The first international institutions emerged in European politics in the nineteenth century, and since then they have become “an increasingly common phenomenon of international life.”Footnote 1 At the end of the twentieth century, Paul Diehl estimated that the number of international organizations (IOs), the formal manifestation of international institutions, “may now exceed twenty or thirty thousand.”Footnote 2 While extensive scholarship in International Relations has examined IOs and their role in maintaining global governance since 1945,Footnote 3 comparatively few in-depth studies have focused on how IOs developed as the institutionalized sites of early global governance in the nineteenth century and their impact on the evolution of international order.Footnote 4 In particular, limited attention has been given to the co-constitutive relationship between the spread of IOs as a European model to manage transnational affairs and the globalization of European international society in the nineteenth century as European norms and practices became global standards of international politics.
This article adds to the literature on IOs as the formal bodies of global governance by highlighting the power of geographical imaginaries in elevating and legitimating European models for interstate cooperation as a global standard. Scholarship on the use of international institutional models, largely based on the European experience in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, has highlighted the dangers of transplanting models from Europe to foreign geographies. However, there is limited discussion of why European institutional models are so compelling in the first place. I contend that by examining the geographical imaginaries that underpinned early efforts to spread European model IOs to the colonial periphery in the late nineteenth century, we can better understand why European model institutions were and continue to be attractive as a universal solution to the challenges of global governance. In particular, by focusing on an important episode in late-nineteenth-century international history, the 1884–85 Berlin Conference, I demonstrate how two interrelated geographical imaginaries shaped the conference and its outcomes. The first framed central Africa as a conceptually empty geography, while the second framed Europe itself as a geography capable of producing universal models. Both imaginaries were rooted in European colonial visions of the global and led diplomats to the attempted transplantation of a European model for transboundary river governance to the Congo River basin.
The structure of the argument is as follows. First, I consider European institutional models and existing scholarship that problematizes the uncritical application of European models to foreign geographies. However, these critical works largely leave unanswered the question of why European institutions are so compelling as generalizable models. To address this question, I turn to the concept of geographical imaginaries, and in particular, how two interrelated geographical imaginaries underpinned European assumptions about historical development and colonial spaces. The first imaginary frames the colonial periphery as conceptually empty of institutions that matter, and the second frames Europe as a site that generates universal models to be applied elsewhere. I then examine how both imaginaries informed diplomatic deliberations at the 1884–85 Berlin Conference as a prominent nineteenth-century attempt to export a European institutional model to the colonial periphery in the Congo River basin. Understanding how these imaginaries framed diplomatic decisions in early attempts to create international bodies for global governance has implications for international politics today as we consider one-size-fits-all technocratic solutions and benchmarks for global progress.
The Problem of European Institutional Models
In the study of how political institutions spread, several bodies of literature have analyzed the pitfalls of applying institutional models from one geographical context to another. While this scholarship recognizes the problematic practice of exporting model institutions to foreign contexts, there is limited examination of why institutional models, largely emanating from Europe, became such a compelling ideational assumption in international politics.
There are two main ways of conceptualizing the mechanism of how institutional models spread. First, scholarship on transplants highlights the grafting of existing institutions, particularly domestic economic and legal institutions, onto external contexts.Footnote 5 This literature notes the long historical legacy of transplantation, extending back to Roman times, and recognizes the imperial undertone of modern projects to transplant institutions, from the Napoleonic code to post–World War II efforts to spread Anglo-American law codes to Latin America, Africa, and Asia.Footnote 6 Of course, the spread of these institutions is not always successful. Transplants, with their related physiological metaphor of rejection, emphasize how transplanted institutions might fail to take root and might even harm the recipient society. Berkowitz, Pistor, and Richard highlight what they call the “transplant effect,” or the “mismatch between pre-existing and imported” institutions, resulting in an unreceptive environment and failed transplants.Footnote 7
Second, analysis of the diffusion of international institutions emphasizes the mimetic qualities of the active adoption of “institutional features already operating in other institutions.”Footnote 8 A variety of mechanisms drive diffusion, including coercion, manipulation, socialization, persuasion, and emulation.Footnote 9 Again, diffusion is not always successful. One explanation for nondiffusion is the existence of structural firewalls, such as a lack of resources or limited state capacity, that hinder ideas or institutional models from taking off in new locations.Footnote 10 Another might be incompatible problem structure or a lack of demonstrated effectiveness.Footnote 11 Research on nonregimes points to a variety of factors, including domestic politics, problem structure, and insufficient knowledge, to explain why international regimes have failed to emerge in some issue areas.Footnote 12 Together, these bodies of literature have highlighted the challenges that confront attempts to apply institutional models to new contexts.
