Before the cultural Cold Wars: American philanthropy and cultural diplomacy in the interwar years

The absence of formal state structures for the conduct of cultural relations until 1938 has led to the assumption that Americans abandoned a noble tradition of liberal cultural exchange in the Cold War, when state and private organizations co-operated in a propaganda battle against the Soviet Union. This article re-examines the realities of American cultural diplomacy in inter-war Europe by focusing on a group of key actors: philanthropic foundations founded by the Rockefeller and the Carnegie families. Far from being apolitical, foundations operated with the tacit approval of the state and reliably furthered American interests abroad but their non-governmental status also made them vulnerable to foreign intelligence

Curating women’s international thought

LSE Library is currently hosting the public exhibition Women’s International Thought, a collaboration with the Leverhulme Project on Women and the History of International Thought. Running between 5 May and 2 September 2022, the exhibition explores the ideas, genres and contexts of women’s international thinking in Britain and the US in the first half of the twentieth century. In this post, two of the curators, Katharina Rietzler and Joanna Wood, reflect on the process of curating the exhibition and committing to making the exhibition accessible to blind and visually impaired audiences

Women’s international thought and the new professions, 1900-1940

This article examines the “new professions” as alternative settings where women thought and wrote about the international. Presenting the case studies of Fannie Fern Andrews, Mary Parker Follett and Florence Wilson, it shows that, in emerging professional and disciplinary contexts that have hitherto lain beyond the purview of historians of international thought, these women developed their thinking about the international. The insights they derived from their practical work in schools, immigrant communities and libraries led them to emphasize the mechanics of participation in international affairs and caused them to think across the scales of the individual, the local group and relations between nations. By moving beyond the history of organizations and networks and instead looking for the professional settings and audiences which enabled women to theorize, this article shifts both established understandings of what counts as international thought and traditional conceptions of who counts as an international thinker

American foundations and the 'scientific study' of international relations in Europe, 1910-1940

This thesis deals with the role of American philanthropic foundations in promoting an expert-led approach to international politics in Europe between the two world wars. Harking back to earlier forms of transatlantic elite internationalism, American foundations financed a number of institutions for the ‘scientific’ study of international relations, and constructed a transnational network of international relations specialists. The organisations at the heart of this study, the Rockefeller Foundation and the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, funded a variety of think tanks, academies and research institutes, some of which had international and some of which had national constituencies. Institutions supported by the foundations included the Hague Academy of International Law, the Geneva Graduate Institute of International Studies, the Royal Institute of International Affairs and the Deutsche Hochschule für Politik. Efforts to promote the cooperation between these institutions culminated in the funding of the International Studies Conference, a federation of institutes for the study of international relations organised under the auspices of the League of Nations in 1928. The philanthropic project to promote a ‘scientific’ approach to international relations turned the foundations into actors in a new international politics which they sought to rationalise at the same time. This new international politics was marked by the post- 1919 intertwining of governmental, intergovernmental and nongovernmental structures. Adopting a transnational approach which avoids conventional bilateral perspectives, this dissertation explores foundation activity in a variety of contexts. It analyses the foundations’ role as promoters of international expert exchange and internationalist education; as protagonists of American cultural diplomacy and targets of the cultural diplomacy of other countries; and finally, as nongovernmental organisations which undermined intergovernmental structures. Ultimately, this thesis contributes to the transnational history of American philanthropic foundations and sheds light on the role of nongovernmental organisations as actors in 20th century international politics

Theorizing the history of women's international thinking at the 'end of international theory'

Throughout the 20th century, women were leading intellectuals on International Relations (IR). They thought, wrote, and taught on this subject in numerous political, professional, intimate, and intellectual contexts. They wrote some of the earliest and most powerful theoretical statements of what would later become core approaches to contemporary international theory. Yet, historical women, those working before the late 20th century, are almost completely missing in IR's intellectual and disciplinary histories, including histories of its main theoretical traditions. In this forum, leading historians and theorists of IR respond to the recent findings of the Leverhulme project on Women and the History of International Thought (WHIT), particularly its first two book-length publications on the centrality of women to early IR discourses and subsequent erasure from its history and conceptualization. The forum is introduced by members of the WHIT project. Collectively, the essays suggest the implications of the erasure and recovery of women's international thought are significant and wide-ranging

Counter-Imperial Orientalism: Friedrich Berber and the politics of international law in Germany and India, 1920s-1960s

The most trenchant critiques of Western international law are framed around the legacy of its historic complicity in the imperial project of governing non-European peoples. International law organised Europe and its ‘others’ into a hierarchy of civilizational difference that was only ever reconfigured but never overturned. But when analysing the complex relationship between international law and imperialism the differences within Europe—as opposed to a dyadic opposition of Europe versus the ‘rest'—also matter. Within the historical and political constellations of the early and mid-twentieth century, German difference produced a set of arguments that challenged dominant discourses of international law by posturing as anti-imperial critique. This article focuses on the global career of Friedrich Berber (1898-1984) who, as a legal adviser in Nazi Germany and Nehru’s India, was at the forefront of state-led challenges to liberal international law. Berber fused notions of German civilizational superiority with an appropriation of Indian colonial victimhood, and pursued a shared politics of opposition. He embodies a version of German-Indian entanglement which did not abate after the Second World War, emphasizing the long continuities of empire, power differentials, civilizational hierarchies and developmental logics under the umbrella of international law

Fortunes of a profession: American foundations and international law, 1910-1939

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The war as history: writing the economic and social history of the First World War

This essay analyses the “history wars” of the interwar years through the lens of the Carnegie-sponsored Economic and Social History of the World War, both as an antidote to “pre-emptive” historiography and as a crucial intervention that reinforced the salience of comparable social and economic data in international political debates

From peace advocacy to international relations research: the transformation of transatlantic philanthropic networks, 1900-1930

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