduces the Cold War to economics and, depending on the
author, attributes hostility to the Soviet Union to capitalist fear of socialism or the need for
markets, raw materials, and foreign investment (Thompson 1982; Brewer 1990; Stephanson
2007; Dunn 2009; Anievas 2010).
There is also a political-​ psychological narrative. In the early 1960s psychologists
(Bronfenbrenner 2010) explored Cold War stereotypes and the ways in which they had
penetrated thinking in the US. Other psychologists emphasized the extent to which major
wars of the past, notably the First World War, were the result of misperception (White
1968). Psychologists and political scientists explored crisis decision-​making and how
faulty procedures contributed to bad policy decisions and war. This is more petit than
grand narrative. It nevertheless constitutes a challenge to realist and rationalist reliance on
rationality.
New narratives emerged late in the Cold War. The tragic narrative, implicit in the writings
of Morgenthau, was made explicit in the writings of Ned Lebow (2003, 216–​256) and his
account of what he calls ‘classical realism’. It follows Thucydides—​contra most realists—​
in emphasizing the ways in which so-​called rational calculations are the cause of conflict
 Facing Nuclear War: Luck, Learning    709

and war, not means of forestalling or coping with them (Lebow, Erskine, and Lebow 2012;
Williams 2022).
Then there is a post-​colonial narrative. It is concerned with the periphery (Westad 2017;
Lawson and Mulich 2021). It rejects the concept of bipolarity as a justification for neocolo-
nialism and focuses on efforts of colonial peoples, newly independent states, and neutrals
to advance their agendas and the ways in which the Cold War affected them. It pays little
attention to nuclear weapons and war in isolation (Said 1994; Bhabha 1994; Wilkins 2017).
Postcolonial scholarship focuses on denial of access to technology, including nuclear
weapons (Mahtur 2020) or crafts a notion of nuclearity (Hecht 2012) that emphasizes the
ideological project behind the separation of nuclear energy and nuclear weapons (Biswas
2014). For those scholars, the focus on war avoidance should not lead to a neglect of past and
present harm caused by the extraction of nuclear materials, production, and reproduction of
nuclear control regime (Biswas 2014, 2020).
These narratives can be compared along several dimensions. First is the level of ana-
lysis. All but the psychological have generated grand and petit narratives, with the latter
offered as instantiations or building blocks of the former. Second is the focus of petit
narratives. The missile crisis is a primary focus of the realist, tragic, and psychological
narratives, in large part because of their interest in nuclear war. They accept the con-
ventional wisdom this crisis raised a serious prospect of war but offer quite different
accounts for why it did and why war was averted. The postcolonial narrative suggests a
relatively unexplored perspective: analyzing the crisis from the perspective of Cuba, a
central player in the crisis, and other unheard voices. The third dimension has to do with
nuclear war more generally. It is a principal concern to the realist, Manichean, tragic, and
psychological narratives.
Works in these several traditions give different estimates of the likelihood of nuclear war,
and they reflect different analyses of its causes. For realists, war is least likely because reason
is expected to restrain political leaders from committing mutual suicide. For Manicheans
it was the most likely because they expected Soviet leaders to launch an attack the moment
they thought they could benefit from it, regardless of the absolute cost to both sides. No
doubt, there were Soviet officials who thought this way about the US, as the response to the
Able Archer exercise in 1983 indicates (Scott 2020; Kaplan 2020, 158–​163). Tragic and psy-
chological narratives put more emphasis on war arising from loss of control, accident, and
miscalculated escalation. In contrast to the Manichean narratives, their concern was with
acute crisis, although they did not dismiss the possibility of war arising as a result of an acci-
dent in periods of lower tension.
Liberalism and Marxism are teleological, and their grand narratives expect the ultimate
victory of their respective movements (Ashworth 2022). Some realists made claims—​
generally ex post facto—​about the outcomes of individual confrontations on the basis of the
balance of power. Tragedy eschews prediction, although understands that people cannot live
without making them.
Finally we come to the question of modernity. The tragic and Manichean narratives are
pre-​modern in origin. Neither puts much emphasis on reason or control, which is why
they make no predictions. They are otherwise quite different. Tragedy can be a vehicle for
learning the value of caution, self-​restraint, and seeing the world through the eyes of others.
Manicheism paints a stark picture of good and evil and discourages empathy. If tragic
narratives would see nuclear annihilation as the worst of all outcomes, Manicheism would
710    Richard Ned Lebow and Benoît Pelopidas

consider it acceptable if evil was destroyed (Cook 2004). Whether he meant it or not, in 1966
Mao Zedong publicly embraced this position (Kennedy 2012, 118–​119).
The realist, liberal, and Marxist narratives are squarely within the modernist tradition.
They emphasize reason, calculation, control over people and the environment. Liberals and
Marxists also believe in progress, which realist narratives do not. Realism straddles pre-​
modern and modern narrative forms, although neo-​realism is distinctly modern in its pre-
tense of being science. Overall, tragic and Manichean grand narratives make the possibility
of nuclear war conceivable. On the contrary, defining features of modern grand narratives
create what has been called a ‘survivability bias’ derived from a focus on control and pre-
dictability (Pelopidas 2020) which makes the possibility of nuclear war inconceivable, while
claiming to account for it. The combination of those two claims characterizes the modernist
overconfidence when it comes to the possibility and danger of nuclear war. It is illustrated in
the treatment of the Cuban Missile Crisis, luck, and learning, we now turn to.

Cuba, Luck, and Learning

There is unanimity on the need to learn lessons from the nuclear age and this crisis in par-
ticular (Allison 1971, 1–​2; Lebow 1981, ­chapter 9; Iklé 2006 ­chapter 5; Blight and Lang 2005;
Perry 2015). A concept of ‘nuclear learning’ was crafted by IR scholars in the 1980s (Nye 1987;
Knopf 2012). Even a critical constructivist/​post-​structuralist take on the crisis such as Jutta
Weldes’ Constructing national interests (1999) accepts the need to draw lessons from the
crisis. There is no consensus about whether these lessons can make future confrontations
more predictable or controllable.
There were originally two schools of thought about nuclear war-​avoidance in Cuba.
Advocates of compellence claimed US victory and attributed it to military and nuclear su-
periority (Horelick 1963; Betts 1987; Kroenig 2018, 84–​94). A minority denied there was a
winner and argued that nuclear superiority did not affect the outcome (Waltz 2012, 7).
Evidence from US and Soviet archives and interviews with crisis participants challenge
both interpretations (Blight, Allyn, and Welch 2002 [1993]; Lebow and Stein 1994, Part
I; Sagan 1993 c­hapters 2 and 3; Schlosser 2013; Sherwin 2020). They also reveal that
policymakers overestimated their degree of control as well as the weapons’ safety and
underestimated the danger of the crisis. American and Soviet officials have endorsed
these assessments and emphasized the role of luck in resolving the crisis (Ellsberg 2017,
197–​201; Blight and Blanton 2002). Other officials have since then gone public about their
longstanding concerns about the limits of control at the time of the crisis and its lucky out-
come (Perry 2015, 3). It is now known that such worries had been voiced earlier on by high
level US officials (Acheson 1969). Most importantly, we are not aware of any interpreter who
changed their mind in the other direction, towards an interpretation of the crisis in terms of
control, either deterrence or compellence. In addition, there is a growing awareness that nu-
clear weapons were a principal cause of the missile crisis (Lebow and Stein 1994, 49; Gavin
2020, 300–​301).
Revealing in this connection is the shift in former Secretary of Defense Robert
S. McNamara’s thinking about control, safety, and luck. During the crisis McNamara was
hawkish and acted as if he believed in the controllability of the crisis, the validity of his
 Facing Nuclear War: Luck, Learning    711

knowledge and the safety of the weapons. At the beginning, he initiated the idea of a quaran-
tine around Cuba and, from 25 October, advocated the use of force and escalation as well as
the dropping of practice depth charges near Soviet submarines to enforce the blockade (Stern
2012, ­chapter 4; Kaplan 2020, 67–​73). At the peak of the crisis, on 27 October he is on the
record telling Attorney General Robert Kennedy: ‘you need to really escalate this . . . And then
we need to have two things ready. . . . a government for Cuba, because we’re gonna need one
after we go in with five hundred aircraft. And secondly, some plans for how to respond to the
Soviet Union in Europe, cause sure as hell they’re gonna do something there’ (Stern 2012, 61).
McNamara’s confidence was visible in 1961 during the Berlin crisis. Before safety devices
called Permissive Action Links were placed on nuclear weapons he decided to equip US
troops on the frontlines with Davy Crockett atomic rifles to counter a Soviet invasion. Those
rifles could be used at the will of the soldier (Schlosser 2013, 280). During the missile crisis
he insisted that the Navy could drop practice depth charges on Soviet submarines to lead
them to surface without damaging them or leading them to respond violently. The President
was stunned by his level of confidence (Stern 2012, 61). On 5 December 1962, less than two
months after the crisis, McNamara was still advocating for a massive increase in the US ar-
senal. In other words, uncertainties regarding the estimates of the number of Soviet weapons
and the expectation that US Congress would act as a veto player if he would have asked for
fewer nuclear weapons trumped considerations of nuclear weapons safety and the fueling
of the arms race (Pelopidas 2021). His response to uncertainty was to ‘take whatever any
reasonable person would say is required’ and ‘double it’. ‘That would be money well spent’
(Kaplan 2020, 77).
For the next thirty years McNamara publicly hailed the crisis as a case of exemplary con-
trol and management. In a 1983 special edition of American Broadcasting Company (ABC)
news Viewpoint following the screening of The Day After, which depicts a nuclear war be-
tween the US and the Soviet Union resulting in the annihilation of the US. Conservative
commentator William F. Buckley cites a character from the movie claiming that ‘we over-
came’ the crisis of 1962 because ‘we had a considerable deterrent which was unambiguous’.
He then turns to McNamara, who asserts confidently that ‘we have a stable deterrent today’
without correcting the picture of control and safety in the crisis that was painted (McNamara
1983 at 34). McNamara displayed the same confidence in the long interview he gave on 20
February 1986 for the Public Broadcasting System (PBS) series War and Peace in the Nuclear
Age. He called the crisis ‘the most dangerous time’ during his service as Secretary of Defense
but only because ‘it was a period of great tension’. ‘And not only was it the most dangerous
period in my seven years as Secretary of Defense’, he added, ‘but I think it was also the most
expertly handled’.
In 1986 McNamara acknowledged the problem of ‘inadequate information, misinforma-
tion, emotion’, and the likelihood that ‘in a crisis, you make misjudgments’. He nevertheless
mostly applied his caveats about miscalculation and loss of control to the Soviet Union.

The reason I felt so concerned Saturday evening, as I say, I wondered whether I’d ever see an-
other Saturday sunset, was that events were moving out of control. There were forces at work
in the Soviet Union, in the West, that very possibly would have escalated, perhaps not through
initiation or action by the West, I hoped it wouldn’t come that way, perhaps the Soviets would
have in some fashion moved. And they had Castro to think of. Perhaps they weren’t entirely in
control of his actions. They had the troops to think of perhaps they weren’t entirely in control
of them. (McNamara 1986 at 50)
712    Richard Ned Lebow and Benoît Pelopidas

