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No Enchanted Palace: The End of Empire and the Ideological Origins of the United Nations
Abstract
No Enchanted Palace traces the origins and early development of the United Nations, one of the most influential yet perhaps least understood organizations active in the world today. Acclaimed historian Mark Mazower forces us to set aside the popular myth that the UN miraculously rose from the ashes of World War II as the guardian of a new and peaceful global order, offering instead a strikingly original interpretation of the UN's ideological roots, early history, and changing role in world affairs. Mazower brings the founding of the UN brilliantly to life. He shows how the UN's creators envisioned a world organization that would protect the interests of empire, yet how this imperial vision was decisively reshaped by the postwar reaffirmation of national sovereignty and the unanticipated rise of India and other former colonial powers. This is a story told through the clash of personalities, such as South African statesman Jan Smuts, who saw in the UN a means to protect the old imperial and racial order; Raphael Lemkin and Joseph Schechtman, Jewish intellectuals at odds over how the UN should combat genocide and other atrocities; and Jawaharlal Nehru, India's first prime minister, who helped transform the UN from an instrument of empire into a forum for ending it. A much-needed historical reappraisal of the early development of this vital world institution, No Enchanted Palace reveals how the UN outgrew its origins and has exhibited an extraordinary flexibility that has enabled it to endure to the present day.
... The UN is among the numerous organisations that the forces of colonialism have helped form. Even though this paper will argue that the UN was conceived of and is still a colonial enterprise, I acknowledge that it is also contended, amidst the many continuities of exploitation, there was a small but significant break in the practice and self-description of PIL, at the conclusion of the formal colonial era (Mazower 2013). Thereafter, the colonial forces differentiated into autonomous entities and the plundering-justifying systems emerged. ...
... It can be construed that the UN is a colonial artefact created during the decolonial era by and for those seeking to defy the turn of history and preserve the colonial system. It exists as a governance mechanism that enables the nascent Soviet and American Empires to coexist peacefully with the dwindling European Empires (Mazower 2013). Countries with close ties to the Great Powers ended up being protected by Cold War politics (Matas 1996). ...
Implementation mechanisms within International Law and their failure to act upon situations they were created for are much debated topics in the academic community. There are multiple examples of International Humanitarian Law and International Human Rights Law failing, across the world, in its objective of (a) creating an international obligation to prevent its violations and (b) implementing its principles via compliance mechanisms that do not exist. What is extremely worrying about this is that, although certain western nations support creating these norms, they do not have the political will to uphold them. Even though International Law has multiple implementation mechanisms, they have failed to enforce the de jure principles they have established. Nations across the world are well-aware of the lack of realistic implementation mechanisms within the International Law system but have kept this as a subject of only debates in the United Nations Human Rights Council and international conferences held under the ambit of the International Committee of the Red Cross. The failure of International Law in protecting Human Rights is due to the latent nuances of its colonial nature, which are stitched into the fabric of Public International Law. Countries that have created these norms, have created them with the aim that these norms should fail to apply to them. The paper argues that Public International Law has an intrinsic colonial nature, created for the twin purpose of loot and then acting as a justification for the same. The paper further argues that International Human and Humanitarian Rights regimes form a smokescreen for International Economic Law and allows it to operate in its shadows without much notice. To reinforce this argument, the paper uses Marxist theory of ideology critique, which states that law works as a disguise for the real processes at work, within the International legal system. The real forces at work remain unknown, while contemporary debate focuses on Public International Law and its failings (Danilenko 1999). It is essential to understand the fundamental issue this structure boils down to, i.e., the Great Powers can direct any action they desire with no fear of consequences, while other countries have no recourse due to the difference in economic and military might. This intrinsic colonial nature of International Law exists in an apparatus that tries to maintain the status quo with the Great Powers at the top.
... Anthropologists, sociologists, historians and political scientists have examined how anti-colonial thinkers, minority activists and citizens of empire turned to the principles of international order as an alternative to the ruses and masks of liberal legality (e.g. Getachew 2019; Goebel 2015;Mazower 2009;Pedersen 2015;Wilder 2015). ...
... It is still significant, however, because the aspiration to found a new international order on science is periodically revived -though seldom with anthropology or a science of culture as its basis. Such efforts, rather, seem always to involve displacing political power into formal expertise and the disinterested operation of putatively apolitical legal rules (Mazower 2009;Slobodian 2018). In this vein, Martti Koskenniemi has written sharply about the unintended but ultimately perverse consequences of the interwar efforts to construct a fully technical international law, a law of standards and arbitration and regulations: 'Thinking of international law in apolitical and technical terms opened the door for expert rule and managerialism, not in competition with politics as in the domestic realm, but as a substitute for it. . . . ...
Bronisław Malinowski sought throughout his career to make a scientific contribution to understanding and reforming the international order by making analogies with ‘primitive’ societies. His ethnographic material was important to Marcel Mauss’s internationalist project in The Gift, and can still provide lessons in internationalism. This article examines Malinowski’s ethnographic figuration of ‘the evolution of primitive international law’, and documents a set of intellectual exchanges between him and Mauss. This illuminates an unexpected avenue of Durkheimian influence on British social anthropology and situates Malinowski in contemporary imperial and internationalist debates. Despite Malinowski’s early criticism of Émile Durkheim’s account of ‘collective ideas’, his later writing shows the (unacknowledged) influence of Mauss’s understandings of obligation and intersocial exchange. Unearthing the terms of this exchange between Malinowski and Mauss helps to recover the central normative lesson of the former’s final book and his ethnographic work as a whole – namely, that sovereignty should be dethroned as an organising principle of international order in favour of intersocial exchange and the obligations it produces.
... The irony here is that many anticolonial thinkers and movements were, for different reasons, deeply suspicious of states as well as nations, concerned about the colonial legacies embedded in statist legal structures and proposed a variety of political units other than the nation-state (Fanon [1963(Fanon [ ] 2004Mantena 2012;Mehta 2010;Harper 2020;Iqtidar 2021). Yet "successful" decolonization was recognized through the formation of a nation-state as the inheritor of colonial administration, a process facilitated by international agencies like the United Nations and departing colonial powers (Mazower 2009). ...
How might the ideas and practices of Global South migrants and activists inform normative frameworks and conceptual repertoires that political theorists and activists bring to bear on questions regarding justice and migration? Taking seriously the call for conceptual innovation to move beyond Eurocentrism this article builds on oral histories collected from refugees and migrants from the Tribal Areas of Pakistan to argue that the concept of haqq raises important questions about the reliance on statist justice in contemporary theorizing about migration ethics and provides insights into alternative ethical concerns. Ideas and practices of haqq foreground social relationships as well as the imbrication of responsibility and entitlement for communities and individuals. Crucially, engagement with haqq helps dislodge assumptions regarding state-enforced rights as universal vehicles of justice. Consequently, different ethical questions and imaginaries become available for consideration that resonate much beyond debates about migration.
