The invention of an international order: lessons from 1814

In 1814, an alliance of European empires captured Paris and exiled Napoleon Bonaparte. Drawing on a new book, Glenda Sluga explains how this coalition planted the seeds for today’s international order, wedding the idea of a durable peace to multilateralism, diplomacy, philanthropy, and rights, and making Europe its centre

Gender, Peace and the New International Politics of Humanitarianism in the First Half of the Twentieth Century

This chapter examines the changing ideas of peace and their connections with the longer history of humanitarianism in the first half of the twentieth century, using gender as an analytical focus. In particular, it explores the international and internationalist contexts of the emerging peace movement and international humanitarianism and their changing character; the gender dimensions of peace-thinking and policies, especially in the context of the League of Nations and the United Nations; and the ways in which feminism was a significant influence on the development of these two international bodies, even as women were sidelined in their operations. In the first half of the twentieth century, these international, intergovernmental organizations had as their central rationale the taming of warfare. The chapter analyzes the extent to which, in each case, they contributed to the institutionalization of new gendered international norms of pacifist and humanitarian activism

Turning International: Foundations of Modern International Thought and New Paradigms for Intellectual History

This essay provides an overview of the disciplinary and analytical significance of David Armitage's Foundations of Modern International Thought in the context of the new international history, and the so-called ‘international turn’. It then goes on to discuss the significance of the absence of women in this new sub-field of intellectual history

'Global Austria' and the League of Nations: Reframing Empire and Internationalism

In 1945, when Karl Polanyi was in London typing up his lecture notes on Nationalism and Internationalism, the Geneva-based League of Nations, perhaps the most extraordinary institution that had yet appeared in human history, was all but dead, without funeral and without fanfare, and a new international organization, and the foundations for the United Nations Organizaton were being laid on the other side of the world. Polanyi had already lived through through the great transformations of twentieth century international politics. His birth in 1886 in Vienna to a Jewish bourgeois family—his father was a railway entrepreneur, whose real name Pollacsek spoke to the diverse Habsburg origins—coincided with the international turn of the 1880s and 1890s. As we will see, in the Austrian empire as well as Europe’s other empires, bourgeois and aristocratic contemporaries were likely to identify with a ‘new internationalism’—the characteristics of which were a faith in international law, arbitration, and governance, as the means of a permanent peace

The International History of (International) Sovereignty

Historians have all but dispensed with a conventional chronology that marks the Treaty of Westphalia (1648) as the origin of a modern state-centric territorial sovereignty. Instead, they are accumulating evidence that, since at least the early nineteenth century, sovereignty stretches back to the imperial practice of intervention into polities elsewhere on humanitarian grounds. Imperial sovereignty was less uniform than imperial officials and cartographers asserted; instead, as Lauren Benton has argued, it was (and is) usually “more myth than reality, more a story that polities [told] about their own power than a definite quality that they possess[ed]”. Then there is the increasing number of historical examples of nonnormative, quasi-invisible forms of extra-territoriality that shaped the global imperial political architecture of the late nineteenth century: from the remaining principalities of the Holy Roman empire, and the conceptually distinctive practices of the Habsburgs as they separated cultural sovereignty from political sovereignty within their imperial territory, to the European claims to commercial and municipal authority in the treaty ports that dotted China’s seaboard and river system, carving out the spoils of war

From the fringes to the State: the transformation of the Falange into a State Party

The early years of the Francoist regime saw the rise to power of the Falange Española. A fascist and minority party in the times of the Second Republic, the Falange grew rapidly and exponentially after the outbreak of the war, soon seeing itself at the helm of the single party established in April 1937. The Falange was transformed into a conduit between state and society, and the only channel for the participation of the people in the construction and development of the New State until 1945. This transformation, which owed as much to the civil war and Spanish peculiarities, as to the interactions between Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy, entailed its necessary bureaucratisation but it did not imply its complete de-politicisation. Therefore, this essay contends, the party’s importance to the construction of the regime cannot be dismissed simply as a failed attempt to instate a fascist dictatorship in Spain. Moreover, if, as Glenda Sluga has argued, the Spanish Civil War was one of ‘the most obvious examples of transnational links in the history of interwar fascism and anti-fascism’, it seems necessary to explore the Spanish case within a broader European context, if we want to properly understand the post-liberal departure of the 1930–1940s

The Economic History of a European Security Culture, After the Napoleonic Wars

Economic developments have long shaped what we think of as the main themes of global as well as national history, from the story of capitalism and the industrial revolution, to the age of empires-cum-nations. Yet peacemaking at the end of the Napoleonic wars brought onto the international scene financiers, rentiers, and bankers, funding the future of Europe. Their presence was indicative of the emergence of a new capitalist economic order shaped by industrialisation and imperialism. This chapter uses a focus on this rising class as a lens through which to survey the social and ideological influence of shifting economic relations, practices and identities on the politics of peacemaking and on political agendas, from their impact on foreign policies and questions of ‘security’, to the proposals for political consideration brought to the peacemakers by Benjamin Constant, Saint-Simon, and Robert Owen

From F. Melian Stawell to E. Greene Balch : international and internationalist thinking at the gender margins, 1919–1947

Like several other interwar liberal internationalists, F. Melian Stawell was a classicist by training, set for an illustrious career at Cambridge working simultaneously on the ancient Greeks and contemporary world order. Stawell is best known as the author of The Growth of International Thought, a book increasingly cited, if not read, as the first to use the term ‘international thought.’ This chapter offers the first close reading of the text itself and of its major influences and context, challenging the (gendered) distinction between international and internationalist thought. Indeed, it argues that it was interwar internationalist international thought that inspired some contemporary IR academics to write for broader audiences, and women to engage with international politics. Overall, the essay both makes a case for including a range of genres in histories of international thought, whether work that had a primarily pedagogic or political rather than scholarly function