In classified settings, however, McNamara showed serious concerns about safety and the
command and control over the weapons as early as 26 January 1963. He briefed members
of the National Security Council about accidents in Texas and North Carolina involving the
possibility of accidental explosions of Mark 39 thermonuclear weapons. The declassified
summary of this account reports that ‘he went on to describe the crashes of US aircraft,
one in North Carolina and one in Texas, where, by the slightest margin of chance, literally
the failure of two wires to cross, a nuclear explosion was averted. He concluded that, ‘des-
pite our best efforts, the possibility of an accidental nuclear explosion still existed’ (cited in
Schlosser 2013, 301). Eric Schlosser concludes that McNamara was the most concerned about
maintaining presidential control over the use of the weapons, not just their safety, and the
one who was most scared among those who were briefed on those accidents (Schlosser 2013,
249). In January 1968, when another serious accident took place as a B-​52 bomber carrying
thermonuclear weapons crashed near the Thule Air Force Base in Greenland, McNamara
immediately—​ the day after the accident—​ discontinued the airborne alert, requiring
bombers to fly around the clock with weapons on board. (Sagan 1993, 170–​180; Schlosser
2013, 325; Ellsberg 2017, 314).
McNamara’s confidence in the safety of nuclear weapons at the time and in the chain of
command was further shattered by the Oral History Conference in Havana in 1992 that
gathered remaining participants in the crisis. Alongside the discoveries about the limits of
control, of leaders’ knowledge at the time and of weapons’ safety in the 1990s, the face to face
encounter with Castro led McNamara to conclude that ‘it was luck that prevented nuclear
war’ (McNamara in Blight and Lang 2005, 60).
At this conference McNamara learned that Soviet submarines around Cuba each
carried a nuclear torpedo. Stalking and dropping depth charges compelled the Soviet
attack submarine, the B-​59 to surface in the Caribbean because of low batteries and rising
temperatures. Once in sight it was strafed by an ASW S-​2 Tracker aircraft that flew over-
head at an altitude of only 10–​15 meters. Machine gun bullets hit the water in front of it and
on either side. American destroyers surrounded the submarine, pointed their guns at it and
tried to blind the crew on deck with searchlights. Captain Valentin G. Savitsky not unreason-
ably concluded that they were under attack. Out of contact with his command he reasoned
that perhaps war had broken out. His orders compelled him to fire his nuclear torpedo if
attacked. Before leaving port, the chief of staff of the Northern Fleet had made it clear to his
submarine commanders that if attack was imminent, they should fire first (Sherwin 2020,
22–​26; Plokhy 2021, 257–​274).
Savitsky and his fellow commanders made a pact among themselves that they would go
down fighting rather than disgrace their country. Savitsky ordered an urgent dive and the
readying and loading of their nuclear-​tipped torpedo. His descent into the submarine was
blocked temporarily by the stocky signaling officer, who had become stuck in the conning
tower. Also on board and on deck the B-​59 was Captain Vassily A. Arkhipov, representing
the brigade commander. He observed that the American destroyers were firing over, not at,
their submarine and that one of the destroyers was trying to signal to them. He yelled at
Savitsky to cancel the dive (Sherwin 2020, 26–​28; Plokhy 2021, 257–​274).
The US Navy came within a hair’s breadth of starting a nuclear war because its dropping
of grenades to make Soviet submarines surface, and subsequent harassment by destroyers
and aircraft, made at least one Soviet Captain convinced that war had broken out and that
he should retaliate before being sunk. It seems almost certain that this would have happened
 Facing Nuclear War: Luck, Learning    713

had Captain Arkhipov not been on deck and if the signalling officer had not blocked access
to the conning tower (Plokhy 2021, 257–​274). The submarine’s torpedo would have sunk at
least one ship, if not more, and—​with or without authorization from the White House—​the
US Navy would have attacked all the submarines they were tracking. There would have been
a shooting war in the Caribbean involving nuclear weapons. It is anyone’s guess what would
have happened next.
McNamara later acknowledged that the Excomm also knew nothing about this or of the
90 Soviet tactical nuclear weapons in Cuba (McNamara 2005, 33). Listening to Castro in
1992, he realized that the hawkish course of action he had initially advocated during the
crisis could have invited Soviet escalation:

Near the end of that meeting, I asked Castro whether he would have recommended that
Khrushchev use the weapons in the face of a U.S. invasion, and if so, how he thought the
United States would respond. “We started from the assumption that if there was an invasion
of Cuba, nuclear war would erupt,” Castro replied. “We were certain of that . . . . [W]‌e would be
forced to pay the price that we would disappear.” He continued, “Would I have been ready to
use nuclear weapons? Yes, I would have agreed to the use of nuclear weapons.” And he added,
“If Mr. McNamara or Mr. Kennedy had been in our place, and had their country been invaded,
or their country was going to be occupied . . . I believe they would have used tactical nuclear
weapons.” I hope that President Kennedy and I would not have behaved as Castro suggested
we would have. (McNamara 2005, 33; see also Ellsberg 2017, 210)

In spite of this compelling evidence many historians and IR scholars remain reluctant to
acknowledge the role of luck and the limits of safety and control—​even though they main-
tain the need to learn from the past and use the missile crisis as a crucial reference point.
Ariel Colonomos noted astutely in 2013 that ‘the “science” of international politics does not
like “luck” ’ (2013, 190). In 2018, Milton Leitenberg (2018, 249) concluded his study of nu-
clear weapons during the Cold War with the observation that ‘luck is a term one rarely finds
in an academic study’. Most strikingly, scholars have not incorporated this new knowledge
in their interpretation of the event (Waltz 2012, 7; Kroenig 2018). French interpreters have
shown similar inflexibility (Pelopidas 2017, 258–​260). Mark Bell and Julia Macdonald are
an exception. They write that ‘luck was required to peacefully negotiate the Cuban Missile
Crisis’ after fully acknowledging the limits of control, knowledge, and weapons safety (Bell
and Macdonald 2019, 55–​57, quote on 60). So too does Lebow (1987).
Mainstream IR requirements of structured predictions and policy relevance understood
as advice to future nuclear crisis managers make recognition of the limits of knowledge, con-
trol and the role of luck a priori unacceptable (Pelopidas 2016; 2017, 248–​251) As a result, even
Bell and Macdonald (2019, 59), in spite of their acknowledgment of the role of luck, end up
quantifying the risk of nuclear use in the crisis, assess it as ‘moderate’ and conclude that ‘the
brinkmanship model accurately captures the key dynamic—​the manipulation of risk—​of
the Cuban Missile Crisis’. Frank Sauer admits his uneasiness with the notion of luck: ‘This is
not only an unsettling notion’, he writes. ‘It is also hard to believe’ (Sauer 2015, 2). He excludes
it from his analysis without providing any good reason. Gavin (2020, 306–​307) does the
same. For a thorough critique of nuclear crisis management, see Lebow (1987).
Among historians, the impediment is resistance to counterfactual methodology, which
makes it almost impossible to examine possibilities that did not materialize and therefore
any assessment of the role of luck (Lebow 2015, 406; Pelopidas 2017, 251–​253). There is not
a word on the possibility of nuclear war or luck in avoiding it in the chapter on ‘the Cuban
714    Richard Ned Lebow and Benoît Pelopidas

Missile Crisis’ in the 2010 Cambridge History of the Cold War or the 2013 Oxford Handbook
of the Cold War (Hershberg 2010; Immerman and Goedde 2013). One exception is Ruud van
Dijk who writes that the crisis ‘demonstrates that individual actors are capable of taking irre-
sponsible risks (while fortuitously also being able to choose the opposite course of action at
key moments’ (van Dijk 2014, 275).
In the face of a wealth of supporting evidence and the ability of at least some of the policy-
making elite to take it aboard, the world of social science remains reluctant or unable to learn
the most important lesson of nuclear crisis.

Conclusion

The July 1914 crisis triggered the First World War. Historians described it as inevitable, and
this remained the conventional wisdom until quite recently (Afflerbach and Stevenson
2007, Lebow 2010; Macmillan 2013; Clark 2012). If the Cuban Missile Crisis had led to war—​
conventional or nuclear—​historians would have constructed a causal chain leading ineluct-
ably to this outcome (Lebow 2015, 406). Instead they have done the opposite. Because the
crisis was peacefully resolved they have assumed the equal inevitability of this outcome and
the narratives we have analyzed provide different reasons why this is so.
Cognitive psychologists would look to the hindsight bias to explain efforts to portray
the past as overdetermined. We think more fundamental processes are at work. In the First
World War powerful political and psychological reasons were mutually reinforcing. Those
in power in 1914 had strong incentives to deny to themselves and their publics any responsi-
bility for the catastrophe.
Just the reverse happened with the missile crisis, and for equally powerful political and
psychological reasons. Belief in the ability of deterrence and compellence to prevent nu-
clear war was immensely reassuring to everyone. Downplaying uncertainty, denying loss of
control and miscalculated escalation, exaggerating rationality, risk management, and con-
trol over nuclear weapons and the military, buttressed presidential authority and justified
Kennedy’s nuclear arms buildup and the off-​scale military budget (Sherwin 2020, 465–​469).
Diverse political and economic constituencies had strong interests in propagating this fairy
tale. The realist narrative provided the vehicle for this reading of the crisis and its widespread
acceptance is hardly surprising. The crisis also gave a boost to the Manichean narrative as
Khrushchev and the Soviet Union could readily be portrayed as aggressors only held in check
by superior power. The Marxist narrative suffered, and the liberal narrative accommodated.
The crisis was the catalyst for the psychological narrative, but it took a decade to develop and
had relatively little traction, even in the academy.
These political and psychological defenses have important implications. One of the
reasons the July crisis was not resolved was the belief, among so many leaders and diplomats
in Russia, France, and Britain, that it would be resolved peacefully as had earlier European
crises. The realist narrative of Cuba created similar expectations about the ability of
superpowers leaders to manage their relationship. This optimism has carried over into the
post-​Cold War era and conflicts between the US and China and Russia. It has also provided
the justification for even more disproportionate military spending, new generations of
nuclear weapons, and corresponding strong reasons to resist all the evidence from Cuba
 Facing Nuclear War: Luck, Learning    715

and other crises that luck had played a very large role in their peaceful resolution. Rather
than enhancing conflict management and prevention, dominant narratives make crises,
accidents, and war more likely.
The tragic narrative suggests that the realist narrative and the nuclear policies based on
it are what made luck necessary. The missile crisis and the Cold War accordingly offer a
broader lesson about modernity, and one that is the central theme of Sophocles’ exploration
of the fate of Oedipus. In his desire to escape the prophecy that he will kill his father and bed
his mother, he fulfills it. Oedipus’ power and reason—​and commitment to avoid murder
and incest—​are responsible for this outcome. So too, the tragic narrative asserts, have
overreliance on power and reason in the modern world brought about undesired outcomes,
and not infrequently the very ones people were trying to avoid. It is possible that a sincere
commitment to avoid nuclear war could make it more likely.
What should be done? We in the academy, government, and media must recognize how
lucky we have been. We cannot blindly count on good fortune and must make the possi-
bility of nuclear war imaginable. We need to identify pathways that lead to war other than
a conscious decision by an evil adversary to start one. We must take seriously problems of
miscalculated escalation through fear, flawed estimates and judgments, and loss of control.
We need to broaden the audience for this new sensitivity and analysis beyond the narrow
community of nuclear crisis managers. Ideally, we should combat the organizational, cor-
porate, and political interests that want to maintain the dominant narrative. To do so, we
need to become able to distinguish a sincere commitment to avoid nuclear war grounded
in the belief that it is possible from lack of imagination or refusal to believe in its possibility
(Anders 1962, 496–​497). Tragedy may apply to the former but should not be misused as an
excuse for the latter.
We scholars must continue archival research on cases of near nuclear use through
decisions or accidents. We must embrace counterfactual analysis as a means of probing the
contingency of important political outcomes and further develop this method. We need
to embrace the Knightian distinction between risk and uncertainty, and develop a more
sophisticated understanding of luck. Above all we must avoid the survivability bias.

Note
1. Anders’ concept of ‘promethean discrepancy’ captures the gap between the human possi-
bility to destroy and imaginatively and morally relate to.