... Manela argues that emerging nationalist movements appropriated Wilsonian language and adapted it to their own local culture and politics as they launched into action on the international stage. No Enchanted Palace: The End of Empire and the Ideological Origins of the United Nations shows that the connections and continuities between imperialism and the flagship multilateral institutions of the 20th century were more profound (Mazower 2009(Mazower , 2013. In this context, The Guardians: The League of Nations and the Crisis of Empire (Pedersen 2015) is both highly informative and conceptually curious. ...
Rassismus ist Realität – auch in der pluralen Gesellschaft Deutschlands. Doch was braucht es, um Rassismus zu erfassen, zu erforschen und politische sowie zivilgesellschaftliche Antworten auf ihn zu finden? Die Beiträger*innen liefern einen interdisziplinären Überblick zu grundlegenden Perspektiven, Theorien und Forschungsansätzen für eine zeitgemäße Rassismusforschung. Die im Rahmen des Nationalen Diskriminierungs- und Rassismusmonitors (NaDiRa) entstandenen Analysen bieten unverzichtbare und einzigartige Erkenntnisse zu Ursachen, Ausmaß und Folgen des Rassismus in Deutschland.
... Despite the efforts by UN-affiliated agencies to invent new forms of intellectual cooperation after 1945, they did so by creating institutions that replicated elements of colonial and imperial culture (Mazowar 2009). Joseph Hodge has shown that in the 1950s and 1960s, organizations such as the Food and Agricultural Organization of the UN (FAO) and the World Food Organization (WFO), hired large numbers of former European colonial scientists to lead technical assistance and other international developmental projects (Hodge 2010). ...
Decolonization created new opportunities for international scientific research collaboration. In Indonesia this began in the late 1940s, as Indonesian scientists and officials sought to remake the formerly colonial botanical gardens in the city of Bogor into an international research center. Indonesia sponsored the Flora Malesiana project, a flora of all of island Southeast Asia. This project was formally centered in Bogor, Indonesia, with participation from tropical botanists from around the world. The international orientation of Indonesian science led to the establishment of one of UNESCO’s Field Science Co-operation Offices in Jakarta, and to a period of close collaboration between Indonesian botanists and UNESCO. This paper examines the importance of UNESCO’s Humid Tropics research program, which initially provided further opportunities for Indonesian botanists to participate in international scientific networks. The paper concludes by showing that the Humid Tropics program led to the slow erosion of Indonesian agency and authority over tropical botany, and the assertion of Western control and management over tropical botany research.
... 2 This unifying worldview has greatly influenced the organization to the present day, but has always been highly contested. Huxley's cosmopolitanism was controversial as nationalism was still going strong, and the United Nations and UNESCO were by no means a project that would undermine nationalist aspirations (Mazower, 2008). An indication of the reluctance of the Great Powers to give up national sovereignty in favour of multilateral structures was the decision taken by the United States and several Western countries in 1944 to channel funds for post-war reconstruction bilaterally rather than through UNESCO, which meant that UNESCO's budget would remain very limited, a factor that has impaired the organization even before it was established (Jones, 1988). ...
This chapter provides an introduction and critical discussion of the epistemic and ontological underpinnings of UNESCO, the OECD and the World Bank and gives an overview of the educational work of these three organizations from a global governance perspective. Based on their divergent ideologies and modes of governance, we conceptualize UNESCO as the “idealist”, the OECD as the “master of persuasion”, and the World Bank as the “master of coercion”. The chapter demonstrates how the three international organizations have engaged with similar ideas and approaches, collaborated when it served their interests and struggled for influence and impact on the design and workings of the global governance in education.
... For Voeten (2005: 529), its creation amounted to an 'elite pact', formed by a select number of actors which institutionalised "nonmajoritarian mechanisms for conflict resolution". As Mazower (2009) emphasised, the postwar institutionalisation of the veto in the Security Council was meant to uphold Western powers' colonial aspiration to continue ruling the world's peripheries while safeguarding the Soviet Union from Western encroachment in its sphere of influence. But as he notes, even if the Council is often described as legitimating great power politics, it is nonetheless important to analyse a particular historical moment in which powerful states "came to define their security needs in ways necessitating membership in a world body" (2009: 11). ...
How do we study the UN Security Council, a bastion of sovereign nation-state politics, from the perspective of ‘outsiders’ such as UN special rapporteurs? This article reimagines the relationship between security and human rights at the UN through a social space approach. By challenging institutional and geographical boundaries between the Security Council in New York and the Human Rights Council Geneva, I follow actors in a social space in which transversal lines connecting security and human rights become visible. I uncover a social space that is animated by actors, their relations and social positions relative to each other as well as connections between institutions, geographical locations, practical competencies and material infrastructures. On this basis, I theorise four distinct boundary-blurring practices of UN special rapporteurs: between the issue areas of human rights and security, between the geographical locations of New York and Geneva, between institutions such as the Security Council, Human Rights Council and the OHCHR, and between the domains of politics and law. While these practices help them enter into the social space of the Security Council in New York, special rapporteurs need to pay ‘entry costs’ by accepting the basic premises of the counter-terrorism architecture in return for recognition as valid actors in this architecture. Taking this viewpoint from the outside, I argue, illuminates the extension of the Security Council beyond its institutional confines and uncovers ‘the human-rightization’ of global security policy.
... To give two famous descriptions: the nineteenth-century British jurist John Austin suggested that the sovereign was 'a determinate human superior' that themselves had no superior but 'receive[d] habital obedience from the bulk of a given society'; the twentiethcentury German Carl Schmidt defined the sovereign as 'he who decides on the exception'. 49 The point from these descriptions is that a particular person, group of people or institutions possess final authority; the concept of sovereignty implies that there is a choice about who or what that authority is. As the mid-twentieth-century historian of international relations F. H. Hinsley put it, the question of sovereignty addresses the 'problem of deciding the basis of government and obligation within a political community'. ...
This article argues for an essentially political definition of empire with sovereignty at its core, which recognises that British assertions of sovereignty were multiple, mutually contradictory and thus, taken together, incoherent. Tracing the history of conflict between different archetypes of sovereign authority, we argue that imperial crises occurred when empire's different ideas were forced to speak to one another, during world war, for example. The emphasis here on sovereignty and incoherence contrasts with conceptions of the history of the British empire which assert to the contrary that empire was a coherent entity. Such coherence can, we argue, only be maintained by treating empire as a metaphor for broader conceptions of power and thus collapsing the history of empire into other totalising meta-concepts such as global capitalism or Western cultural dominance. Recognition of the incoherence of imperial sovereignty offers new, more nuanced, readings of central concerns in the literature such as imperial violence and the economics of empire.
... The Southern coalition had a precursor in the 1927 Brussels conference of the League Against Imperialism and Colonial Oppression. Almost immediately after decolonisation, Nehru's India used the platform of the General Assembly to criticise colonialism and racial inequality in South Africa (Mazower, 2009). Representatives from 34 contingents attended the 1947's Asian Relations Conference in Delhi, at which delegates of national independence movements debated the future of Asia and alternative strategies for opposing colonialism (Thakur, 2019). ...