However, scholars have challenged these ways of understanding how institutions spread, particularly the mechanistic metaphors that can obscure politics and agency.Footnote 13 The “transplant” and “diffusion” metaphors both assume a unidirectional spread of ideas from a source, usually Western in its origins, to a largely passive periphery. While both bodies of literature identify challenges to the spread of institutional models, they largely leave unquestioned the overall suitability between local problems and a universal solution. Hence, the emphasis remains on modifying the model to suit a particularized locality while leaving the generalizability of the model unchallenged.Footnote 14 Critiques of an unquestioned acceptance of Western models as a global standard have informed many areas of international politics. Work in comparative regionalism has challenged the universality of the European Union as a model or benchmark for regional integration elsewhere.Footnote 15 Critical work in development theory has also highlighted the dangers of “institutional monocropping,” what Peter Evans describes as the “imposition of blueprints based on idealized versions of Anglo-American institutions, the applicability of which is presumed to transcend national circumstances and cultures.”Footnote 16 In this linear and stadial view of development, “developing” economies need only to adopt previously successful model institutions from “advanced” economies. Collectively, these critiques confront the underlying, often implicit, assumption in a number of subfields that Western institutions can be transplanted anywhere.
For all their well-founded challenge of idealized institutional models, these critical voices often leave unexamined why Western models and blueprints are believed to be generalizable and universal in the first place. One notable exception here is the neo-institutionalist Stanford School and its work on “theorization” to explain the direction and acceleration of institutional diffusion across different societies.Footnote 17 Theorization challenges rational-choice understandings of diffusion by arguing that the main mechanism for the spread of world cultural norms is through the existence of “general and abstract models that allow for concrete recipes for action by transcending local, idiosyncratic circumstances.”Footnote 18 These models are essentially arguments for how legitimate, modern actors should be constituted and ought to behave. Here, IOs and international NGOs reinforce and legitimate these models, often through technical expertise. For example, Connie McNeely highlights the UN's role in legitimating “world-level educational ideals and prescriptions” that are then transmitted to nation-states.Footnote 19 When these abstract models fail to fit local contexts, “decoupling” might occur, where an actor adopts a norm or institution for symbolic purposes without complying in practice.Footnote 20 While the Stanford School offers a sophisticated account of how existing models constitute actors and drive diffusion, there is limited discussion of how certain world cultural models came about as opposed to others and the hierarchical global power structures that shaped that process. Instead, the Stanford School focuses much of its analysis on the post–World War II era, with world society and its abstract models already formed.Footnote 21
What are the foundational assumptions that make Western institutions an appropriate model to be diffused and transplanted to other geographies? To put it another way, even after recognizing that the application of European models elsewhere is problematic, why do we benchmark against a Western ideal type,Footnote 22 focusing on how to amend these models to make them more flexible and inclusive?Footnote 23 To answer this question, I turn to theoretical insights from critical geography and postcolonial scholarship and examine how unacknowledged geographical imaginaries constitute powerful ideational schemas that shape and limit courses of political action.
The Colonial Geographical Imaginary and the First International Organizations
To investigate the enduring nature of Western institutional models, let us turn to the notion of geographical imaginaries. As Derek Gregory explains, these are “taken-for-granted spatial orderings of the world.”Footnote 24 Gregory builds on David Harvey's development of the idea of “geographical imagination,” which “enable[s] the individual to recognize the role of space and place in his [or her] own biography.”Footnote 25 Hence, geographical imaginaries are a particular type of sense making that translates ideas about a particular geography into a schema about how it relates to other geographies. For example, imaginaries of the “West” not only combine locations as disparate as Europe, North America, and Australasia but also call to mind the “non-West” and the hierarchical relationship between the two.