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 PA RT V I

C ON C LU SION
 Chapter 49

History a nd t h e
Internati ona l
Time, Space, Agency, and Language

Maja Spanu and Christian Reus-​S mit

Introduction

This is a Handbook on History and International Relations, on the complex relationship, first,
between temporality and a domain of political life, and second, between two fields of schol-
arly inquiry. We have avoided, however, cleaving to any particular definition of international
relations, either as a realm of human interaction or a discipline or sub-​discipline. This is
partly because we accept Raymond Aron’s astute observation that ‘ “International Relations”
have no frontiers traced out in reality, they are not and cannot be materially separable from
other social phenomena’ (1966, 4). The ‘international’, from this perspective, is best under-
stood as a conceptual category, one that social and historically located actors—​scholars,
practitioners, activists, citizens, and so on—​have used to define and order a particular
sphere of human life, a sphere they imagine and construct through their practices. It is also
because the field of International Relation (IR)has shifted over time, as social and political
conceptions of the international have changed. Indeed, in important respects, its intellec-
tual and professional contours have been shaped by debates about its proper subject do-
main: relations between sovereign states, transnationalism, or ‘world’ or ‘Global Politics’. For
these reasons, although it might seem strange in a Handbook on History and International
Relations, we have sought to decentre the international and its representations. Not because
it is unimportant to our project, but because we wanted to treat it as a historically emer-
gent and variable concept (and field of inquiry). The same logic applies to our treatment of
history, as both a temporal process and disciplinary project. What history is, in the former
sense, has long been debated by historians and philosophers of history, and the discipline
of History has itself been a contested intellectual project, as current debates about ‘Global
History’ demonstrate.
To avoid reifying ‘history’ and ‘international relations’ we have sought to read their
shifting contours and relationships through the organizing themes of modernity and
724    Maja Spanu and Christian Reus-Smit

granularity. Modernity, as our fellow editors explain in Chapter 1, is a central yet contested
concept in accounts of history an international relations, framing debates about distinctions
between past and present and about trajectories of development. Importantly, these debates
cut across the fields of History and IR, disrupting the often-​ritualized lines of disciplinary
debate. The theme of granularity shifts the focus to ‘questions of scope, scale, and closeness
of association when classifying or bundling phenomena together in posited relationships’
(Bukovansky and Keene, Chapter 1). It asks our contributors to probe ‘the tension between
the richness, specificity, and individuality of a social phenomenon within its immediate
chronological and geographical context on the one hand, and the desire to tease out general
patterns and shifts across the longue durée and the global on the other’ (Bukovansky and
Keene, Chapter 1). Our contributors have engaged, at times favourably and at others more
critically, with the themes of modernity and granularity in chapters relating to ‘Readings’
(the narrative framing of history and international relations), ‘Practices’ (which either re-
inforce or destabilize fixed agentic identities and interests), ‘Locales’ (that reveal the import-
ance of perspective in constituting understandings of both history and the international),
and ‘Moments’ (the choice of which is commonly informed by assumptions about mod-
ernity and granularity).
This approach to history and international relations not only constitutes a fresh en-
gagement with the subject, but it has also prompted thought-​provoking and richly varied
contributions from our authors. In this final chapter, however, we have decided to recentre
the international and its history. Our goal is not to distil from our authors’ writings
overarching ‘umbrella’ conceptions of the international. Rather, we seek to draw out—​in
general and in relation to our authors’ arguments—​some of the challenges of locating key
concepts and practices that have characterized the international historically. In saying that
such key concepts and practices are historically contingent, we are making the case that
they have carried multiple meanings, that they have been defined and deployed at different
points in time, in diverse global contexts, serving often contradictory ends. Moreover, as
the preceding chapters testify, conceptions of our political life have been imagined, dis-
cursively constructed, and mobilized by diverse actors, often in contestation. With this
in mind, the following discussion focuses on four topics that help us access the multiple
origins, understandings, and deployments of the international (and the global), and of
the many practices, conceptions, and moments that accompany them. These are, respect-
ively, time, agency, space, and language. One advantage of these foci is that they enable us
to trace, through the writings of our contributors, how conceptions of the ‘international’
blend into the ideas of the ‘global’, a concept that appears frequently in preceding chapters.
Moreover, they demonstrate not only Aron’s point that ‘ “International Relations” have no
frontiers traced out in reality’, but also the historical instability of the very category of the
international.

Time

Perhaps the most straightforward of all our four points for a Handbook on History and
International Relations is that variations in conceptions (and constructions) of time matter.
For much of the post-​1945 period, IR scholars approached history by flattening out time,
 History and the International    725

either by seeing international history as a temporal realm of ‘recurrence and repetition’

(Wight 1966, 26), characterized by enduring processes and persistent rhythms, or as a tem-
poral realm characterized by progressive change. Our contributors have shown, however,
that the relations between time and the international are far more complex. In particular,
they draw attention to six issues: how variations in time matter for how actors have under-
stood key processes or phenomena in international relations, the importance of non-​linear
processes of change across time, the significance of temporally specific contradictions (both
at the level of social processes and structures and within beliefs of individual actors), the
impact of how we link or separate events in time on how we read their distinctiveness and
significance, and the need, in all of this, to remain sensitive to continuities (as well as the
political, epistemological, and methodological risks associated with their identification and
emphasis).
The terms ‘international’, ‘global’, ‘sovereignty’, as much as other key concepts of our polit-
ical life, have existed within spans of time. This, however, does not equate with their meaning
being unchanging. For instance, as several of our chapters show, with one century separating
them, how the Paris Peacemakers thought about the postwar world order in 1919 (Kelly,
Chapter 44) was different from how their predecessors thought about relations among states
in 1815 (Mitzen and Rogg, Chapter 40), and from how their successors would think, only a
few decades later, about world order in 1945 San Francisco (Gorman, Chapter 46). Agents,
be these political actors or thinkers, are embedded in specific environments of shared values,
ideas, and norms and these environments shape the way they think and act. Let us take,
here, the trajectory of empire in the twentieth century. For centuries empire was a legitimate
form of political authority. It still was in 1919 and 1945, as the Allies who won both world
wars arranged organizations such as the League of Nations and the United Nations accord-
ingly, by formalizing internationally stratifications of power, territories, and people (see
Chapters 4, 16, 35, 45). Yet, only two decades later, in the 1960s, the practice of formalizing
stratifications in the name of supposed degrees of civilization, race, or advancement was no
longer possible as colonial rule was formally delegitimized thanks to the efforts of a constel-
lation of colonized and postcolonial actors (Lee, Chapter 47; Mayall, Chapter 21). This does
not mean, though, that from one day to the other empire and hierarchies ended, leading
all the way to formal equality. For instance ‘development’ became a widespread keyword to
accompany stratifications of territories, populations, and economies (Unger, Chapter 24).
With the end of colonial rule, hierarchies and inequalities were not dismantled. As Martin
Bayly (Chapter 14) discusses, since then the ‘return to empire’ has taken different and more
ambiguous forms that are still echoed in today’s practices and arguments about ‘the war on
terror’, in Brexit’s imperial nostalgia, and in Russia’s violent attempt to reestablish a claimed
historical unity of Russia and Ukraine.
Claiming that variations in time matter, however, as several our contributors argue, is not
the same as suggesting that conceptions change in linear or progressive ways. Julia Costa
Lopez (Chapter 27) writes about the plurality, diversity, and global interconnectedness of the
‘premodern world’, and suggests that because of its very appellation, the ‘premodern’ is often
turned into a dependent concept for what happened before ‘modernity’ and is thus devoid
of independence, and specificity. This can also lead to the often unspoken assumption that
the organized ‘modern’ had to inevitably stem from a less organized ‘premodern’ (Yudan,
Chapter 11). As both Costa Lopez and Chen Yudan show, how the two intertwine is more
complex than largely assumed. Writing on the history of rights in the international system,
726    Maja Spanu and Christian Reus-Smit

Andrea Paras (Chapter 8) also calls into question progressivist accounts of history, focusing
on the ‘evolution’ of rights (and human rights specifically). Paras reminds us that struggles
for expanding rights are accompanied by attempts to control, at times perpetuating struc-
tural hierarchies. For Paras, narratives about legal or moral progress attached to the expan-
sion of rights can erroneously lead to simplified visions of the past and the future in which
rights continue to mobilize peoples to fight for ‘positive’ change or in which global solidarity
is the norm.
As several of our authors attest, macro-​history in IR and longer term perspectives in
History are particularly interesting testing grounds to question evolutionary and pro-
gressivist narratives about world order. As Ayse Zarakol (Chapter 28) argues, modern-
ization theory in particular posits a teleology of development wherein the ‘West’ led the
way to major historical transformations, and others followed. Despite strong normative
critiques, Zarakol suggests that such an understanding has not being entirely rejected
within scholarship. This, for instance, is visible in the dominant scholarship in political
science and IR on the ‘emergence of the modern state’. For Zarakol, however, these types of
evolutionary (and Eurocentric) metahistorical narratives about the birth and evolution of
the modern state in Europe cannot be dismantled by critiques that are too micro and that
touch one or another specific aspect or moment in the history of international relations..
They need to be replaced by alternative macro-​histories of global modernity in which all
spaces and agents are equally considered. Echoing Zarakol’s call, Yongjin Zhang’s chapter
on ‘Barbarism and Civilization’ offers an alternative vision of how the two concepts (and
ensuing practices) have been invoked and used across time and space (Chapter 15). Zhang
shows how this conceptual duo has carried across time and space complex historical
memories and highly conflicting relationships in intercultural encounters and socio-​
political interactions. Through explorations of moments of their articulation across both
Western and Chinese history, Zhang demonstrates that barbarism and civilization are as-
suredly not evolutionary markers, but intersubjective constructions of opposition that
have served different political actors to order, each in their own way, international and
domestic politics.
Even though concepts and practices navigate across time, contradictions and
inconsistencies characterize their understandings and applications in a multitude of ways
and forms. Most notably, these tensions can exist across time. Yet they can also co-​exist at
given moments in time. Two chapters in the Handbook on specific revolutions speak dir-
ectly to this point. In the chapter on the 1848 revolutions, Daniel Green (Chapter 41) explains
how these revolutions were an explosion of liberal-​nationalist political rebellions which
were concurrently accompanied by forms of repression and control on the side of European
governments. Musab Younis (Chapter 39) writes about the (largely understated) centrality
of the Haitian revolution (1791–​1804) for international relations, for postcolonial struggles,
and for rights struggles globally at the time and then later. Yet, as Younis also demonstrates,
a granular look at this moment clearly shows the coexistence of radical and more conserva-
tive forces, leading to regressions and not just advancements. For instance, while after the
Haitian revolution enslaved Africans were no longer taken to Saint-​Domingue, they were
taken elsewhere in the Caribbean, strengthening slave-​based production in other places like
Cuba. Hence, we may argue that any close look at moments of deep transformation involves
the coexistence of movements towards greater liberty and emancipation, with repression
and violence.
 History and the International    727

Claire Vergerio (Chapter 43) adds an interesting level of analysis to the way tensions are
historically constructed and presented, whether at given points in time or a posteriori. In
the chapter on the Berlin (1884/​85) and Hague conferences (1899, 1907), Vergerio tells us
that the Berlin Conference to partition Africa and regulate European trade and colonialism
is depicted as the epitome of European imperialism. In contrast, the Hague Conferences
on the regulation of warfare are often celebrated as departures from the past: moments of
greater inclusion, progressive thinking, and embodying the attempt to limit the horrors
of wars through international law. As such, scholarship largely views these conferences as
representing two conflicting understandings of the role of international law in the devel-
opment of our modern world: one brutal and imperialistic, the other progressive and hu-
manitarian. Yet, by showing how many of the same individuals were actually involved in
both Berlin and the Hague, Vergerio stresses the imperialistic and hierarchical foundations
of these conferences whilst revealing the coexistence of two visions of order.
This does not mean that tensions at a given point in time ought to be viewed neces-
sarily as contradictions. For instance, while at the turn of the twentieth century empire and
Eurocentrism were still the norm, nationalist movements, and other contestation forces
were at play in the ‘West’ and globally. Progressive voices calling for more equality and in-
clusion were also being increasingly heard, from women’s movements (Sjoberg, Chapter 8)
to people of colour’s representatives and associations (Manchanda, Chapter 16). The end of
the nineteenth century and beginning of the twentieth century was therefore also a period
that many, in Europe, in urbanized parts of empires, in Latin American states, and in parts
of Asia such as Japan saw as being more liberal and more ‘modern’ than the past—​a period
characterized by many technological advancements in urban planning, in communication
networks (telegraph, telephone), transportation, and, finally, in the organization of multilat-
eral events at which delegates from different parts of the globe would participate (Bruneau,
Chapter 31). Those ‘Western’ delegates involved in conferences, congresses, and inter-
national draft-​making inevitably had to confront different conceptions stemming from this
greater internationalism.
This also mean that, at times, tensions would be present in the visions held by a single indi-
vidual. For instance, for a long time, numerous historians and IR scholars described United
States (US) president Woodrow Wilson’s conceptions of international relations as liberal and
idealist. Yet, we see in Wilson’s decision after the First World War to maintain a racial line
along which self-​determination would be recognized, and the construction if the League’s
Mandate system, a close alignment to racist conceptions of order (Manchanda, Chapter 16).
The example of Wilson’s contradicting views may not come as a surprise once we relocate
the trajectory of this individual in the socio-​political context of the time. Yes, Wilson might
have thought differently and more inclusively than their predecessors and of many of their
contemporaries about world order but he also deemed that racial segregation in the US
was a totally legitimate way of organizing domestic society. Wilson held what we now see a
conflicting vision of order that encompassed inclusive components in terms of recognition
of some people and states whilst supporting older racial and civilizational hierarchies.
So far, we have discussed tensions and variations at given points in time or across
larger time spans. Several of our contributors also identify patterns of continuity in his-
tory. The contributions in the third section of the Handbook speak precisely to this point,
by underscoring practices that have endured across history, from sovereignty (Branch and
Stockbruegger, Chapter 12) to diplomacy (Frey and Frey, Chapter 13), from religion (Lynch,
728    Maja Spanu and Christian Reus-Smit