The voting record of states of the global South at the United Nations General Assembly indicates they are dissatisfied with the US-led liberal international order. Against existing interpretations, this article challenges the notion that states belonging to the Group of 77 (G77) express discontent because they are illiberal and undemocratic. Instead, the article argues that the G77 is composed of a diverse group of states influenced by a common South–South ideology. This foreign policy ideology has a distinct intellectual history and conceptual morphology, grounded in common experience of colonial domination and international peripheralisation. These arguments are tested using a series of multiple regression models, controlling for illiberal characteristics of states and examining the reciprocal influence between G77 membership and voting stance at the United Nations. Disaggregation of General Assembly resolutions and analysis of the text of General Debate speeches corroborates the argument that a coherent set of shared ideas shape how global issues are conceptualised and framed by members of the G77. The results are consistent with the argument that states of the G77 have socialised one another into a shared South–South ideology and that domestic illiberalism is insufficient to explain why they express dissatisfaction with the US-led international order. Ideologies of foreign policy originating in the global South, therefore, should not be overlooked as an influence on world politics.
... On the one hand, the United Nation's (UN) founding principle, Article 2(7) of its Charter, guarantees 'noninterference' in 'matters which are essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of any state'. State sovereignty hardened rather than softened under the UN; the defunct and reviled League of Nations had possessed greater power than the UN to intervene in the affairs of (some) nation states on behalf of national minorities (Mazower 2009). On the other hand, Chapter 1, Article 1, Part 2 of the Charter states that the UN's purpose is: 'To develop friendly relations among nations based on respect for the principle of equal rights and self-determination of peoples, and to take other * My thanks to Aparna Sundar and Nandini Sundar for the opportunity to present on this topic in Delhi in early 2010. ...
... The RSC operated in what historian Davide Rodogno terms a "sovereignty deficit," a temporal and political space where the absence of state power empowers nonstate organizations, like the RSC, to gain unique control over the lived experiences of the dispossessed (Rodogno, 2016, 190). Ultimately, however, the goals of the RSC, much like the League of Nations itself, were largely oriented towards upholding state power and legitimizing the sovereignty of nation-states (Mazower, 2013). Like many humanitarian and bureaucratic organizations of the time, the RSC focused heavily on statistics and data management in order to render refugees legible to state power. ...
In 1924, the League of Nations authorized a special commission to resettle the hundreds of thousands of refugees created by the Greco-Turkish War. The Refugee Settlement Commission (RSC) would be responsible for rehousing Greek refugees expelled from former Ottoman territories and resettling them in Greece. The RSC had a unique commission. In an attempt to effect a “permanent solution” to ethnic violence in the lands of the former Ottoman Empire, the League of Nations had helped broker the Treaty of Lausanne between the warring nations of Greece and Turkey that ended the conflict and authorized each nation to denaturalize and expel any Greeks in Turkey and any Turks in Greece, over one and a half million civilians in total from both countries. With the League's approval, the RSC carried out the task of resettling hundreds of thousands of refugees who had been created by international accord, forced out of their ancestral homelands, and expelled to Greece with the vague promise of citizenship, housing, and welfare. This paper follows how the Refugee Settlement Commission, a supranational organization created and legitimized by the League of Nations, sought to enact their visions of modernity and civilization through the resettlement of these refugees.
... Undoubtedly, the UDHR is regarded as the first global human rights document, which institutionalizes the rights of human beings (Mazower 2009). On 10 December 1948, global leaders adopted the declaration through the process of consensus among the member states; however, the UDHR, being the preeminent legal human rights instrument, has generated other human rights instruments (Cheng 2008). ...
... On the one hand, the United Nation's (UN) founding principle, Article 2(7) of its Charter, guarantees 'noninterference' in 'matters which are essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of any state'. State sovereignty hardened rather than softened under the UN; the defunct and reviled League of Nations had possessed greater power than the UN to intervene in the affairs of (some) nation states on behalf of national minorities (Mazower 2009). On the other hand, Chapter 1, Article 1, Part 2 of the Charter states that the UN's purpose is: 'To develop friendly relations among nations based on respect for the principle of equal rights and self-determination of peoples, and to take other * My thanks to Aparna Sundar and Nandini Sundar for the opportunity to present on this topic in Delhi in early 2010. ...
... On the one hand, the United Nation's (UN) founding principle, Article 2(7) of its Charter, guarantees 'noninterference' in 'matters which are essentially within the domestic jurisdiction of any state'. State sovereignty hardened rather than softened under the UN; the defunct and reviled League of Nations had possessed greater power than the UN to intervene in the affairs of (some) nation states on behalf of national minorities (Mazower 2009). On the other hand, Chapter 1, Article 1, Part 2 of the Charter states that the UN's purpose is: 'To develop friendly relations among nations based on respect for the principle of equal rights and self-determination of peoples, and to take other * My thanks to Aparna Sundar and Nandini Sundar for the opportunity to present on this topic in Delhi in early 2010. ...
... Als Churchill und Roosevelt versprachen "denjenigen ihre souveränen Rechte wiederzugeben, denen sie mit Gewalt entzogen wurden" hatten sie die von Deutschland, Italien und Japan eroberten Gebiete im Sinn -nicht die Kolonien Frankreichs oder Großbritanniens. Nach Beendigung des Krieges gegen Hitler wollten die USA die Macht Großbritanniens nicht gefährden, das im Kontext des Kalten Krieges ein wichtiger Verbündeter gegen die UdSSR war (Mazower 2009). ...
Zusammenfassung
In der humanitären Hilfe fungiert das „Lokale“ zunehmend als asymmetrischer Gegenbegriff des „Universalen“: Es bezeichnet den Einzelfall, das Althergebrachte, alles, was nicht als wirklich international und allgemein anwendbar gilt Doch auch universale Werte entstehen in zeitlich und lokal spezifischen Kontexten. Die Geschichte internationaler Institutionen macht deutlich, dass hinter Normen identifizierbare Orte und Personen stehen, die nicht zuletzt ihre eigenen Interessen verfolgen. Der Universalisierung einer Norm gehen stets Machtkämpfe voraus. Dieser Beitrag zeigt anhand von drei Beispielen – Flüchtlingskonvention, Menschenrechten, Grundsatz der Unparteilichkeit – wie Machtkämpfe in der internationalen Hilfe ausgetragen werden. Wer universelle Normen verteidigen will, ist gut beraten, sich über deren Geschichtlichkeit bewusst zu sein.
... Many scholars argue or imply that IOM is inherently untrustworthy and normatively flawed because of its place outside the 'UN family' (Goodwin-Gill 2019; Pécoud 2018; Guild, Grant, and Groenendijk 2017). Mazower (2009), however, provides an essential corrective to jejune accounts of the UN emerging from the wreckage of World War II as the sentinel of a new, rights-based, anticolonial order. 8 Following the UN's founding in 1945, senior western officials applauded the successful ruse through which they were able to 'delude' human rights advocates into believing 'that their objectives had been achieved in the present Charter' (Mazower 2009, 7). ...
