In August 1921 the Victorian maverick and “doyen of Anglo-American intellectuals” James Bryce visited the United States for a series of lectures on the subject of international relations.Footnote 1 This was Bryce's final transatlantic venture, for the former ambassador to the United States died shortly afterwards. Flicking through the pages of Bryce's lectures, the reader is confronted with an array of themes driving the liberal thinking of the times: anxiety over the destabilizing effects of “propaganda” and the lure of communist and pan-nationalist agendas; defense of the moral kernel of state power; faith in the education of “public opinion” and the value of civic citizenship in bringing about positive patriotism in an era driven by nationalist antagonisms; uncertainty over the prospects of modern democracy and of imperial rule.
Bryce's pessimism was attuned to the liberal zeitgeist of the period. In the words of one scholar of international relations, “he reluctantly looked to the future, while longing for a world gone by.”Footnote 2 In the world to come Anglo-America was destined to be in the vanguard of a flickering international order.Footnote 3 Bryce's melancholia exemplifies the pervasiveness of the discourse of decline in explaining Britain's entanglements with the world throughout the twentieth century.Footnote 4
Recently, during the EU referendum campaign, both sides of the argument concurred on the essential decline of Britain's global power.Footnote 5 Those in the “Leave” camp argued that the exit from the European Union would “make Britain great again,” to use Donald Trump's words.Footnote 6 Free from the shackles of the EU, it was said, Britain would be able to recover its greatness by reconnecting with its white imperial past and forging closer ties with countries like Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the United States. Those joining forces with the “Remain” camp insisted that Brexit would further diminish the country's waning international influence and inaugurate a prolonged period of domestic and international instability. When the outcome of the referendum became known, a historian who championed Britain's membership in the EU, and is himself a historian of “decline,”Footnote 7 predicted a surge in the public debate on Britain's purported decline and urged his fellow “historians of ‘decline’ [to] sharpen [their] pencils.”Footnote 8
Historians have been sharpening their pencils for a long while. Morefield and Hall's interventions confirm the scholarly fashion of framing British and (recently) American involvement in world affairs in terms of decline and fall. Taken together they deal with responses to perceptions of Anglo-American decline from the beginning of the twentieth century to the dawn of the twenty-first century. Moreover, they exemplify latest trends in the field of international intellectual history, broadly defined.Footnote 9 In recent years there has been a considerable outpouring of studies on the “international thought” of political thinkers and theorists of international relations. Two distinctive patterns are beginning to crystalize. The first is a revisionist preoccupation with the intellectual foundations of the discipline of international relations, the master concepts operating within it and the lives of its practitioners.Footnote 10 The second pattern concerns the ways in which political thinkers have conceptualized interstate relations and imperial and international affairs in the modern age.Footnote 11 Moving towards the twentieth century, scholars are calling for a closer reexamination of the entwined trajectories of nationalism, imperialism and internationalism.Footnote 12
Empires without Imperialism charts the trajectory of Anglo-American liberal imperialism by uncovering the elective affinities between the early twentieth-century British moment of imperial anxiety and the resurgence of liberal imperialist discourse in the post-9/11 American context. It is essentially a contribution to the surging literature on the contours of liberalism and empire in the anglophone world.Footnote 13Dilemmas of Decline presents a wide-ranging prehistory of the emergence of the discipline of international relations during the three decades that transformed Britain's place in the world, from the aftermath of the Second World War to Britain's accession to the European Community. The differences in focus stem from the adoption of diverging conceptual vocabularies. Morefield favors an unconventional combination of linguistic contextualism with insights from the study of political ideologies and the field of postcolonial literary criticism.Footnote 14 Hall employs a revamped version of the international-relations concept of “intellectual traditions” attuned to Mark Bevir's exhortation that “historians should explain beliefs by reference to traditions and dilemmas.”Footnote 15
THE EMPIRE'S PASSIVE VOICE