Chapter 17) to war-​making (Barkawi, Chapter 20), from regulating commerce (Helleiner,
Chapter 23) to governing finance (Predmore and Young, Chapter 25). While this may seem a
straightforward point to make for more contemporary times, there may also be continuities
and similarities in times and places that are often overlooked. Going back to the notion of
the ‘premodern’, Costa Lopez suggests that recent works in political theology emphasize
that a ‘Whig’ narrative of progressive secularization from the ‘premodern’ to the ‘modern’
hides the role of medieval theology in the constitution of modern ideas. As Costa Lopez
(Chapter 27) suggests, it also overlooks the fundamental similarities between medieval and
modern internationals.
Searching for similarities and for patterns of continuity across time, however, requires
several caveats. Taken together, several of our contributors identify three ‘risks’ attached
to this intellectual exercise—​the instrumentalization of the past, what can be an inaccurate
search for ‘origins’, and presentism—​thus identifying three points of caution. The first relates
to how today’s political actors instrumentalize the past to advance political arguments about
the present. For instance, in the chapter on Sykes–​Picot, Megan Donaldson (Chapter 45)
suggests that different invocations of the agreement today serve different political projects
in the present. For postcolonial Arab states (and, in a very different way, for groups such as
Al Qaeda and the Islamic State of Iraq (ISIL)), Sykes–​Picot is described as an inoperative
agreement overriding Arab sovereignty. This account is more appealing than one stressing
a different historical reality, that is, Arab leader Sharif Husayn’s efforts to forge Arab and
Muslim unity with and through British sponsorship. In turn, Western references to Sykes–​
Picot, often castigate European governments for the clumsiness of the agreement’s territorial
allocation and they are coupled with new, more or less explicit, proposals for boundaries,
reanimating a posture of imperial power.
While the first point is highly political, the two other ‘risks’ are more closely related to
disciplinary reflections on how history is written and studied. The second risk that both
historians and IR theorists share has to do with the search for the origins of concepts and
practices across time (and space). The ‘politics of origins’, as R. B. J. Walker (Chapter 2) argues,
are thus characterized by three biases. Firstly, IR scholars in particular tend to view bench-
mark dates as points of origin and change, overlooking wider contexts (Walker, Chapter 2).
The Peace of Westphalia is a typical case in point. As Andrew Phillips shows, the Peace of
Westphalia instantiated a distinctive diversity regime that tied legitimate political authority
to the recognition of authorized forms of confessional religious difference. Yet, this does not
mean that from one day—​or year—​to the other, Westphalia definitively signified the sover-
eign state’s triumph, the birth of the modern state system, or the secularization of European
international society. Transitions, indeed, are longer than often thought. Secondly, despite the
importance of postcolonial accounts and global histories, Eurocentrism still strongly marks
mentalities. David Kang (Chapter 34) and Anthony Pella (Chapter 32) both argue that al-
though it is common to see the modern state as arising in Europe, state systems existed both in
Asia and Africa well before imperial encounters. More ‘anti-​Western-​centric’ metahistorical
narratives and finer methodological devices are therefore essential to question myths and
assumptions about world order. Thirdly, the tendency to search for points of origins is tightly
connected to those previously mentioned teleological accounts of the international system.
Going beyond this linear vision is therefore an essential task.
The third risk, which preoccupies IR scholars working on macro-​history more than
historians, who, in turn, have developed over time fine methodological tools, has to do with
 History and the International    729

the tendency to introduce present-​day perspectives into interpretations of the past. Writing
on realism, Michael Williams (Chapter 3) tells us that in its ‘best forms’ this theory is both
deeply engaged with history and a means of drawing on history to meet the challenges of
the present. Yet, how are we to do it? Should we look at history as a set of ‘lessons for the
present’? Branch and Stockbruegger (Chapter 12) hold that recent scholarship appears
less concerned with studying history to generate insights for today, but they argue that it
remains important to seek appropriate generalizable findings across time—​balancing the
identification of specificities with the generalization about social phenomena. Maïa Pal
(Chapter 5) cautions us about the scope of historical comparison, reminding us that in social
sciences comparisons are never neutral, objective, and predictable exercises. Hiding behind
comparisons, one always finds theoretical and analytical assumptions.
How, then can we best advance nuanced claims about the history of the international
system and about key concepts and practices that characterize it? One possible way to do so,
that we have sought to translate in the very structure of this Handbook, is to combine a dia-
chronic with a synchronic approach. This coupled approach can help uncover what changes
and what persists when examining one analytic referent—​‘the state’, ‘nationalism’, ‘genocide’,
‘the international’, and so on—​over time. Focusing on specific contexts while examining
broader spans of time allows uncovering the historical presence of notions, the content of
which has shifted over time, stressing change but also pointing at the persistence/​existence
of broadly defined ideas and specific patterns of action throughout history. Such a perspec-
tive implies operating with the understanding of one idea—​say the ‘international’—​inclu-
sive enough to identify certain discursive and behavioural practices within a meaningful
span of time, reflective, in turn, of that given idea. This twofold approach also sheds light on
how an idea—​for instance ‘the international’—​is understood in more contemporary times,
by specifically unearthing the conflicting grounds upon which current understandings may
lie. If historical variation matters and if, at the same time, it is a compelling phenomenon in
political life that some practices and concepts have navigated over time, then we need a way
to look at it that is both conceptually inclusive and analytically clear. In this Handbook, we
have tried to respond to this challenge by providing large-​scale histories of given practices
and concepts, meta-​readings of history and international relationsIR, and have combined
them with the study of specific moments and locales. It is to the latter that we shall now turn.

Space

Our second point relates to the importance of space. Assumptions about space have long
structured historical enquiries. Traditional national histories assume the spatial boundaries
of the sovereign state, conventional international histories have assumed the spatial division
of the globe into territorially demarcated, politically centralized states, and global history
today assumes the interaction of politically constitutive local, regional, and transnational
social forces. Contrasting spatial assumptions such as these lie at the heart of contemporary
debates about the nature of the international and its history, or histories. The heat in such
debates often derives from the close connection between spatial assumptions and norma-
tive commitments. Spatial assumptions, for example, inform Eurocentric accounts of inter-
national society and its expansion, as well as the connection between such accounts and
730    Maja Spanu and Christian Reus-Smit

notions of civilizational hierarchy and the progressive march of history. Differences in spa-
tial assumptions, and the contests they infuse, feature prominently in preceding chapters,
especially those addressing ‘locales’.
Althought the international order may now be globalized, our contributors largely agree
that it is not universal. It is varied, and it is essential to acknowledge this complexity when
historicizing it. Postcolonial scholars in law and history have made this a leitmotiv of their
work from the 1970s, if not earlier. However, as many of our contributors remind us, histor-
ical accounts in international relations and works in international history have for a long
time suffered—​and to some extent many still do today—​from both Eurocentrism and meth-
odological nationalism—​namely, the tendency to view the nation-​state as the sole unit of
analysis and container of all social processes. Scholars would apply one ontological prism—​
the international made of nation-​states and originating in Europe—​ending up with very
problematic accounts of the making of the international system. An emblematic example of
this vision of history, often cited in this volume, is Hedley Bull and Adam Watson’s book The
Expansion of International Society (1984). TheseEnglish School scholars sought ‘to explore
the expansion of the international society of European states across the rest of the globe, and
its transformation from a society fashioned in Europe and dominated by Europeans into
the global international society of today’ (Bull and Watson 1984, 1). Over time, the inclin-
ation to view the European experience as a universal one has been consistently called into
question, first by historians then by IR scholars (Dunne and Reus-​Smit 2017)—​including
English School scholars—​and as well by the contributors to this volume.
First and foremost, our contributors remind us that the making of the current inter-
national system is not just a progressivist story of diffusion of European norms and values.
Instead, it is a story that resonates across time and space in different regional orders
(Chapters 32, 33, 34) and is deeply interconnected with empire (Chapters 4, 7, 14, 35, 43). Many
of our contributors show in their own ways how non-​Western resistance has been as central
a pattern as European domination in the making of the international system (Chapters 8,
14, 16, 18, 20, 21, 29, 36, 39, 42, 45, 47). Yet, as Kang (Chapter 34) reminds us, moving be-
yond Eurocentred histories and understandings of the international system does not simply
equate with replacing a Eurocentric analytical referent with, say, a Sinocentric one. These
are not universal referents from which to look at world politics and their transformations.
They are one part of the broader story of the making—​and thinking—​of the ‘international’,
‘the global’, and other key concepts and practices that have accompanied them historically.
Focusing specifically on political thought, Yudan (Chapter 11) suggests that to constitute
truly encompassing visions, we need to move beyond the dualism between West and non-​
West and look instead, as the author does, for ‘global’ sources. What is more, contestation
may well emerge within dominant regional and cultural orders themselves. These different
locales thus all need to be considered.
These postulations bear at least two implications for how we look for concepts and
practices across space and for the types of frames we employ to historicize them. First, as
much as conceptions and practices vary across time, they also vary across space. For example,
‘statehood’ looks different from different standpoints across the globe. Geography and ma-
terial conditions matter for how agents see the world and identify priorities, alliances, and
interactions within it. Pella argues in Chapter 32 that variation in environmental conditions
was arguably the most important factor that influenced how African states were organized
and interacted until the fifteenth century. As Schweizer (Chapter 38) shows us, in the case of
 History and the International    731

the Seven Years’ War, structural features including size, power distribution, alliance patterns,
issues of territory, and dynastic rivalries were central to the various interests and visions at
stake in the conflict. As much as material aspects, values, ideational factors, and cultural
differences fundamentally shape agents’ perceptions of practices, concepts, and events.
Writing on the 1857 Indian rebellion, Alexander Davis (Chapter 42) shows how the uprising
was foundational to the creation of the colonial state in India, and changed imperial gov-
ernance structures globally, with the British forever aware of the possibility of anti-​colonial
resistance and governing with greater brutality as a result. Yet, in India this same event is
remembered today as the ‘first war of independence’, a moment of resistance to imperial
forms of domination and control. In demonstrating the colonial genealogy of the inter-
national (and the violence that accompany it), Davis also shows how the same event can be
viewed differently accordingly to varying standpoints, and how it bears different social, pol-
itical, and symbolical implications locally and internationally.
Second, as much as the agents we study are embedded in specific contexts, we, as scholars,
are also. The material and ideational context we are located in affects the intellectual choices
we make, the questions we ask, and the disciplinary or theoretical frames we adopt. This
may seem like a straightforward point, but it is also a crucial one for how we then search
for the ‘international’ or the ‘global’, their points of ‘origin’, and transformations across time
and place. A clear case in point comes from Pal’s discussion (in Chapter 5) of the complex
knowledge production about politics and international relations in UK universities. Pal
reminds us that the contemporary context of twenty-​first-​century academia in Western and
Northern universities is a complex and contradictory one where critical thinking is rich and
vibrant. Yet it remains simultaneously hooked into deeply unequal and hierarchical systems
of funding and education (as well as, we may add, political and social contexts) that inev-
itably condition the choices of topics researched and methodologies chosen. It thus seems
essential to keep questioning scholarly assumptions ontologically and methodologically
for how they are both taught and experienced, and to compare varying assumptions across
different places of learning, whether in the Global North, Global South, or somewhere other
locale.
What, are the frames and tools that can be developed, as well as the methodological
standpoints, required to incorporate different experiences into one’s intellectual and ana-
lytical resources to historically investigate the local, the international and the global? Two
interconnected propositions emerge from several of the Handbook’s contributions. The
first proposition relates to the importance of further investigating the richness of global his-
tory, for historians, political thinkers, and IR scholars (Chapters 6 and 7). Though a single
definition of such history does not exist—​and this is perhaps what makes it so vigorously
debated—​Lawson and Mulrich (Chapter 6) present ‘global history’ as being ‘concerned with
the role and effect of a variety of global forces’. It is thus the history of the impact or de-
velopment of global processes relating to globalization and modernity, the spread of ideas,
flows and connectivity, space and scale. Global history thus does not represent one single
approach. As the two authors suggest, it allow us to uncover transboundary movements of
different kinds, allied to a critique of approaches that are confined by methodological na-
tionalism or (largely European) geographies.
Second, stemming from this first point, comes the invitation from a number of our
contributors to think more creatively about forms and sources of interconnectedness
across space. As several of the Handbook’s chapters suggest, these locales can take multiple
732    Maja Spanu and Christian Reus-Smit

scales: from micro to macro, from local to regional and ‘global’. Looking at what happened
in a village, close to a river, or in the discussions of political activists—​or looking at what
happened at junctures of different spaces—​such as borders, oceans, or ‘interpolity zones’
(Benton, Chapter 22)—​may reveal interactions of actors, exchanges of ideas and discussions
that would otherwise go unnoticed or that may simply show us that the ‘origins’ of concepts
and practices are not necessarily where we may think. Yet, these are aspects that we cannot
fully grasp if restricting our studies to those (certainly essential) internationally recognized
(and thereby legitimized) forms of organization and authority.
Still on this second point, another interesting element that emerges from a number of
our contributions has to do with the type of sources taken into account. As Tarak Barkawi
(Chapter 20) and Duncan Bell (Chapter 7) both suggest, a thicker understanding of histor-
ical realities has also to do with the sources chosen for scholarly analyses. In terms of political
thought, Bell tells us that scholars focus largely on written materials, overlooking visual arts,
cinema, architecture, or music. Yet, as the author claims, these are fertile sites for historical
investigations as they produce visions of global order too. In the specific domain of warfare
and military history, Barkawi argues that militarized popular culture can inform us on the
identities of peoples and polities in world politics. For instance, as much as traditional battle
histories, Hollywood war films often reproduce narratives of how a few Western soldiers
successfully fight much larger numbers of brown or black soldiers. One consequence of such
‘military orientalism’—​as the author calls it—​in history writing and other genres is a ten-
dency by Western publics to underestimate non-​European opponents. Overall, enlarging
our vision (and comparison) of locales and sources can thus help us comprehending his-
torical realities with greater nuance. The next section, then, relates to who are the agents we
consider.