The International Organization for Migration (IOM) exerts increasing power in global migration governance, yet research on IOM’s early history is scarce. Explanations of IOM’s founding and early migration management efforts are often reduced to bipolar, Cold War politics, with the US creating the organisation outside the UN to sidestep Soviet interference. Such simplistic accounts fail to grapple with the ways in which its creation and early activities also reflected and entrenched legacies of colonialism and related racialized inequalities. Drawing on extensive archival research, this article analyses how colonial interests and biases also shaped IOM’s establishment, founding documents, and vacillating positions in decolonisation movements. It examines the organisation’s role in moving colonists out of newly independent states; facilitating settler colonial states’ preference for white migrants; and advancing western interests in having an international migration forum in which opposition to exclusionary policies was virtually non-existent. In particular, it questions the agency’s involvement in supporting white migration to Southern Africa in the apartheid era, and the sanitisation of such work from IOM’s institutional history. Theoretically, the article analyses these dynamics through the lens of ‘colonial unknowing’, thereby laying the foundation for deeper, historicised understandings of IOM’s continued, contested roles in migration management.
... 19 While much has been said about the role of the US in the UN's founding, Mazower draws our attention to how 'the British imperial dimension enters as a key strand of early 20th century internationalism' and, eventually, into the internationalism of the UN and its specialized agencies. 20 Pavone notes that even 'UNESCO's utopian dream of uniting all nations in a universal community living in an everlasting peace through the promotion of a general reform of education, science and culture is by no means original in Western history'. 21 His work connects the scientific humanist philosophy influential during UNESCO's founding years to philosophical and political utopias developed in the 17th century by Bacon, Comenius and Puritan Reformers. ...
... With the enormous expansion of membership of the General Assembly upon the arrival of newly decolonized countries, it "turned from critic of the old colonial status quo to defender of a new global order of [sovereign] nationstates." 10 The bilateral agreements that countries signed with the AEC thus covered almost every corner of the 'free world'. They included not only major European powers but also Latin American states like Argentina, Brazil, and Venezuela; colonial and racist regimes like South Africa, Spain, and Portugal; Middle Eastern countries like Iran and Israel; Indonesia and the Philippines in South Asia; NATO allies Turkey and Greece. ...
... Its structure, with five Permanent Members of the Security Council, China (later the People's Republic), France, the Soviet Union (later Russia), the United Kingdom, and the United States, ensured a hybrid of idealism, realism, and also political stasis. (Mazower 2009). ...
Sustain our Common Humanity
The 20th century saw the catastrophes of the First and Second World Wars. International
intellectual cooperation was considered necessary if humanity were to renew civilized
society and build a prosperous economy to the benefit of all. Such exchange also became
an instrument of ideological “soft-power” or cultural diplomacy, using propaganda, and
exploiting the arts, sciences, and intellectual life generally. Here we consider examples of
idealism and realism in international intellectual cooperation and educational exchange.
The aim is to identify and make coherent key issues and suggest lessons for today
... One of the problems with partition studies is its narrow focus on the 'usual suspects' i.e., the partitions of Ireland, India, and Palestine. These partitions have been the subject of much study, especially by Irish, Indian, and Palestinian nationalists, who are especially tempted to think that partitions 'are peculiarly British' (O'Leary, 2007, p. 899) although transnational historians appear to be equally preoccupied with the British Empire's role in partition (e.g., Fraser, 1984;Mansergh, 1999;Mazower, 2009;Dubnov and Robson, 2019). ...
This article implores political geographers to engage with the sub-discipline's imperial roots in which international law was foundational. It does so by revisiting the practice of partition – defined here as an imposed boundary – which remains central to historical and current-day imperialism. This is the case, both regarding longstanding partitions, such as Northern Ireland, Kashmir, the Chagos Islands/British Indian Ocean Territory, Cyprus, Korea, and Western Sahara, and with regard to proposals to impose new partitions in Kosovo, Iraq, Syria, Ukraine, Palestine, and in the South China Sea. By adopting an historical perspective on the geopolitics of bordering, partition can be understood as an imposed boundary, in which the negotiators, to the extent they were consulted, were not presented with a free choice. Partitions in colonial situations only became illegal during the height of decolonization and the Cold War confrontation with the West, when the Soviet Union and Third World succeeded in modifying international law in a way that required the colonial powers to obtain the consent of the representatives of the communities whose territories they proposed to partition. As the world enters a more uncertain period, with increasing geopolitical competition, partition could make a comeback, in various guises, in which it may become necessary to pass judgment on the legality of partition, and not just its efficacy.
Los estudios internacionales, como disciplina académica singular, surgen en el período de entreguerras. El idealismo liberal será el principio ideológico básico y Estados Unidos, Gran Bretaña y Francia los países de referencia, con sus respectivas redes de financiación e institucionalización. El objetivo que se persigue en este trabajo es analizar el papel jugado por los españoles, tanto los procedentes de la Institución Libre de Enseñanza como los de matriz católica, en el inicio de los estudios internacionales. La documentación de los archivos de la UNESCO y de la Fundación Rockefeller permite seguir la constitución de las diferentes entidades dedicadas a ello en España y la proyección exterior, a través del Instituto de Derecho Internacional y de la Conferencia de Altos Estudios Internacionales (CAEI). El resultado muestra que España alcanzó una posición relevante en ambos organismos, reconocida en mayo de 1936 con la celebración en Madrid de la IX CAEI, al tiempo que acogía en el recién fundado Instituto de Estudios Internacionales y Económicos a prominentes refugiados alemanes como Hans Morgenthau o Gerhart Niemeyer. La guerra civil española cercenó, bruscamente, la creciente influencia obtenida.
This paper critiques a core premise of Global IR: the association of knowledge with geography, which we term geo-epistemology. It argues that ‘American’ and Global IR share a Eurocentric spatial imaginary, one that was a product of Western expansion and empire. Through its geo-epistemology, Global IR enables a conservative appropriation of the critique of Eurocentrism in IR. Globality becomes a matter of assembling sufficient geographic representation rather than an analysis of the discipline's political, historical, and spatial assumptions. Anglo-American policymakers and intellectuals invented the national/international world to replace the world of empires and races that came apart in the era of the world wars. This UN world of sovereign nation-states and their regional groupings was the foundational move of both what Stanley Hoffman called ‘the American social science’ – IR – and the American-centred world order. The paper uses the reception and legacy of Hoffman's classic essay to show how culture replaced power and history in the study of the discipline, obfuscating the Eurocentrism of Global IR.
This chapter explores the effects of decolonization on the collective hegemony of the great powers in international society. The chapter contributes to research on the interplay of hierarchies by analysing the two modes of historicity that shaped this interplay: complex temporalities and the structuring effects of history. The first form of collective hegemony, the Concert of Europe, was established when parts of the world were already colonized, others in the process of decolonization and still others yet to be colonized. As the decolonized states were the chief opponents of collective hegemony, the successive decolonization of international society led to an increasing level of contestation. Collective hegemony, though, has persisted. The powerful states were able to perpetuate this practice both by benefiting from path-dependencies in formal governance institutions (UN Security Council) and by side-stepping the consent of smaller states through informal forms of collective hegemony (G7 and G20).