The so-called “Global War on Terror” precipitated by the 9/11 attacks and the ensuing invasion of Iraq changed dramatically the landscape of American and British politics. Debates on empire and imperialism proliferated. As Jennifer Pitts has noted, many scholars “unabashedly and notoriously called for America to acknowledge and embrace its imperial vocation and learn from . . . the British Empire, in order to establish a duly liberal or humanitarian empire.”Footnote 16 On the other side of the spectrum, a number of public intellectuals rose up against America's imperial mission and called out those unelected officials in the Bush administration who, in Edward Said's words, waged an offensive war “against a devastated Third World dictatorship on thoroughly ideological grounds having to do with world dominance, security control, and scarce resources.”Footnote 17 Crucially, Said—the author of Orientalism—lambasted regional experts who “betrayed their calling as scholars” by actively supporting the war effort.Footnote 18 The mission of the intellectual, Said exclaimed, was to enact “a kind of countermemory, putting forth its own counterdiscourse that will not allow conscience to look away or fall asleep.”Footnote 19
Morefield's project shares much of the polemic drive and intellectual bravado of Said's critique. Her counterdiscourse systematizes the links between early and late twentieth-century liberal imperialism, elaborating on what Karuna Mantena has referred to as the “striking similarity between the shifting rhetoric of justification around the Iraq war and the career of nineteenth-century imperial ideology” saturated with “moral idealism, culturalist explanation and retroactive alibis for imperial rule.”Footnote 20Empires without Imperialism uncovers the logic of the liberal alibis for imperial rule by offering a contrapuntal account of British and American moments of imperial decline.Footnote 21 What begins as a historical excavation of the “deflective” imperial strategies employed by a group of British liberal thinkers and policy makers around the period of the First World War becomes a polemical intervention on George Bush's America aiming to prompt fresh reflection on the links between political thinking, expertise and imperial power in moments of actual or perceived “decline.”Footnote 22
The book reads as a drama in three acts. In the first act the audience is introduced to the mechanics of imperial history through a study of the liberal and imperial reformism associated with the British Round Table Group and Niall Ferguson's unapologetic defense of imperialism. The second act delves into the ways in which the purported greatness of classical Athens was read back into the British and American imperial context. Over the writings of Thucydides, the British liberal internationalist and Round Table member Alfred Zimmern encounters the American classicist Donald Kagan. Finally, the third act introduces the “philosopher-kings,” the South African imperial statesman Jan Smuts and the former Canadian prime minister and Oxford don Michael Ignatieff; in other words, the empire's “handyman” meets the “dramatic poet” of the West's greatness.Footnote 23
The turn of the twentieth century inaugurated a period of uncertainty over the prospects of the British overseas domains. The Boer Wars in South Africa became the laboratory for fresh thinking on the relation between liberalism and the empire and fomented anti-imperial modes of thought in Britain and across the colonial world. What seemed to many as a crisis of imperial legitimacy gave rise to a group of Oxford-based liberal imperialist reformers seeking to redress the challenges of British imperial rule by taking on the twentieth-century prior discussions on imperial unity and federation.Footnote 24 Contrary to the late Victorian moment, Morefield argues, this new generation of intellectuals and “policy makers” understood the world of the empire's white dominions in pluralistic terms, as a “Commonwealth” of diverse “nations” seeking political representation within a hierarchical multiethnic imperial state.Footnote 25 The “Commonwealth” project synthesized the embrace of a “basic conception of universal liberal progress” with a racially tainted vision of the British Empire as a harbinger of Anglo-Saxon unity and a bastion of liberalism and democracy.
The liberal defense of the Anglo-Saxon imperial state has had an eventful afterlife. It survives in the writings of historians living through a current moment of “deep-rooted anxiety” and “fear of imperial decline.”Footnote 26 A case in point is Niall Ferguson. His “strategically elliptic” and “counterfactual” histories, Morefield notes, are on a mission to restore faith in a racially charged “Anglobalization.”Footnote 27 His “discursive tactics—his meta narrative, his misdirection, his disavowal, his racist non-racism—look eerily familiar to those used by anxious Edwardians fretting about the possibility of decline.”Footnote 28 However, Ferguson's neoliberal conception of the state underpinned by a view of the world as a complex financial matrix moving in a frantic pace sets him apart from the statism of his early twentieth-century interlocutors.