Agency

If conceptual constructs such as ‘sovereignty’, ‘empire’, the ‘international’, and the ‘global’ de-
fine our ontological focus and methodological assumptions about the world, they are also
constitutive of and constituted by a field of human practice. As our contributors show, they
are—​like other concepts that have navigated throughout history and that are studied in this
Handbook—​constructs imagined and mobilized by diverse actors, variously connected to
evolving fields of practice. In this volume, several of our contributions ask who these actors
have been, how they have been located and related in a shifting field of debate, and how their
imaginings, discourses, and practices have shaped domains and aspects of human inter-
action. Accordingly, our chapters have a focus on both intellectuals and political actors.
Several our contributions focus on the historical study of international relations by
looking at the thought of intellectuals—​scholars and publicists—​and the field of debate
within their networks. For instance, Duncan Kelly (Chapter 44) writes about ‘the problem of
the First World War and Versailles as part of a regime of historicity’. The author looks at how
these two events are fixed in postwar intellectual thought as pivotal moments, as an origin
story about the rise of an opposition between ‘realism’ and ‘idealism’ in politics, and between
what Kelly terms ‘statist positivism’ and ‘utopianism’ in law. Kelly highlights the intellectual
complexities and tensions between ‘archaism’ and ‘radical modernism’ that underpinned
 History and the International    733

various intellectual positions and their attempts at legitimizing specific forms of politics and
law. In the chapter on liberal internationalism, Luke Ashworth (Chapter 4) explores liberal
narratives held by different Anglo-​American intellectuals at two points in time—​the First
World War and the Second World War. Ashworth shows that although confronted with
common problems of ‘industrial modernity’, thinkers of liberal internationalism positioned
themselves differently in their field, taking different lessons from their readings of their place
in history. Using the Handbook’s theme of granularity as a methodological device, Ashworth
identifies in the thought of individuals working in the same intellectual tradition similarities
but also important differences and disagreements.
Importantly, a smaller number of our chapters specifically look at the connections be-
tween political thought and practice. Not only do these chapters stress the context in which
thinkers and their ideas evolved (as do all our contributions on intellectual history and
political thought). They also look at the intended and unintended implications that spe-
cific intellectuals and ideas had on given fields of practice. Writing on the spatial and con-
ceptual notions of the international and the global, Rosenboim and Tonooka (Chapter 35)
show how these domains that extend beyond the state have had political stakes grounded
in issues of war and peace and growing global interconnectedness. The authors examine
different theorizations of the international and the global at various moments of the twen-
tieth century—​the interwar years, the postcolonial decades, the early twenty-​first century—​
uncovering how these political spaces were imagined and experienced by IR scholars,
historians, and practitioners. Focusing primarily on European and American perspectives,
their chapter traces continuities and changes in international and global thinking that help
us comprehend current visions of world politics. Another example comes from Jacinta
O’Hagan (Chapter 29), who looks at three different narratives about the West across time
and space: the civilizational West, the liberal West, and the fragmenting West. The explor-
ation of these narratives allows two things. First, it gives the possibility of investigating
patterns of continuity and change in invocations of the West by different voices at different
historical conjunctures. Second, it leads to the identification of the practices and forms of
international order that these very same invocations legitimate.
Yet, as much as public intellectuals and thinkers have written and shaped ideas at key
points in time, other agents have played critical roles in shaping the evolving meaning of the
international, the global, and other key notions of our social and political life, both through
their discourses and their practices. The importance of political and social agents comes
sharply into focus in this Handbook when considering moments of resistance and change
around the ‘anti-​colonial’ across time and space. The long overlooked Haitian revolution
made key contributions to the fight against colonial oppression in the late eighteenth century
and after, if only, as Musab Younis (Chapter 39) observes, because Haiti became the first black
postcolonial state, created at a highpoint of European colonialism. As Younis explains, the
Haitian revolution has been absent from most accounts of postcolonialism for two reasons.
First, because it destabilizes the standard periodization about colonial rule and decoloniza-
tion. Second, because local agency and paths of resistance were for a long time occluded by
dominant scholarly and political narratives. Other important moments of colonial resist-
ance are identified in this volume: the mid-​nineteenth-​century Indian uprising against the
rule of the British East India Company in the form of mutinies and civilian rebellions (Davis,
Chapter 42); the efforts of Sharif Husayn in constituting a unity for the Arab and Muslim
world in the context of the First World War’s Franco-​British Middle-​Eastern dominance and
734    Maja Spanu and Christian Reus-Smit

Sykes-​Picot (Donaldson, Chapter 45); the Bandung conference and the consolidation of a
postcolonial and, later, non-​aligned consciousness based on notions such as postcolonial
sovereignty and economic modernization (Lee, Chapter 47).
These moments reveal the importance of individual and collective agency in both
resisting and transforming dominant norms, imperial and patriarchal conceptions, and
practices relating to sovereignty, imperial governance, territoriality, or trade. Whether local
or global, these moments also highlight specific logics of power in terms of who were the
agents supporting change that ought to be recognized: politicians, activists, highly educated
individuals, but also, importantly, wider social movements and leaders, and, very often, a mix
of both, supporting each other. In citing the previous historical examples, we have sought to
stress the importance of non-​Western agency in histories of resistance to forms of domin-
ation and control. This poses more broadly a methodological question on the identification
and recovery of marginalized agency across time and space beyond recognized moments
of transformation and debate. We have distilled in this Handbook four propositions that,
we believe, may help recovering agency across time and space beyond dominant analytical
frames in History and IR, and may shed light over long-​time marginalized agency.
The first is a call to focus scholarly attention on all actors equally, by shifting our focus
beyond the West. This, though, does not imply just replacing one regional focus with a
different one. It also does not imply assuming simply that non-​Western agency emerges
either in alignment with or (most often) in opposition to Western norms and practice.
Instead, it means that the non-​West is viewed as fully active, and not just reactive. As
Zarakol (Chapter 28) discusses with respect to modernization theories, even postcolonial
and decolonial approaches largely assume—​because of its normative ambiguity—​that mod-
ernity is a concept primarily ‘owned’ by the West. Yet, this deprives the rest of the world of
much active agency, since much of human practice seems to be defined in response to the
West’s normative projects. Particularly in IR, this problematic vision fits into a wider discip-
linary history of the ‘evolution’ of international systems that, as Zarakol suggests, legitimizes
the very existence of IR as a field of study and international relations as an object of inquiry.
Evolutionary narratives that have been the common in IR need to be replaced thanks to
the development of alternative metahistorical narratives that restore non-​Western histor-
ical agency, but without neglecting macro-​and micro-​hierarchies. As Gulsah Capan puts it
(Chapter 9), identifying the temporal and chronological boundaries of alternative spaces,
the relationships between such spaces and diverse beginnings remains a scholarly challenge.
The second and third propositions can be viewed in continuity with the previous
point. They both relate to the need to shift our attention to analytical frames and concepts
that have been marginalized both in History and in IR. Two themes emerge from sev-
eral of our contributions: gender and race. Let us begin with gender. As Bell discusses
(Chapter 7), intellectual history has largely ignored voices and experiences of women and
members of minorities, as the discipline has focused (and, we could add, has been for a long
time dominated by) white Western men. Over the past two decades, intellectual history’s
scope has been broadened. Yet, as Bell rightly indicates, much still needs to be done. Women
are absent from scholarly monographs and textbooks in the field and this absence has been
addressed systematically only very recently (Owens and Rietzler 2021). Because women were
excluded from educational and career opportunities, it is important to enlarge the canon by
going beyond the traditional disciplinary focus on scholars and publicists. Laura Sjoberg
(Chapter 8) reminds us that solving the problem of the absence of women from intellectual,
 History and the International    735

disciplinary, or political histories is not simply a matter of adding more names to the list
of scholars, thinkers, or activists that have participated in specific intellectual or political
projects. As Sjoberg writes, histories of global politics are histories of gender relations, and
vice-​versa, gender relations are histories of global politics. What is more, gender relations
are much more complex than a binary distinction between ‘males’ and ‘females’. As Sjoberg
argues, ‘the project of demasculinizing histories’ is a transformative process, which requires
rethinking disciplines, their politics and methods. Despite important contributions to
such ‘de-​masculinization’, much remains to be done both to further include women and
feminism and to adopt methodological and ontological devices that allow going beyond
heteronormative assumptions about society and history which exclude other gender and
sexual groups as well as other minorities.
Our third proposition calls for a focus on race. Many of our contributors stress the im-
portance of recovering race, racism, and race relations in the histories we write in order to
enlarge our visions about the making and shaping of world politics and order. Indeed, if
white men and their views have been central to the writing of history, intellectual history,
and international relations, these disciplines are witnessing a surge of efforts to expand the
scope of political thought and practice to people of color. These efforts directly speak to the
need of opening disciplinary boundaries to critical voices within the Global North itself and,
importantly (as related to what we previously argued) outside of it. Bell (Chapter 7) discusses
the numerous intellectual contributions that have been made in recent years to the history of
political thought: from the mapping of black internationalisms to the transnational tracing
of anti-​colonial, anti-​fascist, and feminist ideas in the mid-​twentieth century. In the chapter
on ‘Race and Racism’, Nivi Manchanda (Chapter 16) shows how race has been subject to a
systematic neglect in IR. Through a comparison of two political and intellectual figures—​
Woodrow Wilson and W. E. B. Du Bois—​Manchanda also shows, first, how different visions
of race gave way to certain practices of racialization; second, how IR’s privileging of the
Wilsonian racialized view of order has led to the discipline’s disengagement with key issues
of social and racial justice until today. This also bears responsibilities for us, as scholars
and citizens. As Manchanda reminds us, if IR has neglected race thus leading to blinkered
understandings of histories of global politics, this now ought to change.
The fourth proposition relates to the ‘type’ of agency considered. We have already
mentioned that intellectual history and the history of political thought examine single
individuals, their paths, conceptions (as these were largely thinkers), and possible
interconnectedness with other intellectuals. In turn, IR along with other disciplinary
branches of History, have largely focused on social and political groups, rather than single
individuals. In IR, the assumption is that while individuals produce subjective knowledge
and experiences, groups are a more relevant object of study to understand social and polit-
ical interactions across time and space. This is so because groups produce and shape inter-
subjective understandings about the world which then have a direct and practical impact
on it. IR in particular has remained centred on corporate (rather perhaps than collective)
understandings of agency, at the level of organizations, states, and other institutions. This
might well be the result of the field’s long-​standing preoccupation to generate ‘big’ struc-
tural arguments and to generalize knowledge. Yet, as Manchanda (Chapter 16) shows, by
confronting the visions of self-​determination and race of two contemporaries—​Woodrow
Wilson and W. E. B. Dubois—​a focus on individual agency does not equate with dismissing
larger or structural arguments. On the contrary, it can enrich some of these arguments
736    Maja Spanu and Christian Reus-Smit

by moving beyond standard views of the system and by showing how certain choices and
perspectives on world order were privileged (Wilson’s in this case) and had greater political
and disciplinary influence (because, in this case, of power inequalities and structural racism
at the time and later). Looking at specific paths not just of intellectuals but of agents ‘beyond
the text’ may, we believe, be helpful in comprehending broader structures, norms, and phe-
nomena. As Manchanda’s chapter attests, this can help to identify logics of contestation as
much as domination, revealing the darkest parts of the history of our order.