Geographical imaginaries are plural and can overlap, “even in conflict.” For example, England is simultaneously imagined as part of Europe and also distinct from it. Scholars often investigate these imaginaries based on the subject or object of study—for example, the colonial geographical imaginary or the geographical imaginary of islands. Uma Kothari and Jorden Wilkinson chart how since the colonial era, tropical islands have been imagined as certain types of geographies—“sites of escape, adventure, power, control and philanthropy”—that even today create in our minds a particular notion of how to appropriately develop these islands as resources in the global economy.Footnote 26 Further, Gregory notes that geographical imaginaries are “more or less unconscious and unreflective constructions”Footnote 27—that is, bedrock assumptions that are often unacknowledged by the actors who hold them. We ground international policy discussion of aid for island ecotourism in these geographical imaginaries, even as we take them for granted. Similarly, we ground regional IOs on taken-for-granted myths about geographical spaces such as the “North Atlantic” or the “Arab World,” highlighting how these imaginaries have a constitutive function in global politics.
If geographical imaginaries are often unacknowledged by actors who hold them, what evidence might we examine to understand them? There are two ways to investigate these imaginaries: first, through their constitution in representations and practices; and second, through their political effects. To understand their constitution, Gregory and others draw on Edward Said's scholarship on Orientalism, in which both the “Orient” and the “Occident” are interrelated geographical imaginaries that constitute the Western self in opposition to the Oriental other.Footnote 28 These imaginaries are created through discursive representations—the production of knowledge about a given geography—that in turn have the power to “shape our attitudes to peoples and places.” Crucially, for Said, this construction of geography is not only a rational process but also an imaginative one through which “space acquires emotional and even rational sense by a kind of poetic process, whereby the vacant or anonymous reaches of distance are converted into meaning for us here.”Footnote 29 Hence, scholars must look to cultural artifacts such as literature and art and read between the lines of formal texts to capture the emotional and affective quality of imaginaries. In addition, while Said is most renowned for his analysis of text, his constructions are not just discourses but also material performances that represent, valorize, or articulate ideas about particular geographical orderings through doing.Footnote 30 For example, colonial geographical imaginaries are also constructed through actions such as making “discoveries,” mapping, or even engaging in diplomatic negotiations over sovereignty rights and borders.
To explain the political effects of geographical imaginaries, Gregory uses the term “worlding” to describe how imaginaries structure conditions of political possibility. In this way, geographical imaginaries are akin to Charles Taylor's social imaginaries, which have “a constitutive function, that of making possible the practices that they make sense of and thus enable.”Footnote 31 Alexander Barder, who applies Taylor's social imaginaries to global race relations, writes that an imaginary “constitutes the underlying intelligibility of social reality … [and] legitimizes practices that are typically seen as entirely natural and self-evident.”Footnote 32 As an example, geographers have explored the role of maps in constituting and reinforcing geographical imaginaries. Ó’Tuathail likens maps to panorama friezes, where the viewer or knower stands apart from and above the scene, suggesting an objective, scientific distance between the mapmaker and the unitary and stable world she renders.Footnote 33 The map is a snapshot in time that is then frozen and accepted as timeless truth despite evidence to the contrary—a mapped river remains in one location while actual rivers change their physical position, width, and depth seasonally according to spring melts and daily according to tides and weather. The political effect of such maps is that policymakers accept the world as created by the cartographic depiction and any deviation from this mapped representation becomes abnormal, costly, and in need of political intervention.