One of the most representative early twentieth-century essay collections on the question of liberalism and the empire in Britain featured on its frontispiece a passage from Thucydides: “The cause of the whole catastrophe was Empire pursued for covetousness and ambition.”Footnote 29 The present was filtered through the lens of ancient imperial history. Projects of imperial reform were underpinned by readings of classical Athens (and Rome) seeking to address the challenges of imperial rule in the fractured political landscape of Edwardian Britain.Footnote 30 Alfred Zimmern's reading of Athens had “spectral,” “nostalgic” and “redemptive” qualities. His turn to Greece functioned as a “displacement” mechanism, deflecting the illiberal attributes of the British Empire. Much like the Athenians, the British were seen as “accidental” imperialists, entrusted with a higher duty to educate and foster the development of their colonial subjects.Footnote 31
Zimmern's Athenian ventures find a contemporary parallel in Donald Kagan's classical scholarship. During the time that elapsed between Zimmern's and Kagan's moments, Thucydides found his place in the pantheon of the international-relations “realists.”Footnote 32 According to Morefield, Kagan, like Zimmern, employs Thucydides to “exonerate Athens/Britain/America from responsibility retroactively for creating the conditions for conflict in the first place while simultaneously declaring them to be thoughtful, self-critical societies, intuitively committed to reflection and critique.”Footnote 33 Kagan “displaces his own liberal imperial polity onto Athens, and he does so through the lens of Zimmern's own historical moment.”Footnote 34
The exploration of the political vocabulary of late twentieth-century liberal imperialism necessitates kaleidoscopic readings. Michael Ignatieff symbolizes the transformation of the liberal interventionist humanitarian ethos of the 1990s. During the War on Terror, Ignatieff became increasingly unwilling to empathize with the erstwhile “occupants of failed states.” The “global landscape of Ignatieff's post-September 11, 2001 writings,” Morefield asserts, “looks more like a battlefield, with liberal states and peoples hunkered down in their trenches bent on protecting their way of life from those whose societies are not under the endless trial of justification and for whom they are utterly not responsible.”Footnote 35 Ingatieff's “crass” Berlinian insights offer a misguided reading of the contemporary imperial moment as a tragedy driven by a fixation with “immediacy, dirty hands, and collective guilt.”Footnote 36
Ignatieff's naturalization of the Western democratic liberal political order and the human rights principle prompts Morefield to draw parallels with the ideas of the South African statesman Jan Smuts. Smuts is widely acknowledged to have been among the intellectual forebears of the League of Nations mandates system and the UN's trusteeship scheme. The liberal legacy of these imperial structures reverberated at the height of liberal interventionism in the 1990s. According to Morefield's reading, Smuts set forth a vision for the British Empire as a holistic political community capable of soothing the tensions between imperialism and internationalism. Smuts's evolutionism did not amount to a linear and progressive vision of world order as that prescribed by the members of the Round Table and Zimmern. Rather, it set forth a hierarchical view of the world inhibited by empires seen as complex organic composites of people sharing varying degrees of autonomy.
Smuts, Zimmern, Curtis, Ferguson, Kagan and Ignatieff are the leading all-male cast in Morefield's drama set around the continuities of Anglo-American muscular liberal imperialism. The author can be seen as a committed polemicist as well as a historian quarreling with her sources. Her British cast is all too often accused of wanting to “have their own imperial cake and eat it too,” of refusing to come to terms with the contradictions in their own thinking, of being “both producers of meaning and prisoners of their own conceptual worlds.”Footnote 37 Seen from this angle, Morefield's historical excavation and interpretation entail the impossible task of liberating her cast from the presuppositions of their own thinking. This explains why the author takes it upon herself to illuminate more radical avenues of thinking on liberalism and the empire available in Edwardian Britain revolving around anti-imperial conceptions of radical pluralism. One such direction is taken by G. D. H. Cole's political theory, which “reimagined the relationship between the state and other political associations in a manner meant to radically decenter the imperializing, war-seeking hegemon.” Another path was offered by Ghandi's radical pluralistic vision in Hind Swaraj which prompted critical and reflexive thinking about one's sense of community, national identity and consciousness.Footnote 38
Finally, one of the most prescient themes in Morefield's intervention is the assertion that the post-First World War reconfiguration of internationalism, nationalism and imperialism/colonialism was simply a means of masking imperial domination. Her critique is rightly directed against teleological readings of the emergence of international organizations in the interwar period as “one obvious signpost along the developmental road to Kantian cosmopolitanism.”Footnote 39 However, one should not underestimate the productive forces unleashed by what one historian has recently referred to as the “dynamic of internationalization” which on many occasions run contrary to the colonial interests of the great European empires.Footnote 40
BRITAIN AND THE WORLD
In the early 1920s, as Britain and Europe seemed to have started recovering from the “international nervous break down” caused by the First World War, projects to study international life proliferated.Footnote 41 A concerted involvement with international affairs was believed to guarantee a safer future. That was the message James Bryce carried to the United States. Despite the failure of the “Commonwealth” project, members of the Round Table movement were influential in setting up foreign-policy think tanks, facilitating Anglo-American cooperation and advancing Anglo-Saxon ideas of federal union leading to the establishment of the so-called “special relationship” with the United States in the aftermath of the Second World War.Footnote 42