Language

What indicators should we use to plot the history of the international and its complex rela-
tion to ideas of time, space, and agency? The most common answer to this question is ‘lan-
guage’, the way that actors define, narrate, and construct the international through written
words and public speech acts. Yet our reliance on language is fraught with complications,
not the least being the complex relationship between words and meanings, the complicated
interplay between meanings and practices, the interpretive problems associated with using
words as guides to motives, and the difficulties associated with translating meanings across
diverse languages. Of all the factors implicated in writing and interpreting the history of the
international, this receives the least explicit attention from our contributors. Yet it does fea-
ture in significant ways in particular chapters, and it is an issue of critical importance that we
would be remiss not to address, however briefly, in this final chapter.
When seeking to understand how historically located actors understood aspects of inter-
national relations it is common for scholars to use tell-​tale language—​often specific words—​
as a guide. This approach suffers from two problems, however. The first, which scholars
are now well attuned to, is that words can, and commonly do, carry different meanings
in different contexts. What the Ancient Greeks meant by ‘democracy’, and the normative
assessments they made of it, differ from how modern liberals understand the word. And as
Branch and Stockbruegger (Chapter 12) show, the way state, territory, and sovereignty have
been understood across time and space varied greatly. Contemporary scholars who follow
terminology historically are not only aware of this issue, they see it as an advantage. A good
example is Martha Finnemore’s study of intervention in world politics. Rather than formu-
late an abstract definition of intervention and then operationalize it empirically, Finnemore
focuses on ‘activities that participants [in real world politics] describe as intervention and
ask inductively, What is it?’ (2013, 10). In other words, her goal is to excavate the varied, his-
torically specific meanings that have attached to ‘intervention’. This leaves a second, arguably
more challenging, problem unattended, however. Just as the meanings that attach to words
can vary over time, similar meanings can inhere in different words. As Reus-​Smit argues
elsewhere, actors can be talking and arguing about rights even when they are not using the
specific term. Here meanings are to be found in forms of moral argument and political jus-
tification, not discrete words alone (Reus-​Smit 2013, 11). In this volume, Rosenboim and
Tonooka (Chapter 35) show how the global and the international are best seen as systems
of thought that channel abstract ideas about politics and space into concrete practices,
institutions, and political relations. Despite the frequent use of these terms in theoretical
tracts, historical texts, and political communication, the international and the global have
 History and the International    737

been ambiguous and challenged categories, not always explicitly mentioned—​as the two
authors discuss for the postcolonial decades—​yet implicitly referred to in multiple ways.
Added to this complexity there is the equally complex interplay between meanings and
practices. Indeed, all of what has been said previously reinforces Wittgenstein’s point that
any attempt to understand meanings has to look beyond individual words to the word games
in which they are embedded. Wittgenstein illustrated this with the use of the term ‘five slabs’
on a building site. In one context, these words might be an instruction: ‘get me five slabs’. In
another context they might be part of a report: ‘I counted five slabs’ (Wittgenstein 2009, 34).
And of course, on an Australian building site ‘five slabs’ might refer to pieces of concrete
or packs of beer. While Wittgenstein’s argument here can be read narrowly, as endorsing
the previous point about meanings inhering in wider linguistic constructions, his point is
broader than this. The meaning of ‘five slabs’ on the building site is embedded not just in
language but in social practices, the things builders do. This point is developed in the recent
work of practice theorists in IR, who caution against an exclusive reliance on language as
an indicator, or even generator, of meanings. Their work shows how meanings—​including
values and norms—​very often evolve not through processes of linguistic construction, but
through the practices actors undertake: the things they do (Adler and Pouliot 2011). For ex-
ample, it is common today for states in the United Nations (UN) Security Council to abstain
from votes. Yet in the UN Charter’s rules governing the Security Council, there is no such
thing as an ‘abstention’: it is a voting status that has evolved through the practices of Council
members, and through these practices it has evolved accepted normative standing.
Two of our chapters engage this relation between language and practices in interesting,
if divergent, ways. Dirk Moses (Chapter 20) asks whether if genocide was a term coined in
the 1940s can we legitimately talk about genocidal practices much before then? The issue
goes well beyond international law’s retroactivity or legal precedent here, speaking precisely
to the very construction of meaning through practices. Interestingly, Moses also discusses
how today’s international criminal law seems to be privileging the language of ‘atrocity
prevention’ focusing specifically on crimes against humanity and war crimes and how this
has made genocide more difficult to prove in courts. Does this mean, one might ask, that
genocide was not present before the mid-​twentieth century or that it has disappeared from
human practice today (neither of which seem plausible)? Eric Selbin (Chapter 26) calls for
an approach that bridges the study of meanings in language and in practices, arguing that
while academics debate the utility and boundaries of the term ‘revolution’, this seems almost
beside the point when considering the greater picture. Indeed, billions of people around the
world hear, use, and understand the term, both broadly and specifically, in ways that have
meaning and can be used to make meaning in specific contexts. For Selbin, then, the goal for
researchers should be to put in conversation the production of meaning in scholarly debates
and in the practices of those engaged in, and whose lives are affected by, revolutions. Selbin’s
position is that the tensions that may emerge from this confrontation can provide a pro-
ductive space to recover the meanings of revolution.
A third complication associated with a focus on language as an indicator of meaning
concerns the methodologically challenging relation between words and motives. While this
is barely touched upon by our contributors, it has figured prominently in debates among IR
scholars about how one explains actors’ behaviour. On the one hand, the words actors use to
justify their actions are sometimes seen as revealing their true motives. On the other hand,
such claims are often rejected on the grounds that talk is cheap, and that often the words
738    Maja Spanu and Christian Reus-Smit

actors invoke are just rhetoric: linguistic shields behind which their true motives lie. But as
Quentin Skinner argues, both of these positions miss the point. Sometimes the language
actors employ—​how they describe and justify their actions—​does reveal their animating
motives. But even when it does not, language remains powerfully implicated in their actions.
When actors use speech to justify their actions they are commonly appealing to ideas and
values that already have normative standing in the social context in which they seek to
act, and when their justifications are successful, language has played an important role in
facilitating their actions (Skinner 2002,149–​155). If this is true, then rhetoric, far from being
cheap talk, is a politically enabling linguistic craft.
Finally, while the rhetorical use of language is the now object of much scholarly attention,
how this functions, and how it can be interpreted, in different linguistic domains is seldom
probed explicitly in English-​speaking IR scholarship, and to some extent in the international
history literature as well. There is no doubt, as Lawson and Mulich (Chapter 6) remind us, that
there is immense value in multi-​archival research, even if this is also immensely difficult. And
it is obvious that speaking multiple languages is a decided advantage when undertaking com-
parative historical research. It allows us to move beyond the English-​speaking world (with,
of course, all its variations) so that when we talk, for instance, about ‘big’ concepts such as
‘Empire’, we might be able to grasp variations in understandings of it (Bayly, Chapter 14). The
relevance of linguistic knowledge for historical research is therefore twofold. First, it enables
researchers to look at different contexts and, crucially, different sources. Second, it gives
a stronger sense of what it is that specific individuals, or groups, meant when using certain
words. Not only multiple languages may have something to tell on the emergence of specific
ideas, but they can help in making sense of visions, concepts, and practices that change or that
are in conflict one with another. This all having been said, though, as Bell argues in Chapter 7,
even if speaking multiple languages the viability of comparing ideas across languages, espe-
cially when doing comparative contextual work, is not at all straightforward and has led to
many scholarly disagreements. These challenges are amplified when it comes to the writing
of global histories, or when looking at international relations from a global perspective. Here
very few scholars—​including the most celebrated global historians—​command more than a
small sample of relevant languages. Moreover, even the best work of this kind becomes ever
more reliant on secondary sources, as well as translations of primary sources. Interestingly,
this is an area where the challenges facing IR scholars and global historians have converged,
and significant opportunities exist for dialogue about methodological strategies that can rec-
oncile global approaches to the history of the international with persuasive recoveries of the
meanings that inhere in diverse languages and practices.

Conclusion

In engaging the relationship between history and international relations, both as tem-
poral and social domains and fields of inquiry or disciplinary projects (History and IR), we
have sought in this Handbook to differ from two existing approaches. The first is the long-​
standing practice of raking over the tensions between—​and incompatibilities of—​History
and IR: their contrasting, and perhaps incommensurate, methodological, theoretical, con-
ceptual, and stylistic commitments. This is well-​ploughed ground, and debates in this space
 History and the International    739

have over time become ever more ritualized. The second is less a tendency than a new de-
parture: the effort to identify, construct, and celebrate a burgeoning new sub-​field of IR,
‘Historical International Relations’. The focus of another recent handbook (Carvalho et al.
2021), this new wave of historical scholarship in IR represents one of the field’s most signifi-
cant recent developments, one warranting sustained recognition, analysis, and engagement.
Our project has been different, however. Without reengaging the identity politics and terri-
torial disputes that have separated History and IR, we have sought to explore the complex
ways that both historians and IR scholars have encountered and narrated the relationship
between history and international relations. Decentering the international, we have asked
our authors—​historians and IR scholars—​to engage the themes of modernity and granu-
larity, and to write chapters that discuss one of four cross-​cutting foci: readings, practices,
locales, and moments. The result, we believe, is a refreshing new perspective on the rela-
tionship between history and international relations, and the multiple ways—​contradictory
and compatible—​that this relationship is comprehended, ways that do not map neatly onto
the disciplinary divide between History and IR. This final chapter has recentred the inter-
national, but not by distilling a common conception from the diverse perspectives offered
by our authors. Rather, we have sought to problematize this concept by examining, however
briefly, the ways in which the meaning of the international has, over time, been conditioned
by intersecting assumptions about time, space, agency, and language.

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 Index

For the benefit of digital users, indexed terms that span two pages (e.g., 52–​53) may, on occasion,
appear on only one of those pages.
Tables and figures are indicated by t and f following the page number

Abraham, W. 478 Organization of American States 489,

Abya Yala 494, 495 492–93
Acharya, A. 691–92 Pan-Americanism 486–88, 489
Achcar, G. 228–29 ‘re-imagining’ the Americas 492–94
Africa UN Economic Commission for Latin
history of international relations, and 469– America 489–90
70, 479 ancient Greece 189–90, 402
kinship 477–78 ancient Near East
slavery 475–77 diplomacy 189
state-system 470–72 Anderson, B. 312–13, 697
trade 472–74 Anderson, J. 505
warfare 472–73, 474–75 Anglo-American relations
Afro-Asian Peoples’ Solidarity Organization financial governance 370–72
(AAPSO) 695 Anti-Imperialist League of the Americas 487
Agallon, N. 540 Arendt, H. 676, 685
Alikhani, A. 164 Argus 625
Alker, H. 440 aristocratic culture 443
Alliance for Progress 491 Arkhipov, V. 712–13
Alston, P. 270, 274 Asian-African Conference see Bandung
American Political Science Association Conference
(APSA) 411 Assassi, L. 372
American Popular Revolutionary Alliance Association Internationale du Congo (AIC) 640
(APRA) 487 Atlantic Charter 679
Americas atrocity 277
Abya Yala 494, 495 diplomacy of atrocity 279–82
Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas reviving the diplomacy of atrocity 288–89
(ALBA) 493 see also genocide
Community of Latin American and Australia
Caribbean States 493–94 response to Indian Uprising 625–26
Free Trade Area of the Americas 493
globalizing the Americas 488–92 balance-of-power
‘Latin America’ 485 limited war 442
La Vía Campesina 494 origins of balance-of-power
modernity 494–95 politics 442–43
742   Index