Following Said, much has been written about colonial geographical imaginaries and the construction of the Occidental self in opposition to the Oriental other. This way of framing geography divides the world into spatial binaries such as the global North and South or the West and non-West. Enfolded into these oppositions are two interlinked geographical imaginaries—one about “backwards” and “developing” geographies as the source of development problems, and another about “advanced” and “developed” geographies as the source of development solutions.Footnote 34 The first imaginary constitutes the periphery as a problematic geography deficient in advanced norms and institutions, and the second constitutes Europe or the West as the bearer of enlightened institutional models. For example, modernization theory, which remains implicit in the way we think about economic development, draws on both an imagined “premodern” society and an idealized modern one. Descriptors such as “backwards” versus “advanced” connect these two imaginaries and make a temporal argument that places all societies along a single, progressive continuum—some societies are simply further along than others. Connecting these imaginaries also implies that to journey from Europe outward is to travel in time. As Anne McClintock writes, “In colonial discourse, the movement forward in space is backward in time, from verbal consciousness and hybrid freedom … down through the historic stages of decreasing stature to the shambling, tongueless zone of the precolonial, from speech to silence, light to dark.”Footnote 35 Here, I follow geographers, anthropologists, and postcolonial scholars who have long highlighted this conflation of time and space as important to legitimating European colonialism and its enduring legacies in the way we understand modernization, our discourses about failed and fragile states, and our understanding of the desired trajectory of global political development.Footnote 36
This notion that the European present occupies a position ahead of the societies of the Americas and Africa along the same developmental continuum shaped nineteenth-century European understandings of the places they encountered. In particular, this underpinned the Standard of Civilization as an ideational and legal framework that dictated who can be afforded a place in civilized international society.Footnote 37 Civilizational standards also legitimated European expansion by reinforcing the argument that advanced Europeans were best placed to guide less advanced societies toward the light of civilization. As Hegel famously wrote of Africa, it is the “land of childhood … lying beyond the day of self-conscious history.”Footnote 38 By evoking the term “childhood,” Hegel places “Africa” along the same developmental track as modern man. The child, with guidance from capable guardians, can one day attain the light of adulthood. We can trace the continuing political effects of these imaginaries in the creation of the UN mandate system and Trusteeship Council, which enacted and institutionalized linear development models throughout the twentieth century.
This conception of time and space operates in two ways that reinforce the imaginaries of Europe as a geographic site of universal possibilities and the periphery as a conceptually empty geography. First, as geographer John Agnew highlights, mapping societies along a single continuum universalizes one, singular understanding of historical development—that of the European experience—as the global standard. Doing so sidesteps the contingent nature of European history itself. Second, as geographer Doreen Massey argues, this occludes or erases other possible development trajectories for the periphery: “Because space has been marshalled under the sign of time, these countries have no space—precisely—to tell different stories, to follow another path.”Footnote 39 As Massey stresses in her investigation into the geographical imaginaries that underpin globalization, placing societies along the same development narrative means we are constantly trying to solve the problem of how non-Western societies can “catch up” with the West by emulating Western models and enacting “modernization.”
Examining colonial geographical imaginaries is key to our understanding of international institutions because the first IOs were established in the nineteenth century. Alongside European imperialism, the nineteenth century was also an important formative period for the modern international order, amounting to what George Lawson and Barry Buzan argue was a “global transformation” that reconstituted the international from a polycentric to a core–periphery order.Footnote 40 In particular, a wealth of international relations scholarship has foregrounded the nineteenth century as central for processes of consolidating the modern territorial sovereign state,Footnote 41 extending international hierarchy,Footnote 42 and establishing early global governance.Footnote 43 In this context, the first intergovernmental and international organizations emerged, including the 1815 Rhine Commission, the 1856 Danube Commission, and the 1865 International Telecommunications Union.Footnote 44 The creation and successes of these first IOs went on to shape early international institutions, including the League of Nations and the United Nations. However, the literature on international institutions and the adoption of Western models leaves this formative era for global order relatively underexplored.
In what follows, I use a detailed historical investigation into this underexplored era to expose the constitution and legitimation of the ideational frameworks that enabled the spread of European model institutions to all corners of the globe. In particular, understanding European diplomats’ imaginaries of colonial spaces and their own place in the global is essential for explaining their efforts at the 1884–85 Berlin Conference to transplant a model IO from Europe to West Africa. Here, the Berlin Conference was an important moment in nineteenth-century global history, not only because it established the international legal basis for effective occupation. It was also a key moment in the extension of interstate norms and institutions developed in Europe—in this case, the freedom of trade and navigation along transboundary rivers, and international commissions to ensure them—to the colonial periphery. Situated in the global transformation of the nineteenth century that shaped our current order, Berlin is an early and illustrative example of the power of geographical imaginaries in explaining the Eurocentric assumptions behind the attraction of European institutional models.