This article looks at India’s complaint at the United Nations Human Rights Commission in 1979 about the ‘virginity test’ performed on a migrant Indian woman at Heathrow. It examines the use of arguments about race and racial discrimination by India to compel Britain to discuss immigration on a bilateral basis. The article argues that the pivot to a race-based argument was deliberately patriarchal and India’s main concern in these negotiations was the impending British Nationality Act of 1981, which would prevent men from moving to Britain in search of an overseas wife. Using the virginity testing scandal, the article re-examines the changing role of discourses about race in postcolonial institutions of global governance.
IR scholars and analysts often view the African Union's apparent deference to common positions with a collectivist lens. However, in this article, I argue that the legend of common African positions (CAPs) has not yet been animated, as African leaders do not always work collectively for structural and political reasons. Two significant factors complicate analysing Africa's IR in Africa: first, Africa is not a monolith. With fifty-five states and numerous linguistic, cultural, and historical paths, there is more that is different than is the same. Second, conventional IR theories are rooted in Global North worldviews and are, therefore, not the most appropriate tool to study African countries' collective decision-making.
S'inscrivant dans la lignée des travaux portant sur les réseaux transnationaux de femmes, cette thèse interroge la manière dont la question de l'éducation supérieure des filles s'est faite une place sur la scène internationale, au travers des débats portés par les associations internationales féminines. Adoptant une perspective transnationale et croisant diverses échelles, cette étude archivistique se centre sur l'engagement d'une association en faveur de cette cause, celui de la Fédération internationale des femmes diplômées des Universités (FIFDU), de sa création en 1919 jusqu'à 1970. La première partie de la thèse décrit la position singulière de la FIFDU dans la constellation des associations internationales féminines. Elle questionne les fondements de l'organisation, qui oscillent entre pacifisme, féminisme, et internationalisme. À partir de l'étude des trajectoires des fondatrices et dirigeantes, ainsi que des discours de ces dernières, elle analyse les besoins d'une nouvelle génération de femmes diplômées. La seconde partie étudie les actions mises en place dans le cadre de la FIFDU pour atteindre les buts de promotion de l'internationalisation, des études et des carrières féminines, en particulier le programme de bourses internationales destiné à permettre à des chercheuses prometteuses de mener des recherches ou des études avancées durant plusieurs mois à l'étranger, ainsi que les modalités de l'accueil et de l'hébergement réservés aux boursières et aux diplômées en voyage. Elle interroge également l'utilisation faite par les associations nationales de l'orientation professionnelle, qu'elles perçoivent comme un levier de promotion des études universitaires féminines, et sur laquelle elles prennent appui particulièrement pour encourager la présence des femmes dans les carrières scientifiques. La troisième et dernière partie explore les ressorts de la collaboration entre la FIFDU et les grandes organisations internationales, qui permet une diffusion à double sens des idéaux et des actions des deux types d'organisation.
Out of a total of 54 members of the League of Nations at its zenith, only China, Japan and Siam (Thailand) were located in Eastern Asia, an area that covers the sub-regions of what are conventionally known as East and Southeast Asia in academic discourse today. By focusing on their activities, this book contributes to two emerging trajectories of research: the deconstruction of the narrative of the League as little more than a grandiose experiment in cooperation between the great powers that failed with the catastrophe of World War II; and the growing interest in how actors beyond Europe and the United States shaped the evolution of the modern international system.
This article aims to shed light on the rationale behind Fascist Italy’s participation in the League of Nations’ (L.o.N.) cultural organizations, as well as on the strategies and diplomatic tools it adopted with a view to setting the intellectual cooperation agenda in the 1920s and 1930s. Although inspired by a strong nationalist ideology, the Fascist regime, at least initially, successfully adapted its cultural diplomacy strategies to the multilateral context of the L.o.N., embracing the language and tools of internationalism. In the long run, however, this delicate balance between nationalist and internationalist attitudes proved untenable: Mussolini’ project aiming to convey a positive and tolerant image of Fascism to the outside world was firstly tainted by the measures taken in 1931 to regiment Italian intellectuals, and then finally collapsed with the aggression to Ethiopia. However, this article shows that the involvement in the L.o.N.’s cultural organizations, while providing Fascism with international channels for circulating its propaganda, also determined instances of real cooperation: the most emblematic case is represented by the development of cinematography, which can be considered Italy’s long-term contribution to the enhancement of intellectual cooperation within the L.o.N. in the interwar period.
Over the past two centuries, the concept of human dignity has moved from the fringes to the centre of the international legal system. This book is the first detailed historical, theoretical and legal investigation of human dignity as a normative value, the intellectual sources that shaped its legal recognition, and the main legal instruments used to give it expression in international law. Ginevra Le Moli addresses the broad historical and philosophical developments relating to the legal expression of dignity and the doctrinal geography of human dignity in international law, with a focus on international humanitarian law, international human rights law and international criminal law. The book fills a major lacuna in the literature by providing a comprehensive account of dignity within international law that draws on an extensive documentary and archival basis and a vast body of decisions of international judicial and quasi-judicial bodies.
Les nouvelles coloniales de Kipling et de Maugham mettent en scène, respectivement, la société anglo-indienne à l’époque du Raj et la vie dans les colonies anglaise et hollandaise des îles d’Asie du sud-est durant l’entre-deux-guerres. Malgré ces spécificités contextuelles et l’écart temporel entre les époques auxquelles les deux auteurs écrivent leurs nouvelles, ces dernières sont invariablement traversées par le motif d’une colonisation pensée comme crise. Or le genre de la nouvelle porte formellement l’idée de crise. En utilisant le rapprochement opéré par les études postcoloniales entre modernité et colonisation comme paradigme de lecture, cette thèse montre comment la nouvelle peut opérer une prise spécifique sur ce rapport et se révéler lieu de trouble. Dans le cadre de cette réflexion sur la propension de ce genre à déstabiliser la modernité politico-philosophique et les idéologies qu’elle charrie – la promotion de la raison, du savoir, du progrès – il apparaît que les nouvelles de Kipling et de Maugham opèrent selon des modalités différentes. Celles de Kipling interrogent poétiquement le politique et la modernité tels qu’ils apparaissent dans leur spécificité coloniale par le biais d’une écriture qui opère depuis les marges, ce par un double décalage par rapport au roman domestique. Le fait même de prendre pour objet la société coloniale, elle-même située sur les marges de la société métropolitaine anglaise, s’inscrit en effet dans une écriture du décentrement. Les nouvelles de Maugham s’énoncent elles aussi depuis certaines marges mais s’inscrivent davantage dans un constat général du déclin de la civilisation européenne durant l’entre-deux-guerres et dans une réflexion sur la situation de l’écrivain face à divers centres, sources d’autorité et de savoir. Le trouble que produit la nouvelle est donc certes lié au statut de « voix solitaire » de cette dernière mais surtout à sa position de marginalité.