Bandung Conference 690–91 Bourdieu, P. 257–58

context 692 Bowman, I. 54
final communiqué 694 Bretton Woods system 366–67
institutional effects 694–97 Brown, W. 242
legacies 697–98 Bull, H. 469–70, 730
meanings, purposes and importance 691–94
modernity 698–99 Carey, H. 341–43
mythology 698–99 Carr, E.H. 39–40, 57
‘spirit of Bandung’ 697–99 Casanova, J. 249–50, 251
‘barbarism’ and ‘civilization’ 218–19, 229–30 Cassirer, E. 439–41
‘civilization’ as a modern European Castro, F. 713
construction 223–26 Césaire, A. 227
conflict between ‘civilization’ and Chakrabarty, D. 128–29
culture 229 Cheah, P. 448–49
resurrection of the discourse of ‘civilization’ China 220–21
versus ‘barbarism’ 227–29 Bandung Conference, and 701
standard of ‘civilization’ 456, 653 international thought 158–59, 162–63, 223
battle histories 299–301 state formation 501–2
Becker, C. 263 chronofetishism 68
Belich, J. 370–71 Churchill, W. 679–80
Bell, D. 450 Citino, R. 298, 299
Benton, L. 205–6 ‘civilization’, see ‘barbarism’ and ‘civilization’
Berger, P. 249–50 ‘classical’ realism 41
Berlin and Hague Conferences Clausewitz, K. von 298–99
Berlin Conference (1884–85) 631, 633–34 Clay, H. 484
Hague Conferences (1899 and 1907) 631, Cold War
634–36 modernity 710
humanitarian and universalist narratives of 706–10
approach 639 ‘colonial discourse analysis’ 128–29
non-Western actors, role of 640–41 communal mind 51
private actors and public opinion 640 Community of Latin American and Caribbean
purposes and impacts of the States (CELAC) 493–94
conferences 633–36 Condillac, A. de 448
role of the US 640 Confucianism 397–98
similarities between the Congress of Vienna 587–88, 597
conferences 639–41 abolition of slavery 594
Berman, N. 646 great power peace 589–90
Bevir, M. 96 IR scholarship on 588–89
Bhabha, H.K. 128–29 liberal order 590–91
Blaine, J. 486 socio-cultural environment 596–97
Bleiker, R. 165 women 596
Bob, C. 269 Constantinople, fall of 531
Bolívar, S. 484, 574–75 ‘accommodation and resistance’ 532–36
Bolivarian Alternative for the Americas international dialogue and
(ALBA) 493 cooperation 536–39
Bosanquet, B. role of local issues and national agendas in
liberal internationalism, and 51–53 Christian response 532
 Index  743

tension between religious allegiance and Modern Era 198–99

economic and political interests 532–36, preliterate societies 188–89
540–41 Renaissance 193–95
contractual international law 460–61, 462, 463 resident embassies 193–94, 195
Correlates of War (CoW) 295–96 disciplinary history 99–100
Cox, R. 39 Donnelly, J. 272
Cuban Missile Crisis 706 Du Bois, W.E.B 240–42, 648
control, safety, and luck 710–14 global colour line 241
narratives of 714–15 letter to Wilson 239–40
‘nuclear learning’ 710 Duroselle, J.-B. 146–47
theories of nuclear war-avoidance 710 Dyer, R. 623
cultural genocide 283
culture Eagleton, T. 229
conflict between civilization and Early Modern era
culture 229 diplomacy 195–97
Cunha, A.M. 336 East Asia 500
Curtis, L. 140, 627 absence of war 504
dynastic transitions 507, 508t
Da Silva, D.F. 242 granularity 505–10
Daut, M. 582–83 modernity 501–5
Davis, A. 100 patterns of war 505–10
Davis, K. 395 state formation 501–5
decolonization 238–39, 308, 692–99 East India Company 203–4, 322–23, 337, 620,
Haitian Revolution, and 578 621
international economic order, and 489–92 Ebrey, P. 502
religion 251–52 Edelman, L. 119
De Goede, M. 372–73 eighteenth century 439–41, 560
democracy balance-of-power and limited war 442
realism 44 disputes over commercial society 446–48
Denison, W. 625 origins of balance-of-power
dependency theory 490 politics 442–43
development 348 ‘perpetual peace’ 448–50
interdependence between the development revolutionary action 450–51
regimes and the IR regimes 357–58 scepticism as the stimulus of
postwar period 350 balance-of-power 443–44
socialist countries’ visions of Vattel and scepticism 444–46
development 353–54 Eisenstadt, S.N. 254–55
the 1970s 357 Elden, S. 178–79
US visions of development 351–52 empire 98–99, 202, 203, 236, 462, 516–17
Western / European development 352–53 ‘boomerang’ effects of imperialism 206
Dilley, A. 370–71 British Empire 624–27
Dillon, M. 257 Congress of Vienna 593–95
diplomacy 188 Eurocentrism 207
ancient world 189–92 imperial systems 204–5
Early Modern era 195–97 IR discipline 100, 130–32
French Revolution 197–98 jurisdiction 321–24
Middle Ages 192–93 protection, politics of 324–26
744   Index

empire (cont.) decentralized nature of

‘relational’ conception of empire 209–12 neomercantilism 341, 344–45
‘re-turn’ to empire 202–3 global reach of free trade thought 335–38
standard of ‘civilization’ 225–26 neomercantilist reaction to free trade
empire history 98–99 thought 338–44
Engberg-Pedersen, A. 300–1 French Revolution
English School 8, 25, 84–85, 145–46, 412–13, 549 diplomacy 197–98
Enloe, C. 521 Haitian Revolution, and 579
Eslava, L. 696 Freund, E. 655
ethnonationalism 612–14 Fukuyama, F. 120, 433
‘Eurocentric big bang theory of world
politics’ 415–16 Gandhi, M. 430, 624
Gellner, E. 311–12
fascism 43 gender 111–12
Faysal I 665, 666–67 de-masculinizing histories 114–16
federalism 55–56, 57 exclusion of women and feminism in the
fetials 190–91 study of IR 112–14
Fichte, J.G. 448 financial governance 372–74
Figueira, D. 440 Haitian revolution 577
filibusters 485 histories of the state and histories of
financial governance 363–64, 374 gender 116–17
Anglo-American relations 370–72 problematizing history 118–20
Bretton Woods system 366–67 ‘right side of history’ and ‘wrong side of
evolution of transnational governance history’ 120–22
organizations 367–69 role of women in conceptualizing and
gender 372–74 creating the international 521
informal social institutions 369–70, 374 general will 51
international standards 369 genocide 277
origins of international ‘crime of crimes’ 287, 288–89
cooperation 365–66 cultural genocide 283
public-sector governance diplomacy of genocide 285–88, 289
arrangements 364–65 exclusion of political groups 283
Finnemore, M. 736–37 foundations of the new diplomacy 282–84
First World War (WWI) 646–47, 652–53, intervention 286
654 limitations of the UNGC 284–85
battle between forms of ‘idealism’ and political and non-political categories 278
‘realism’ 648–49 Responsibility to Protect norm 286
justifications for war 654–55 Secretariat Draft convention (1947) 283
‘war guilt’ question 143 struggle for post-genocide
see also Versailles Treaty recognition 286–89
Follett, M.P. 53 UN definition 284
Foran, J. 387 see also atrocity
Foreign Affairs 241 Germain, R. 40
Forrester, K. 95–96 Getachew, A. 99
Frederick II 564–65, 567, 568, 569–70 Gilly, A. 379
Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) 493 Gilman, N. 239, 412
free trade-versus-neomercantilism Gilmore, R.W. 234
debate 344–45 global history 79, 130–31, 156, 418
 Index  745

empire, and 204, 324 Hamilton, A. 338

flows and connectivity 82 Hartog, F. 647–48
gaps in the scholarship 83 Hayek, F. von
globalization and modernity 81 ideas of global order 56–59
Peace of Westphalia, and 551–52 Heidegger, M. 439–40, 441
regional histories 82 heralds 189–90
space and scale 81–82 Herodotus 27
spread of ideas 83 Hinsley, F. H. 25–26
Goldstone, J. 382 hinterland states 472
Gong, G. 456 historical apocalypse 45
Gootenberg, P. 336–37 historical sociology in international relations
Gramsci, A. 385–86 (HSIR) 63–64, 73–74
granularity 4–6, 12–14, 723–24 comparative exercises 71–73
development 358 Eurocentric problem 67–68
East Asia 505–10 granularity 65
human rights 262–63, 268–73, 274 internalism 69–70
intellectual history 97 methodology in pedagogy 71–73
intersection between modernity and methodology in research 67–70
granularity 14 modernity 65
relationship between IH and IR 137–38 relevant specificities 65–67
religion 254–56 uneven and combined
‘re-turn’ to empire 205–9 development 66–67
revolution 381–82 ‘historicist’ realism 39–41
Revolutions of 1848 607 Hobbes, T. 28, 29, 30–31
Second World War 685 Hobhouse, L. T. 52–53
Sykes–Picot agreement 670–71 Hobson, J. 67–68, 415–16
‘great divergence’ 81 Hoffmann, S. 143–44, 295
‘Great Power’ System 562–63 Holocaust 300–1, 680
Grotius, H. 85–86, 322, 328, 444 see also genocide
Grovogui, S. 131 Holsti, K. 590
Guha, R. 126–27 Hont, I. 447–48
Guilhot, N. 44–45 Hopgood, S. 267–68
Hôtel Majestic 140–41
Hague Conferences (1899 and 1907) see Berlin Howard, M. 300
and Hague Conferences ‘humanitarian intervention’ 280–81
Haitian Revolution 296–97, 594–95 human rights 262, 273–74, 682
consequences 574–75 actors 270–71
‘counter-plantation system’ 576–77 definitions 269–70
free people of colour 580–81 demise of human rights 267–68
gender 577 different historical narratives 264–68
intellectual culture 582–83 geography 271–72
modernity 579–80, 581–82 granularity 262–63, 268–73, 274
political writing 582–83 long (or short) history of progress 264–66
postcolonialism 577–79 modernity 262–63, 274
significance 573–74, 575 relevance of historiography 263–64
sovereignty 576 shadow side of rights 266–67
tradition of historiography 582 timescales 272–73
Hall, W.E. 225, 280–81 Hume, D. 447
746   Index

Huntington, S. 227–28, 433 ‘international’ and ‘global’ 513–15, 523–24

Husayn, Sharif 662–63, 671 contemporary theories 520–21
continuity and change 521–22
Ibrahim II 537–38 future research 524
‘ideologies of progress’ 523 modernity 522–23
Ikenberry, G. 591 international conferences 697, 700
imperialism international law, birth of the discipline
and the ‘international’ 516–17 of 637–38
see also empire International Swaps and Derivatives
Indian Uprising 617–18, 627–28 Association (ISDA) 368–69
Australian response to the Uprising 625–26 international thought 98–101, 155–56
consequences of 623–24 benefits of a global vision 156–57
differentiated understandings of concept-centred approach 160
modernity generated by the colonial global sources 157–61
experience 624, 627 strategies to connect the pre-
divide and rule strategies 620, 621 modern ‘global’ and modern
levels of violence 622, 623 ‘international’ 161–65
‘martial races’ 623, 624–25 true ‘global’ study of 165–66
native troops, use of 621 interpolity law 320–21, 330
numbers killed 622–23 interpolity zones 329–30
origins and context 620–22, 627 jurisdiction 321–24
reorganization and thinking of the British possession 321
empire 624–25, 626–27 protection 321, 324–26
support of the Princely States 622 protocol 321
inequalities of wealth and income 655 regulation of violence 321, 326–29
Institut de Droit International 637–38 Ishay, M. 264–65, 269, 272
Institute of International Finance Israel, J. 451
(IIF) 368–69
intellectual history 103 James, C.L.R. 296–97
disciplinary history 99–100 Japan
empire history 98–99 state formation 502, 503
global history 156–57 Jobson, R. 474
granularity 97 Johnson, J.T. 442
marginalized themes and expanding the Joll, J. 650
scope of 101–3 jurisdiction
modernity 98 interpolity law 321–24
source materials 103
trends and trajectories 98–101 Kant, I. 25–26, 31, 53, 60, 448–50
interdependence between history and Kardorff, W. von 342
international relations 3, 6–9, 15–16 Kaunitz-Rittberg, A. von 565, 566, 567–68
internalism 69–70 Kedourie, E. 311–12
‘international, the’ Kelley, L. 504–5, 509
agents, role of 732–36 Kerber, L. 273
language 736–38 Keynes, J.M. 650–51
space, importance of 729–32 Kim, S.J. 507
time, relations with 724–29 kinship 477–78
International Accounting Standards Board Kissinger, H. 440, 443
(IASB) 368–69 Klu Klux Klan (KKK) 238–39
 Index  747