The 1884–85 Berlin West Africa Conference
Scholarship on European imperialism often looks to the 1884–85 Berlin Conference as a key moment in the fierce inter-imperial scramble to conquer Africa.Footnote 45 In 1482, Portuguese explorer Diogo Cão claimed the Congo's mouth with stone pillars, and from then until the late nineteenth century, European interests in western Africa rested primarily in creating a network of coastal trading posts. However, in the late nineteenth century, excitement about valuable raw materials, combined with an intensifying civilizing mission to end the slave trade and bring Christianity to native populations, catapulted inland Africa into the geopolitical limelight.Footnote 46 Looking back, we see how the Berlin Conference marked the moment that competition escalated, animated by diplomats’ agreement on principles of effective occupation. However, this was not the intention of diplomats who met at Berlin. Their intention was very much the opposite. They wished to establish a cooperative framework to stave off violent competition among colonial powers and stem its potential spread back to the heart of Europe.Footnote 47
By the mid-1880s, competing claims on the Congo had already increased diplomatic tensions. France and Portugal both claimed the Congo for their empires, with Great Britain, Germany, and King Leopold II of Belgium's International Association of the Congo all maintaining interests in the region. In 1883, Britain and Portugal attempted to conclude a treaty that would affirm Portuguese territorial claims to the mouth of the Congo River. When France and Germany found out, they strongly objected to this agreement, which seemed to gift the Congo to the Portuguese to the exclusion of others.Footnote 48 To defuse the diplomatic situation, German Chancellor Otto von Bismarck called a conference in Berlin to discuss a peaceful resolution that would also maintain Europeans’ access to the Congo River basin's lucrative natural resources and bring the light of civilization to Africa.
Fourteen parties, including the United States and the Ottoman Empire, were present at the Berlin West Africa Conference, which took place between November 1884 and February 1885. Its key aim, as Bismarck lays out in his opening statement, was to “bring the natives of Africa within the pale of civilization,” and one of the main ways to do so was by “opening up the interior of that continent to commerce.”Footnote 49 Here Bismarck referred specifically to Articles 108 to 116 of the Final Act of the 1815 Congress of Vienna, Articles 15, 16, and 19 of the 1856 Treaty of Paris, and the 1865 Act on the Navigation of the Danube as precedents for the Congo.Footnote 50 These referred not only to accepted legal principles to uphold freedom of navigation and commerce on international rivers, but also the creation of international commissions on the Rhine and Danube to secure these freedoms. On paper, the Berlin Conference seemed to have achieved just this: Article 1 of its General Act declared freedom of trade on the Congo; Article 10 established the Congo's neutrality; Article 13 guaranteed freedom of navigation on the Congo; and Article 17 established an International Commission for the Navigation of the Congo. In reality, none of these principles and institutions left the paper on which they were written, and the transplant of European norms and institutions to the Congo never took root.
Many historians have judged the Berlin Conference harshly. Sybil Crowe argues that rather than establishing free trade and a neutral space in the Congo basin, the conference allowed a monopolistic economic system to emerge under Belgium's exclusive control of the region.Footnote 51 The International Commission for the Congo, established by Articles 17 to 20 of the General Act of the Berlin Conference, never materialized. Instead, Leopold II's International Association of the Congo concluded agreements with all major powers at Berlin and gained ownership over the Congo basin. Adam Hochschild shows that instead of commerce, Christianity, and civilization, the Berlin Conference allowed Leopold II of Belgian to declare the Congo his personal colony, leading to millions of deaths.Footnote 52 In Thomas Pakenham's scathing judgment, “there were thirty-eight clauses in the General Act, all as hollow as the pillars of the great saloon.”Footnote 53 My aim here is not to rehearse these arguments about the conference's failures but to examine the power of geographical imaginaries in informing the decisions that led to these failures. As I noted earlier, imaginaries can be analyzed in two ways: through their constitution and their political effects. The remainder of this article first identifies the empirical puzzle that framed the diplomatic outcomes of Berlin, and then works backward to show how the constitution of two interlinked geographical imaginaries contributed to these outcomes.