When considering the wave of forced migrations during the Second World War in Europe and Asia, and the international and institutional responses thereof, we can speak about the 1940s as witnessing the birth of a global refugee resettlement regime. Organisations including the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), the International Refugee Organization (IRO), and eventually the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) placed refugee resettlement at the heart of constructing the postwar world order. This volume adopts a global optic to investigate the formation of this international resettlement regime in Europe and Asia, while also studying refugee camps and movements, agency of refugees and migrants, decision factors for resettlement, and the intellectual production of people on the move. A historicisation of the global resettlement regime of the long 1940s may well carry important political and ethical lessons for us today, if only to remind us of the connected fates of our common humanity, and the responsibilities we therefore bear towards our fellow human beings.
This article analyses the disregarded notion of the ius legationis (right of legation), revisiting historical debates in diplomatic theory and law over who possesses or ought to have this right. By examining how the ius legationis manifested into a volitional or subjectional or natural right, we argue that this renders it not merely a legal issue, but a highly political and ethical question that is of direct relevance to contemporary international relations. In an era where inclusivity is rhetorically promoted at the United Nations, we suggest that a rekindled right to diplomacy (R2D) – conceiving diplomacy as a right that is claimed but also contested – can shed light onto inequalities of representation and the role international law can play in remedying asymmetries and ethicizing the practice of diplomacy. Beyond its primary normative contribution, we argue that the R2D can also provide an analytical framework to understand UN's efforts at institutionalizing diplomatic pluralism, its logics of inclusion and exclusion, as well as the struggles of diverse groups to obtain accreditation, consultative status, and negotiation ability within multilateral diplomacy.
This contribution reflects on the theme of intellectual history and the present from the perspective of recent intellectual histories of mid-twentieth-century Africa. I focus on two aspects of the intellectual historian's work which relate to the importance of putting the past into dialogue with the present. First, using new histories of the historical event of mid-twentieth-century decolonization as a case study, I consider the potential offered by investigating ideas which have been eclipsed or forgotten and trying to understand when and why possibilities closed down. Second, I consider the role of the intellectual historian in deessentializing concepts that underpin contemporary public discussion, focusing in particular on the concept of “democracy.”
Asking how being ‘international’ relates to privilege, I analyse a role-play game, the Students’ League of Nations, where pupils and teachers from select international schools simulate the UN General Assembly in Geneva. I document distinctive practices of selection and visions of excellence as talent, using Bourdieu’s notion of ‘institutional rite’. I combine insider ethnography and quantitative analyses of the host school with a historical account of it’s elitism to bridge the gap between macro- and micro-analyses of ‘everyday nationalism’. I show how this game draws a symbolic boundary between ‘international’ and ‘local’ high schools by separating students who are considered worthy of transgressing their national identity from all others.
The region of east-central Europe is one that for many centuries was inhabited by multi-national dynastic empires: Ottoman, Habsburg, Romanov and Hohenzollern. Their break-up after the First World War left a host of memories, ideas, even institutions. It also left a series of apparently intractable problems of identity and membership, as groups that had previously occupied a wide imperial space found themselves caged in nation states, many of which were of recent formation. There were conflicting memories of past existences, and past relationships between groups. These memories have continued to influence present politics, including attitudes to “Europe” and membership of the European Union. This chapter will seek to understand the historical origins of these questions, and especially the role played by memories of past empires.
Though recent years have seen a proliferation of critical histories of international law, their normative significance remains under-theorized, especially from the perspective of general readers rather than writers of such histories. How do critical histories of international law acquire their normative significance? And how should one react to them? We distinguish three ways in which critical histories can be normatively significant: (i) by undermining the overt or covert conceptions of history embedded within present practices in support of their authority; (ii) by disappointing the normative expectations that regulate people’s reactions to critical histories; and (iii) by revealing continuities and discontinuities in the functions that our practices serve. By giving us a theoretical grip on the different ways in which history can be normatively significant and call for different reactions, this account helps us think about the overall normative significance of critical histories and how one and the same critical history can pull us in different directions.
This special section responds to the call for renewed attention to the international implications of decolonization with a particular focus on India and the South Asia region. The section offers insights into historical continuities and ruptures in Indian internationalism, interrogating divides between colonial and postcolonial as well as between national and international. In turn, it de-centres histories of global order-making in the twentieth century, building on the work of a growing chorus of international historians, political scientists, and international relations scholars seeking alternative visions of the international in an increasingly multipolar world order. In challenging the binary rupture of India's international outlook in the pre- and post-independence period, this special section forces us to reconsider the temporal landscape of India's decolonisation moment. Through an avowedly international outlook, many of the papers introduce new spaces, connections, and entanglements through which Indian independence was realised, and in turn through which the scales of the international can be scrutinised. This brief introduction introduces the papers, teasing out the wider themes that link them, and their connections with the broader purposes of the special section itself.
This article examines international criminalization, the process by which particular acts come to be established as international crimes in world politics. While international legal scholars suggest international criminalization constitutes a legal process that centres on international legal codification, this article argues, by drawing upon the insights of constructivist International Relations scholarship, that it is better conceived as a social process. More specifically, the process of international criminalization involves the development of an international social consensus on international criminality, which takes hold in international society following diplomatic negotiations between social actors. Furthermore, international criminalization embraces a two-stage process that requires, firstly, the emergence of an international criminal norm and secondly, the translation of that norm into an international legal proscription. Using these conceptual insights, the article analyses, through a close analysis of international archival documents, the historical emergence of genocide, in order to demonstrate how its proposed conceptualization of international criminalization can better explain how and why this act was specifically established as an international crime. In doing so, the article offers an alternative account of genocide's criminalization which, unlike the existing literature, goes some way towards uncovering the processes of social construction that informed its establishment as an international crime.
This article asks under what historical conditions people who consider themselves as belonging to the ingroup resort to collective violence against free labour migrants. Based on cases in the North Atlantic, and largely limited to the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, it offers a starting point for a more global approach. By using the concept of boundary work, I conclude that once ethnic boundaries are in place they need maintenance, through discourse, legislation, and surveillance. Migrants defined as outsiders, who did not accept their inferior role and thus became direct competitors for such key resources as jobs and houses, were bound to evoke irritation, protest, and, in extreme cases, mob violence. The latter occurred a number of times in early modern England, but such incidents occurred especially in the period 1860–1880 (US and Australia), 1880–1900 (Western Europe), and on both sides of the Atlantic around World War I. In all these cases, boundary-making (through heightened nationalism, imperialism, and embedded racial hierarchies) was prominent, while, at the same time, the state was unable or unwilling to protect its citizens against competition on the labour market and to provide a welfare safety net. This lack of actual boundary maintenance could lead to mob violence, especially when authorities were unwilling or unable to intervene. Moreover, it is striking that violence was directed especially against outsiders who were considered racially or culturally inferior. These included the Chinese and African-American internal migrants in the United States and colonial migrants in the United Kingdom.