Korea expansion of the international system of

state formation 502 states 456–58, 462
Koskenniemi, M. 443 multilateralism 460, 461–62, 463
Krasner, S. 414 rise of a great power system 458–60
Krüger, P. 147 Love, H. 118–19
Lustick, I. 144
Labelle, M. 237 Lynn, J. 298–99
las Casas, B. de 279
‘Latin America’ 485 Machiavelli, N. 28–30, 31
see also Americas Maier, C. 145
La Vía Campesina 494 Maiolo, J. 143
Lawson, G. 384, 387, 592–93 mandate system 236–38, 664–55
League of Nations 53, 309–10, 315, 487–88, Mani, L. 127–28
515–17 ‘Manifest Destiny’ 484–85
Economic and Financial Committees 366 Manoilescu, M. 340–41
Lebanon 236–37 Mantena, K. 99
Lebow, N. 613, 708–9 Mantua 537–38
Leclerc, General 578, 579, 581 Martens, F. 281
Lee, K. 507–9 Maza, S. 296
Lehti, M. 426, 435 McLuhan, M. 519
Lemkin, R. 282, 283 McMahon, H. 662–63, 671
Lenin, V. 238–39 McMillan, K. 591
liberal internationalism 49–51, 53, 59–60 McNamara, R. 710–13
debates over the possibilities of McQueen, A. 45
international government 51–53 Mearsheimer, J. 37–38
development of 50 Mehmed II, Sultan 532–34, 535
Hayek and ideas of global order 56–59 ‘metastate’ 520
League of Nations, and 53 Mexican Revolution 487
Mitrany’s functional approach 55–56, 59 MFN clause 461–62
progressive form of 49, 50 Middle Ages
liberalism 49–50 diplomacy 192–93
Congress of Vienna, and 591 Mignolo, W. 230
‘embedded liberalism’ 366–67 military historiography 294, 298–99
free trade, and 335–38 Milward, J. 506, 509
globalism, and 519 Minotto, G. 535
imperialism, and 98–99 Mitrany, D. 518
realism, and 44–45 functional approach 55–56, 59
Revolutions of 1848 608–9 modern international system
liberty 30 origins of 21–22, 23, 24–33
List, F. 338–39 spatialities and temporalities 22–23
Listians 339–41 system of inclusions and exclusions 22–23,
Loew, L. 233, 237–38 27–28
Lomellino, A. 534 modernity 3–4, 5–6, 9–12, 723–24
long nineteenth century 454, 462–63 alternative metahistorical narratives 417–19
contractual international law 460–61, 462, Americas 494–95
463 Bandung Conference 698–99
emergence of a system of coloniality, and 610
states 455–56 cultural understanding of 547
748   Index

modernity (cont.) Nayak, M. 386

development 348–50, 358–59 Nehru, J. 624, 692–93
differentiated understandings of neo-liberalism 49, 50–51, 336
modernity generated by the colonial neomercantilism see free trade-versus-
experience 624, 627 neomercantilism debate
early modernity 548 New International Economic Order
East Asia 501–5 (NIEO) 355–56, 490–91, 518–19
‘emergence of the modern state sovereignty’ nomadic societies 401–2
literature 414–16 Non-Aligned Movement (NAM) 432, 491,
‘global early modern’ 609–10 695–96
‘globalized late modernity’ 612, 614 North Atlantic Treaty Organization
Haitian revolution 579–80, 581–82 (NATO) 430–31
high modernity 548 Norton, M. 209–10
human rights 262–63, 274 nuclear war 45, 705–6
institutional approach to 547 lessons to be learnt 715
intellectual history 98 see also Cold War; Cuban Missile Crisis
‘international’ and ‘global’ 522–23 ‘nursery history’ 300
intersection between modernity and Nyerere, J. 309
granularity 14
‘logic of confluence’ 610–11 Oedipus 715
‘modernization theory’ trap 411–13 Okubo Toshimichi 343–44
realism, and 42–44 Organization of American States (OAS) 489,
relationship between IH and IR 137–38 492–93
religion 249–50, 254–55 Organization of Solidarity with the Peoples
‘re-turn’ to empire 203–5 of Africa, Asia, and Latin America
revolution 380–81 (OSPAAAL) 491
Revolutions of 1848 611 Orientalism 126, 296–97, 428
Second World War 677–78, 684–85 Osterhammel, J. 609–10
Sykes–Picot agreement 667–70 Owens, P. 101, 113
timing modernity 10–11
Morefield, J. 99 Palmerston, H.J.T. 226
Morgenthau, H. 40, 43, 45, 57–58, 609, 708 Panama Congress 484–85
Moses, W. 102 Pan-Americanism 486–88, 489
most-favoured nation (MFN) partition 26–27
clause 461–62 Pasha, M. 163
Moyn, S. 95–96, 267, 269–70 Peace of Utrecht (1713) 443
multilateralism 460, 461–62, 463, 488 Peers, D. 622–23
narratives 425–26 Pelham-Holles, T. 565–66, 567
dominant narrative 425–26 Penn, W. 449
Nasser, G.A. 693 ‘perpetual peace’ 448–50
nationalism 306 Perry, E. 505
evolution of nationalism 311–13 Peterson, V.S. 115–17
legacy of Western hegemony 307–10 Phillips, A. 619
nationalism and the development of Philpott, D. 575–76
international society 313–16 Pink Tide 493–94
nature and content of nationalist Pius II, Pope 531, 537–38, 540
thought 316–18 Plato 27–28
 Index  749

Polverel, E. 580 liberalism, and 44–45

Posner, E. 268, 271 modernity, and 42–44
possession structural realism 36–38
interpolity law 321 regulation of violence
postcolonial theory 125–26, 132, 618–19 interpolity law 321, 326–29
construction of bodies of knowledge and religion 258–59
who is the subject of history 126–29 alleged demise of religion 251
construction of bodies of knowledge and decolonization 251–52
who is the subject of IR 132 founding mythology of modernity 249–50
Prakash, G. 623 granularity 254–56
preliterate societies ‘multiple modernities’ 254–55
diplomacy 188–89 post-Cold War ‘resurgence’ 252–54
premodern world 395, 404–5 practices 256–58
complexity 400–2 premodern world 396–98
localism 398–400 secularism 249–50
religion 396–98 ‘secularism studies’ 253–54
similarities to the present 402–3 Weberianism 254–55
principalities 29–30 Renaissance
protection diplomacy 193–95
interpolity law 321, 324–26 Rengger, N. 160
protectionism see free trade-versus- resident embassies 193–94, 195
neomercantilism debate Responsibility to Protect (R2P) norm 236–37, 286
protocol Reus-Smit, C. 97
interpolity law 321 revolution 379–80
‘Age of Revolutions’ 380
race and racism 233 Congress of Vienna 592–93
avenues for future research 244–45 definitions of 386–87
definitions of ‘race’ and ‘racism’ 234–35 eighteenth century 450–51
Du Bois, W.E.B 240–42 generational scholarship 382–83
elision of race in IR 242–43, 245 granularity 381–82
hierarchy of races 428 ‘little revolutionary age’ 384–85
mandate system 236–38 modernity 380–81
‘modernity’ 239 multiplicities 387–88
racialization 234 people’s narratives 381–82, 383–85, 386, 388
‘responsibility to protect’ 236–37 Revolutions of 1848 602, 614
‘trusteeship’ 236–37 ‘death blows’ to revolution in 1849 606
war and racial identities 301–3 Europe-wide movement for civil and
Wilsonianism 235–37, 238–40 political citizenship 602–3
Rae, J. 343 fall and winter, events in 605
Ranade, M.G. 340 granularity 607
Ranke, L. von 138 international relations dimension 606–7
realism 7, 35–36, 46, 57–58, 649–50 modernity 611
‘classical’ realism 41 nationalism 608–9, 611–12
democracy 44 nationalization 611–12
historical apocalypse 45 origins 603
historical sociology, and 68 spring, events in 604–5
‘historicist’ realism 39–41 summer, events in 605
750   Index

Rietzler, K. 101 Silk Roads 399

Romans Siu Tchoan Pao 162
diplomacy 190–92 Skinner, Q. 96, 737–38
Roosevelt, F. 679–80 slavery
Rorke’s Drift 302–3 abolition of 323–24, 594
Rosch, F. 597 Africa 475–77
Rosenthal, J.-L. 506–7 Slobodian, Q. 56, 58
Rostow, W. 351, 411 Sluga, G. 595, 596
Roy, R. 337 Smith, A. 447
Runciman, S. 531 Smith, N. 117
Rwanda 287–88 ‘social imaginary’ 524
Sophocles 715
Said, E. 126, 428 Sorel, A. 138
Sandinista Revolution 491 sovereignty 455, 575–76
San Francisco Conference (1945) 680–81 critiques and avenues for future research 180–82
Sarkar, B.K. 162 Haitian revolution 576
Sastroamidjojo, A. 693 literature on 176–78
sati, abolition of 127–28 Peace of Westphalia 546
Sauer, F. 713 racialized process 576
savannah states 471–72, 478 uneven nature 320
Savitsky, V. 712 Spengler, O. 429
Schmidt, B. 100 Stalin, J. 679–80
Schmitt, C. 41 standard of ‘civilization’ 456, 653
Schroeder, P. 7, 147–49, 590 state
Schweller, R. 37 capacity 501, 502
Scott, J. 115 critiques and avenues for future
Second World War (WWII) research 180–82
convergence of regional international literature on state formation 174–76
systems 677 structural realism 14, 36–38, 68
global moments 676 Sugimoto, M. 503
granularity 685 Sukarno, President 693
legacies of 683–84 Suprinyak, C.E. 336
modernity 677–78, 684–85 Swain, D. 503
moment of international Sykes–Picot agreement 660
transformation 678–80 competing influences on the interwar
secularism 249–50 territorial settlement 664–67
‘secularism studies’ 253–54 ‘Eastern Question’ and European imperial
selection bias 417, 507 visions 660–64
Seth, M. 504 granularity and perspective 670–71
Seven Years’ War 571 map 660, 661f
advent of war 566–70 modernity and the emergence of the
diplomatic prelude 563–66 nation-state 667–70
‘first move advantage’ 571 publication of 664
setting 562–63
‘windows of opportunity’ 571 Tadjbakhsh, S. 163, 164
Shahi, D. 164 Talleyrand, C.M. 314
Shilliam, R. 131–32, 594 Tan, S.S. 691–92
Sikkink, K. 270–71, 272 Taylor, A.J.P. 7, 146
 Index  751

Temperley, H. 142 Versailles Treaty 646, 651

tempocentrism 68 Vick, B. 596–97
territory Vitalis, R. 100, 130
critiques and avenues for future Voltaire 223–24
research 180–82 von Glahn, R. 502
literature on 178–80
Thirty Years’ War 545 Wallerstein, I. 470
see also Westphalia, Peace of Walthall, A. 502
Thucydides 27, 138, 402, 707 Waltz, K. 36–38
Tianxia 158–59 war 292–93
Tickner, J.A. 112, 113 Africa 472–73, 474–75
Todd, D. 336 battle histories 299–301
Todorov, T. 228–29 East Asia, patterns of war in 505–10
Toynbee, A. 141 historiography 294, 296–97
Trachtenberg, M. 148–49 history 293, 295–96
trade knowledge about war 294–95
Africa 472–74 literature on 293
see also free trade-versus-neomercantilism military historiography 294, 298–99
debate racial identities, and 301–3
Trouillot, M.-R. 296–97, 576–77 ‘war guilt’ question 143
truces 327–28 Washington Consensus 492
True, J. 112, 113 Watson, A. 469–70, 730
Truman, H. 431 Watt, D.C. 146
‘trusteeship’ 236–37 Weber, C. 121
Tuck, R. 444 Weber, M. 252–53, 254–55, 651, 652
Tucker, J. 447–48 Webster, C. 142–43
‘West’, the 424–25
United Nations (UN) 489, 680–83, 685 ‘civilizational West’ narrative 427–30
aims of 681 conceptualizing the West 425–26
Charter 681–82 ‘fragmenting West’ narrative 433–35
Economic Commission for Latin America ‘liberal West’ narrative 430–32
(ECLA) 489–90 relationship between the West and
humanitarian intervention 682 modernity 436
human rights 682 tensions in the narratives of the
origins of 679–80 West 435–36
veto question 681–82 Westad, A. 350
United Nations Conference on Trade and ‘Western Christiandom’ 28–29
Development (UNCTAD) 490–91 Westphalia, Peace of 415, 544–45
Group of 77 310, 355–56 contesting the ‘myth’ of Westphalia 549–51
United Nations Convention on the Punishment context and core features 545–46
and Prevention of Genocide (UNGC) diversity regimes 552, 553–55
limitations of the UNGC 284–85 gateway to modernity, as 547–49
global historical significance 551–52, 555–56
Vastey, Baron de 582–83 IR debates on historical significance 546–51
Vattel, E. de 441, 442, 444, 446 legitimation crises 552, 553
‘just war’ scepticism 445–46 multipolarity 555
linguistic scepticism 445 Thirty Years’ War and the general crises of
religious scepticism 444–45 the seventeenth century 552
752   Index

Wight, M. 21, 24–25, 27, 28–29, 31–32, 33 WWI see First World War
Williamson, J. 492 WWII see Second World War
Wilson, W. 235–37, 238–40, 309–10, 314, 315,
648, 727 Yan Fu 337–38
Wittgenstein, L. 737
Wong, R. 506–7 Zhao Tingyang 163
Woodside, A. 501 Zimmern, A. 141, 142
Wright, R. 697–98 Žižek, S. 228–29