Abstract
Reviewed by: Matthew Stibbe, Sheffield Hallam University, UK
The founding of the League of Nations in 1919–1920 is often presented as a milestone in the development of international relations, creating a system admittedly still based on the state-centred notion of territorial sovereignty, but now qualified and reinforced by the doctrine of ‘collective security’ rather than the bankrupt pre-twentieth-century concept of the ‘balance of power’. Woodrow Wilson, who won the Nobel Peace Prize in 1919, was the politician most clearly involved in setting up this project, although it was also indirectly influenced by the challenge of the Russian revolution and the Bolshevik government’s decision in late 1917 to publish details of the Entente’s secret treaties, including the pact that had brought Italy into the war against hidden ‘promises of captured territory’ (60).
For all of its flaws, including its failure to challenge the class, racial and gender inequalities still embedded within the international system, the League of Nations did help to cement a new, more liberal and less exclusively European world order after 1919. Daniel Gorman, in his new book, seeks to add a fresh dimension to our understanding of this by examining the role played by non-state parties, including private individuals, social movements and NGOs, in the emergence of what he calls a ‘robust international civil society’ from the 1910s onwards (155). Voluntary networks of organized cross-border activists and experts did things which states and state-led institutions left undone or half-done: they created new frameworks for solving problems of economic governance, scientific exploration, food security, world disarmament, public health and women’s reproductive rights. They also promoted a new ethos of knowledge-sharing at the supra- and transnational levels. Much of this activity, Gorman concedes, was male-oriented, European and/or trans-Atlantic. Nonetheless, women and colonial subjects often found greater scope for political activism in the international as opposed to domestic political arenas, while Latin American and Asian voices were heard more frequently than in the past. More noticeably, the financial clout and outward-facing interests of private philanthropic organizations like the Carnegie and Rockefeller Foundations ensured that American isolationism was never absolute, even after 1920.
Gorman’s book is packed with useful information about different types of non-state-based international cooperation, and the various ‘contact zones’ and institutionalized and imaginary ‘spaces’ in which it took place. It is also good on why all this activity began to materialize then. Improvements in transport, communications technology and other aspects of late nineteenth-century globalization are presented as a ‘necessary condition’ but not a ‘sufficient’ explanation (207). Political commitment also played a part, for instance the desire to mitigate the consequences, and later to tackle the root causes, of pandemics, wars or mass population displacement. Yet alongside this there were the functionalist motivations of those technocrats interested in improving processes rather than human lives. And, as Gorman admits, some actors saw international cooperation as a useful means of boosting national prestige or meeting nationalist objectives – such as treaty revision in the wake of the Paris peace settlement, the formation of regional power blocs or the building of ‘socialism in one country’ in Stalin’s Russia after 1929.
Less convincingly, the intense political enmity between rival internationalisms is played down in Gorman’s account, or reduced to E. H. Carr’s famous binary distinction between ‘utopians’ and ‘realists’. For instance, abstract and applied knowledge is presented as ‘universal’ and its transmission across state boundaries as an ideologically-neutral pursuit (157). Yet for twentieth-century Marxist-Leninists, at least until the Gorbachev era, the question was: knowledge for whom? For the class of exploiters and imperialists, or for the actual producers of wealth, the workers and peasants? Even when it borrowed ‘scientific’ ideas from the West, such as Taylorism, the Soviet Union saw any notion of ‘convergence’ as an existential threat requiring the imposition of strict controls on international contacts and travel for its citizens and ever-more repressive forms of domestic surveillance. This admittedly came after the West had already excluded ‘Bolsheviks’, as well as Germans and Austrians, from most international institutions and networks in the immediate aftermath of World War I.
Gorman is also reluctant to place much emphasis on fascist and conservative-authoritarian experiments with international cooperation in the post-1919 period, describing them as ‘thin and largely unsuccessful’ (7). However, the political impulse to build such networks clearly existed, and their failure is only obvious in retrospect. Gorman’s view of the rise of internationalism is linear, with the 1930s appearing as a brief hiatus, and the military defeat of fascism in 1941–1945 as a point when the world picked up again where it had left off in the face of challenges like the Manchurian incident, Hitler’s rise to power and the Italian invasion of Ethiopia. Only fleetingly does he consider the terrible failure of democratic countries to help Jewish refugees at Evian in 1938, and what this might say about the lack of political will towards, not just the ‘circumscribed nature’ of, international cooperation across the whole of the early twentieth century (206). Indeed, seen from the perspective of Evian, what was required in 1945 was a fresh start, not an attempt to resurrect older, failed ventures.
For students and academics looking for a clear and concise introduction to the historical origins of today’s ‘networked international society’ (206), this is the book to read. It is especially good at highlighting the role of private initiative and progressive social causes. But it has less to offer on what it might be like – then and now – to live in a world where the security and very existence of persecuted minorities is dependent on the often precarious, inflexible and partial nature of international cooperation. Instead, to quote the late American writer Philip Roth in his novel The Plot Against America (2004), what is put forward here is ‘“History”, harmless history, where everything unexpected… is chronicled on the page as inevitable. The terror of the unforeseen is [hidden], turning a disaster into an epic’.