The Political Effect: A Puzzling Attempt to Transplant European Institutions to Africa
To foster inter-imperial cooperation and secure the freedom of commerce and navigation in the Congo River basin, the General Acts of the Berlin Conference intended to apply the norms and institutions developed in Europe throughout the nineteenth century to the Congo—which did not succeed. But why did the diplomats believe such a plan would work? One possible explanation might be simple ignorance—they did not see a difference between circumstances along the Congo River and circumstances in Europe. However, I suggest that this was not the case, and the motivations behind this effort to transplant European institutions to Africa were more complex and puzzling.
First, the diplomats at Berlin showed some awareness of the different geopolitical context they faced in the Congo. On receiving Bismarck's invitation to Berlin, British foreign secretary Lord Granville wrote to Baron Plessen, the German ambassador in London, that “the Regulations of the Congress of Vienna in 1815 for the navigation of rivers referred exclusively to such as ran through the well-defined territories of civilized States,” but the Congo ran through “imperfectly known tracts occupied by savage tribes.” Hence, the problem “to be solved is the application of the general principles of the Treaty of Vienna to the very different circumstances that present themselves in Africa.”Footnote 54 British diplomats made the same observations to the French: one of the difficulties facing the conference would be “applying the rules of the Congress of Vienna, established in view of civilized riverain States, to rivers whose riverain populations are in a state of barbarism.”Footnote 55 These observations are astute, since the Congo indeed lacked what Europeans would consider “civilized States,” and this difference in political context would hinder the application of institutional solutions developed between European states to this entirely different space.
However, this awareness did not translate into a serious questioning of the suitability of European institutional models for the Congo. In his response to Granville, German ambassador to Paris Count Münster stated that while the conference would adopt the general principles of the Vienna Congress, they would have to be adapted to the local context: “The task of the Conference will only be to give expression to this in principle, while to later negotiations will have to be left the formation of an international body, whose duty it will be to get rid of obstacles in the way of navigation and to provide the necessary police ordinances.”Footnote 56 While Münster acknowledges having to adjust for local context, the tasks assigned to the future international body already presuppose the suitability of the European model for river commissions. In their first statement at Berlin, the British delegation softened their concerns, arguing that while African rivers were unlike European rivers and without what European diplomats considered “well-defined States,” the difficulties are “probably not insuperable.”Footnote 57 The final agreement at Berlin confirms this contradiction: while the diplomats were aware of important contextual differences between Europe and Africa, this knowledge did not disrupt their faith in the potential for Europe's river management models to succeed in other geographies.
One might argue that the European powers at Berlin did not intend for an international commission on the Congo River to succeed. The moral sentiments and cooperative overtures might have been only window dressing for naked political interests and a desire to grab as much of Africa as possible. However, not only did diplomats’ written and spoken sentiments contradict such an interpretation, their actions did not support it either. Much of the time at the conference was spent debating how the European powers might guarantee freedom of navigation and commerce along the Niger and Congo Rivers. If the Europeans only wished to ensure territorial advantages for their own empires, why waste diplomatic resources debating the creation of an institution along the Congo? They had colonized lands elsewhere without needing to use IOs as a fig leaf. Nor does the outcome of the conference support the theory of an all-out land grab. Rather than the largest European empires dividing the vast Congo River basin between them, the territories were granted to a non-governmental organization—the International Association of the Congo—headed by an individual from one of the smallest and least powerful European states.Footnote 58 This is not to contend that geopolitical interests did not matter; security and the balance of power did weigh heavily on the diplomats’ minds and informed the conference's failures. But these interests are not sufficient to explain why the diplomats were so insistent on transplanting a European institutional model to Africa despite the differences in circumstances.