Is peacekeeping intervention? This is the central theme which runs throughout this thesis. Since its conception in the mid-1950s, peacekeeping has significantly evolved from traditional, passive, monitoring and observing operations to robust, multi-dimensional stabilisation operations. This raises questions as to whether this is simply a natural evolution of peacekeeping or whether it marks an expansion of the concept of peacekeeping beyond its boundaries, pushing it into the realm of peace enforcement or intervention. Put simply, has peacekeeping evolved too far? Focusing on the Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC), this thesis seeks to understand the relationship between United Nations peacekeeping and the principle of non-intervention. It therefore explores the boundaries between the two, by examining peacekeeping’s legal and normative frameworks, questioning whether, at times, peacekeeping becomes a form of intervention. Uniquely applying a Third World Approaches to International Law (TWAIL) lens, it provides new insights into intervention and peacekeeping, contributing to recent trends that seek to reimagine or reinvigorate UN peacekeeping.
Cette thèse de doctorat en histoire porte sur l’« Incident du 28 février », la révolte qui agita en 1947 Taiwan contre le pouvoir chinois après que la Chine eut récupéré sur l’île en 1945, après cinquante ans de colonisation japonaise. Cette rébellion, rapidement et très brutalement réprimée, est au cœur des luttes mémorielles qui agitent Taiwan depuis sa démocratisation, l’enjeu étant la légitimité de la souveraineté chinoise sur l’île, et l’identité de cette dernière. L’objet de mon travail est la violence politique, ses modalités et sa genèse. J’analyse l’éruption de violence de 1947 à la lumière de cinquante ans de relations sino-japonaises, en particulier la guerre de 1937-1945. Du côté taiwanais, la révolte s’appuie sur les réseaux et le répertoire d’actions et de symboles développés durant la mobilisation pour l’effort de guerre japonais, tant au niveau des troupes coloniales que des groupes paramilitaires et de jeunesse, sans qu’on puisse pour autant qualifier l’insurrection de pro-japonaise. Le passé colonial, et particulièrement la militarisation de la société taiwanaise qui s’est accompagnée d’une assimilation culturelle intensive, sert de ressource pour l’action politique. La violence employée du côté nationaliste chinois remobilise une riche expérience contre-insurrectionnelle, en particulier celle des années 1930. Son intensité disproportionnée s’explique par la perception de la rébellion comme un acte de guerre prolongeant l’invasion japonaise et déniant à la Chine son statut de vainqueur et de puissance civilisée. Elle solde les comptes de la guerre sino-japonaise à l’échelle locale par victimes interposées et parachève l’épuration des élites coloniales.
Este trabajo se propone analizar la evolución del abordaje de la cuestión colonial en el seno de la Organización de las Naciones Unidas y su impacto sobre las independencias africanas, y la abolición de los regímenes de minorías en ese continente, desde su fundación en 1945, hasta la aprobación del Comité Especial de Descolonización en 1961. El tema que queremos abordar es el papel que tuvo la Organización de las Naciones Unidas en la transformación del mundo de posguerra y especialmente en la impugnación del colonialismo; el problema sobre el que nos vamos a centrar es cómo ese organismo, fundado por las potencias vencedoras de la segunda guerra mundial, se convirtió hacia la década de 1960 en un foro de discusión, coordinación e implementación de políticas que promovieron la eliminación de los imperios coloniales y de los regímenes de minorías en África.
Gurminder Bhambra's Annual Lecture points the way to a paradigm shift in how the social sciences should approach the nation-state, both historically and in our own times. That is to say, perceiving of Britain historically as a nation-state or as an imperial state will make all the difference; and, as Bhambra demonstrates, it is precisely the failure to grasp the imperial fact that prevents us from grasping ‘the shared histories that have configured our present’. This article reflects on the crucial imperial fact outlined by Bhambra, and it applies its radical consequences for our approach to the broader Western European scene and the world at large in the postwar period. Our contemporary nation-state system, it is argued, is not the invention of Westphalia and European objectives, but rather the product of decolonization and thus a reaction and alternative to the European designs for the modern world order, in general, and the postwar order, in particular. In relation to this, the article also explains how Bhambra's work helps establish a historically informed critique of methodological nationalism, as opposed to the many misconceptions perpetuated by our current theoretical consensus of what ‘methodological nationalism’ entails.
Public debates in the language of international law have occurred across the 20th and 21st centuries and have produced a popular form of international law that matters for international practice. This book analyses the people who used international law and how they used it in debates over Australia's participation in the 2003 Iraq War, the Vietnam War and the First World War. It examines texts such as newspapers, parliamentary debates, public protests and other expressions of public opinion. It argues that these interventions produced a form of international law that shares a vocabulary and grammar with the expert forms of that language and distinct competences in order to be persuasive. This longer history also illustrates a move from the use of international legal language as part of collective justifications to the use of international law as an autonomous justification for state action.
Refugees in Europe, 1919-1959 offers a new history of Europe’s mid-20th century as seen through its recurrent refugee crises. By bringing together in one volume recent research on a range of different contexts of groups of refugees and refugee policy, it sheds light on the common assumptions that underpinned the history of refugees throughout the period under review.
The essays foreground the period between the end of the First World War, which inaugurated a series of new international structures to deal with displaced populations, and the late 1950s, when Europe's home-grown refugee problems had supposedly been ‘solved’ and attention shifted from the identification of an exclusively European refugee problem to a global one. Borrowing from E. H. Carr’s The Twenty Years’ Crisis, first published in 1939, the editors of the volume test the idea that the two post-war eras could be represented as a single crisis of a European-dominated international order of nation states in the face of successive refugee crises which were both the direct consequence of that system and a challenge to it.
Each of the chapters reflects on the utility and limitations of this notion of a ‘forty years’ crisis’ for understanding the development of specific national and international responses to refugees in the mid-20th century. Contributors to the volume also provide alternative readings of the history of an international refugee regime, in which the non-European and colonial world are assigned a central role in the narrative.
In the middle years of the century, many Britons hoped that the Commonwealth would be a kind of halfway house between empire and normal international relations. Although constituted of independent states, it was expected that dealings between Commonwealth members would have a special character - one which would be especially advantageous to Britain. And for quite a while - probable until the 1970s - and on a number of issues, successive British governments at least purported to believe that this was indeed its nature. However, as a working diplomatic arrangement it is hard to imagine that such a halfway situation could exist for long: the relations of states tend to have their own self-interested imperatives. In practice there is very little evidence to suggest that a special Commonwealth actually existed after the Second World War. In particular, a series of important events in the years immediately following 1945 undermined the credibility of the idea. Britain, however, did not draw the obvious conclusions from these developments, notwithstanding their salience and the fact that it was intimately involved in a number of them. Short of revolutionary contexts it is often hard to grasp the depth of contemporary change, not least when that change is adverse to one's own position. British responses were also testimony to the hold which the imperial idea had, and perhaps also to the depth of the psychological need to believe that their country was still a power of substantial consequence. More prosaically, some Britons doubtless hoped that the changing nature of the Commonwealth would somehow compensate for increasing indications of her relative international decline. And their hopes were, to some degree, to receive emotional and sentimental validation. But by the end of the reign of George VI in 1952 it should have been abundantly clear that as a more or less coherent international unit the Commonwealth had disintegrated. It had never been more than a brief and increasingly insubstantial phenomenon - a reflection of transition rather than of settled behaviour. The legacy of the British empire was a species of international organisation, not a uniquely well-integrated and cosy association of a familial kind.