Britain played a leading role in interwar international cooperation, as manifested by its contribution to the setting up of the League of Nations bureaucracy in Geneva.Footnote 43 Conversely, the League of Nations movement transformed domestic British political life.Footnote 44 British intellectuals were at the forefront of international projects of intellectual cooperation. Thomas Hardy's assertion that “the exchange of international thought is the only possible salvation of the world” featured prominently in one of the first English texts that made use of the term “international thought”—a pamphlet composed by the writer John Galsworthy.Footnote 45 Galsworthy defined international thought as the “exchange of thought between craftsmen—between the statesmen of different countries; the lawyers of different countries, the scientists, the financiers, the writers of different countries.” From the office of the president of the newly inaugurated PEN, Galsworthy did much to promote a “new idealism” as a means to overcome the “narrow patriotism” that prevailed in the wartime period.Footnote 46
The new patriotism promoted by the interwar international institutions presupposed the compatibility between nationalist particularities and internationalist attachments. In the words of Henry Adam Gibbons, “international co-operation has been best exemplified in the world so far by practical achievements of countries with a vigorous national life. Nationalists ought to be the best internationalists. The hope of internationalism lies in nationalism.”Footnote 47 Although internationalism was the leitmotiv of the 1920s, it would be a mistake to assume, as some scholars do, that there was a clear break from the erstwhile “sizable shadow of nationalism.”Footnote 48
The term “international thought” denoted the new internationalist ethos of the 1920s. However, as David Armitage has noted, its employment referred to “a usable past, rather than a critical history.”Footnote 49 Only recently have histories of international thought and/or international relations assumed a critical tone. At the heart of a critical historical turn in the discipline of international relations in Britain lies the reevaluation of the debate over appeasement and the rejection of an understanding of international relations as a sequence of grand strategic debates.Footnote 50 This anti-Whiggish strategy informs Hall's historical reconstruction of the British traditions of theorizing international affairs and his reaction against insular accounts of the making of international relations in Britain.
The appeasement “debate” marked the first instance of the systematic deployment of the notions of “realism” and “idealism” in political discourse and cast a sizable shadow on discussions of political realism in the aftermath of the Second World War. Despite the notable attempts by émigrés to “import” conceptions from sociology and discussions from the American scientific context, “realism” was still widely conceived as amoral power-driven thinking about international politics.Footnote 51 Hall detects a change in the currency that realist theories enjoyed in Britain in the 1950s, subject to increasing intellectual contact with the United States and the gradual retreat of the generation with a direct stake in the politics of appeasement. Thus, in the 1950s, “appeasement was reconfigured as an expression of ‘idealism’, rather than—as Carr has had it—a ‘reaction of realism against utopianism’.”Footnote 52
In the same period, thinking about international politics was dominated by varieties of liberal internationalism comprising the so-called “liberal” tradition.Footnote 53 The resilience of liberal internationalist modes of thinking about international affairs is attributed to the lasting influence of British idealism, the strength of a generation of liberals who had been active since the interwar period and by then led formal and informal networks on international affairs. Crucially, Hall argues, the Cold War realities enveloped British liberal internationalism—broadly understood—into a “wider narrative about the West.”Footnote 54 The common denominator was a suspicion of the sovereign state's exclusive claim to political authority, a core belief in institutions expressing ideas of international order, and a pessimistic prediction about the progression of humanity traceable in a rejection of the politics of nationalism and self-determination. Hall locates the “liberal” outlook on international affairs in four clusters: Christian ecumenical ideas, federalism,Footnote 55 functionalism,Footnote 56 and varieties of what the author calls “liberal realism”—a pro-federalist view of the international which was nonetheless critical of economic planning on an international scale.Footnote 57
The third tradition was that of the “Whiggish” return to the eighteenth-century balance-of-power politics. The national myth of English constitutional liberty sustained a “‘constitutional’ conception of international order . . . distinct from the more legalistic version of internationalism and the more revolutionary order envisaged by radicals as well as realist, power-oriented theories.”Footnote 58 The most productive aspect of this tradition was the effort to build a Whig school of diplomacy and international history based on the “inductive empiricism” prevalent in the works of Harold Nicolson, Herbert Butterfield, Martin Wight and Adam Watson. What is more, Wight equated the West with Whiggish assumptions about freedom, constitutionalism and the primacy of England.
Moving towards the mid-1950s, Hall argues that the rising tide of realism and radicalism overshadowed the liberal tradition. The Suez crisis, the Soviet invasion of Hungary, and the emergence of the antinuclear movement set radicalism on a new plane. Hall's employment of the term “radicalism” stems from A. J. P. Taylor's account of radical dissent in foreign policy.Footnote 59 The key elements of the so-called “radical tradition” were a deeply held suspicion of notions of power and interest, a hostility to “special interests,” the advocacy of limited government and an urge to direct democracy.
Hall is critical of what he takes to be a prescient trait of radical thinking—an anti-Americanism fueled by willful ignorance of American society and “resentment at the usurpation of Britain's world role.”Footnote 60 This is evident in his reading of the New Left movement which spearheaded British radicalism. The student radicals rejected the Cold War rhetoric as “the product of the hegemonic ideology utilized to justify the perpetuation of capitalism” and “aligned themselves with the Third World against the First.”Footnote 61 Moreover, they vehemently opposed the Anglo-American “special relationship” and openly endorsed violence as a means to bring about revolutionary change. Hall singles out the then young British historian Gareth Steadman Jones as one of the prominent anti-American violent enemies of Western liberal democracy.
The violent radicalism of the 1960s is pitted against a more positive and conciliatory turn to the scientific study of conflict and peace resolution with the contribution of scholars from the Commonwealth, namely Australia, and the creative employment of positivist and behaviorist methods. Such institutional ventures, Hall argues, “transformed the study of international relations in Britain, from a field concerned with the ideas and institutions to [one] far broader in its concerns,” and paved the way for its formal institutionalization in the mid-1970s.Footnote 62
Despite Hall's insistence that thinking on international affairs in the postwar period was more porous than is usually assumed, his reconstructions rearrange the canon of an already constituted discipline.Footnote 63 As Nicolas Guilhot has argued elsewhere, historians of international thought face the danger of remaining within the “hermeneutic horizon of the officially constituted field, even though they reshuffle or revolutionize its internal organization. And in doing so, [they may actually be] reinforce[ing] it by restoring its true identity.”Footnote 64
Moreover, the author does not follow the consequences of his assertion that thinking on world politics was not confined to academic institutions. Thus the book fails to unearth alternative spaces facilitating debate on international affairs. One such location is the body of work comprising what is now known as regional and area studies in Britain, which has remained a relatively unexplored field. Finally, the confinement of discussions on international and indeed world politics in broad “traditions” obfuscates a closer emphasis on the temporary realignments of public intellectuals moving between already constituted “traditions” of thinking on international affairs.
Such structural weaknesses become evident when turning to the imperial dimension of debates on world politics in postwar Britain. It is striking that the forces unleashed in the public debate on decolonization, and the argumentative strategies of liberal thinkers, are not given serious consideration. The imperial question concerns only one chapter dealing with the responses of representatives of the aforementioned traditions to the challenges brought by the end of formal imperial rule. Liberal internationalists lamented the end of empire and turned their attention to the “Commonwealth.” In contrast, “British realists . . . were happy to dispense with the commonwealth altogether.”Footnote 65 “Radicals” pointed to the continuities between formal and informal imperialism and some were keen on aligning with the emerging “Third World.” Finally, those associated with the “Whig school” were divided over the effects of the “Balkanization” of the world, in Wight's terms.Footnote 66
More surprisingly, the author does not address the racial component of British debates on world affairs. In fact, the word “race” does not even receive a mention in the book's index, despite the surge in histories documenting the centrality of discussions about race in the intellectual foundations of the discipline of international relations. The fraught memories of racial politics reverberate today in institutions of higher learning across Britain, America, Africa and Australia. Even in the 1950s, a number of British contributors to debates on world and imperial politics were more worried about the prospects of race conflict in the British domains than about the spread of communism across the world and issued calls for the scientific study of the question of race.Footnote 67
Any survey of debates on world affairs raises the question of the political influence of the individuals examined. Dilemmas of Decline adopts a more general viewpoint and argues that in contrast to the American and French setting, the moment of the institutionalization of international relations in Britain in the mid-1970s marked the retreat of British intellectuals with an interest in world politics from power. This development is attributed to the positive value ascribed to academic “neutrality” and to “peculiarly British factors” with regard to the autonomy and anti-intellectualism of the civil bureaucracy.Footnote 68 Thus, Hall asserts, policy making today differs from the earlier twentieth-century revolving doors between academic institutions and foreign policy that Morefield documents in her readings of Zimmern, Smuts and the Round Table movement. However, it remains to be seen whether such an assertion is applicable when one examines the influence exercised by public intellectuals operating in the margins of the world of academia and policy making.
British accession to the European Community succeeded the waning of Britain's formal empire. This reorientation seems to be changing at the current historical juncture with the dawn of a new period of postimperial uncertainty about Britain's place in the world. Politicians and intellectuals reiterate nostalgic accounts of the British imperial past, and racial prejudices linked with immigration proliferate in public discourse. Boris Johnson's crass imperialist remarks about Britain's former colonies are a case in point.Footnote 69 Confronted with these new realities, historians of international thought with an interest in the Anglo world once again face the critical task to recover the links between political power and expert knowledge and theorize the connections between national, international and imperial dispositions.