This book provides a detailed account of the negotiation of the European Convention on Human Rights, the major achievement of the Council of Europe, and of its impact on the British Empire in its closing years. The book concentrates on the role of the United Kingdom in the negotiations, and the consequences which followed ratification. To provide the historical context for these negotiations it gives a detailed history of the protection of individual rights in the common law system, and of the rise of the movement for the international protection of human rights. This was largely a product of the Second World War, though having antecedents back in the 16th century and earlier.
In recent years, the United Nations–League of Nations analogy has been used in U.S. public discourse with increased frequency. A major implication of the analogy is that if the UN does not undergo substantive changes it will become as ineffective as its predecessor. This article asks if the example of the League of Nations can still offer important lessons for the future of the UN. It assesses the validity of the analogy by "mapping" the similarities and differences between the recent events involving Iraq and the events preceding World War II. It further compares the structures, principles, rules, norms, and decisionmaking procedures of the two organizations and argues that several apparently minor differences have allowed the UN to be more effective and survive much longer than its predecessor. The study concludes that the analogy is not only inaccurate but also potentially damaging to the credibility of the UN and, implicitly, to the organization's usefulness.
The United Nations Declaration of Human Rights in 1948 was formulated at precisely the same time that South Africa committed itself to the policy of apartheid. In the second half of the twentieth century, the problem of racism and apartheid became a leading test case for the assertion of human rights. During the Cold War, it constituted one of the few issues around which UN members could establish common cause. Yet it is largely forgotten that the Preamble to the United Nations Charter, which foregrounded the concept of human rights for the first time, was inspired and partly written by the South African premier Jan Smuts, a statesman of international stature and a symbol of world freedom who always presumed the superior claims of white Christian civilization. This paper explores what Smuts meant by the term 'human rights'. In considering Smuts's pre-war experience and thought, it highlights shifts in the language of race and rights at mid-century and points to the new international challenges posed by the assertion of popular democratic and universalist claims to human equality at the dawn of a new age of anti-colonial and anti-apartheid struggle.
While the United Nations offers new channels for international co-operative policies and for collaborative action, emphasis upon national sovereignty and the defense of national interest has tended to make of it an instrument of national policy to defend and extend the vital national interests of the member states. There exist an essential dualism in the Char ter and a pragmatic dualism in American policy regarding the United Nations. With the international shift from an allied- axis split to an East-West split, it has become apparent that the effectiveness of the United Nations in settling disputes is directly related to the remoteness of the dispute from the bi polar conflict. The United Nations clearly lacks the power to be effective within the Soviet sphere. The United States has, in the past, used the United Nations as an instrument of its national policy, but, with the admission to the United Na tions of Afro-Asian states who oppose the colonialist allies of the United States, the United States can no longer count on majorities favorable to its national policies. It can be said that the United Nations and its members live today with one foot in the world of power and the other foot in the hopes for a future world order. In the present global struggle, the great est contribution of the United Nations may well be its function as an educational forum before the world.—Ed.
In assessing population as an intergovernmental and world issue, historians have generally focused on the politics of sex, gender, and reproduction. To expect the history of population to be solely or even primarily about reproduction and individual health, however, is to miss entirely other lines of thought within which population, and in particular world population, came to be a problem for international organizations of the twentieth century. The problematization of population often raised questions about and plans for migration, colonial expansion of territory, and the properties of land and soil—in other words, geopolitics. This article shows how the population problem was precisely a geopolitical problem for the late League of Nations and the early United Nations. The article discusses two institutional occasions on which population as a spatial and security problem came onto the agenda of international organizations. The fi rst case involved a series of meetings held by the International Institute of Intellectual Co-operation, resulting in the document Peaceful Change (1937). The second case arose in the early years of UNESCO when Julian Huxley and others attempted to raise population as a major world issue.
This article discusses what constituted Japan's conception of the world order, by analyzing political discourse of international order in modern Japan. It has been generally assumed that the Japanese vision of international order in the pre-World War II years was dominated by a belief in the supremacy of the sovereign state. Contrary to the conventional supposition, this paper will argue that modern Japan actually abounded in discourses of transnationalism, and that most of them cannot be seen as the product of liberal ideas but rather the result of an unstable image of the sovereign state system. Surveying the historical development of political discourse of sovereignty and colonial administration in modern Japan, the way in which the ambivalence of Japanese transnationalism had affected the theoretical construction of the international order will be elucidated. Keeping in mind that previous studies on the genealogy of international relations have focused exclusively on the paradigmatic debate over the League of Nations, this article will also pay more attentions to the fact that rearrangement of empire had occupied the significant place in building the image of the world order. Based on the historical considerations mentioned above, the conclusion will offer generalized consideration of what constituteｄ Japan's conception of the world order.
In the second half of the nineteenth century, British liberal ideology contained an open-ended vision of international order. The vision usually included a notion of an incipient or immanent international society composed of civilized nations. The fundamental distinction between civilized and barbarian nations meant that while this perceived society was international, in no sense was it global. In this essay we outline some of the broader characteristics of the internationalist outlook that many liberals shared and specifically discuss the claims about international society that they articulated. Liberal internationalism was a broad church and many (but not all) of its fundamental assumptions about the nature and direction of international progress and the importance of civilization were shared by large swathes of the intellectual elite. These assumptions are analysed by exploring the conceptions of international society found in three of the most influential thinkers of the time, T. H. Green, Herbert Spencer and Henry Sidgwick. Finally, the essay turns to the limitations of this vision of international society, especially in the context of the role of empire.
The success of wartime governments in the twentieth century is determined not just by their effectiveness in waging war, but also by their ability to plan for peace. Mobilizing the population for total war and winning the benevolent neutrality or active support of major uncommitted powers require the projection of a vision of a better, peaceful world which will be the necessary consequence of victory. The reordering of international society is therefore proclaimed as a war aim of each belligerent. By December 1916, when Lloyd George displaced Asquith, the desirability of establishing a league of nations was already a matter of serious popular and diplomatic discussion. The new administration almost immediately had to state its attitude on questions of post-war international organization. In launching his peace initiative President Wilson called for the establishment after the war of a ‘league of nations to insure peace and justice’. The joint reply of the Entente powers endorsed the setting up of such a body. In a separate commentary, which was given wide publicity in America, the foreign secretary, A. J. Balfour, explained that, as a condition of durable peace, ‘behind international law, and behind all treaty arrangements for preventing or limiting hostilities, some form of international sanction should be devised which would give pause to the hardiest aggressor’.
The role of the PID in advising the FO in war and especially at the Paris Peace conference.