How do we make sense of this dissonance between the diplomats’ awareness of vast differences between the European and West African contexts and the political outcome built on continued confidence in the Vienna prototype for international river governance? I suggest this puzzling political effect can be understood by examining the geographical assumptions that informed discussions at Berlin. In particular, two interlinked geographical imaginaries shaped the diplomats’ thinking about the Congo as an international issue. First, they saw the Congo River as a conceptually empty space ready to be remade by European institutions. In addition, they saw Europe as a universal space that produced model institutions suitable for export abroad.
Together, these unacknowledged but closely held geographical imaginaries prevented the diplomats at Berlin from taking their insights about the supposed lack of “well-defined states” to their logical conclusion: that European experiences with institutions along the Rhine and Congo were not analogous to the Congo River. Indeed, this dissimilarity had two aspects. Not only was the Congo different from European rivers because of the absence of European-style states along its banks, but the inter-European politics of the 1880s also differed from the inter-European politics of the 1810s and the 1850s. The first drew on a geographical imaginary of the Congo basin as a conceptually empty space ready to receive European civilization and institutions. The second rested on a geographical imaginary of Europe as a site of universal possibilities rather than a contingent geography subject to the context-specific politics of its own past.
Constituting Conceptual Emptiness Along the Congo River
The first geographical imaginary that shaped the diplomatic discussions at the Berlin Conference was the construction of the Congo River basin as a conceptually empty space ready to be filled by Europeans. To be clear, my argument is not that the Europeans believed the Congo basin had no population centers or organized societies; it is that the diplomats understood this geography to be empty of political authorities that mattered in international diplomacy and the central work at Berlin. This conceptual emptiness shaped the conference from the beginning: not only did Bismarck not invite any representatives from indigenous populations, the diplomats did not even entertain the idea that such representation was necessary. At the conference, technical experts brought this taken-for-granted geographical imaginary about central Africa into the open and legitimated the envisioned emptiness with their epistemic authority as prominent specialists in their field. In particular, three groups of experts helped articulate and reinforce conceptual emptiness along the Congo: explorers, cartographers, and legal experts. While I highlight one expert in each category, their claim to authoritative knowledge of the Congo basin derived from their embeddedness within larger networks of experts and fields of expertise. The political effect of this imaginary was clear—as Jeffrey Herbst writes, it allowed Europeans at Berlin “to establish an effective collusion over African territory whereby they could ignore Africa's demography, ethnography, and topography,” with lingering consequences for African politics into the twenty-first century.Footnote 59
For European publics, explorers and their travelogues were a key source of knowledge of inland Africa, and the celebrated explorer Henry Morton Stanley was instrumental in constructing the Congo basin as a conceptually empty space. Stanley was perhaps best known for finding David Livingstone on the shores of Lake Tanganyika and uttering the famous line, “Dr. Livingstone, I presume?” Financed by the New York Herald and the Daily Telegraph, Stanley traveled across the width of Africa, from Zanzibar westward, from 1874 to 1877. In the latter part of his journey, he followed the entire length of the Congo River to Boma on the western coast of Africa.Footnote 60 The French press celebrated Stanley's return to Europe by comparing his accomplishments to Hannibal's and Napoleon's.Footnote 61 He returned to the Congo in the 1880s, this time bankrolled by Leopold II of Belgium, to further explore the river and establish outposts. Based on his exploits, Stanley published two best-selling travelogues, which were translated into several languages: Through the Dark Continent, in two volumes (1878), and The Congo and the Founding of Its Free State, also in two volumes (1885).
The American delegation to the Berlin Conference brought Stanley as a technical expert. Because he was the only expert at the conference with extensive travel experience in the Congo, diplomats relied on his expertise from the very beginning, when the first item of business was to define the Congo basin.Footnote 62 An engaging speaker, Stanley's colorful descriptions of the Congo River and its surroundings captivated diplomats from across Europe. After the 22 November session, in which Stanley spoke in support of freedom of trade along the Congo, the French representative reported to Paris: “In today's session … Stanley gave a long and brilliant exposé on the physical geography of the region he has explored in the center of Africa … This speech produced a great impression.”Footnote 63 The British were more understated but affirmed British support for Stanley's proposals on how to define the Congo basin, which were “met with no serious opposition.”Footnote 64
In his previous writings and talks, Stanley had depicted the Congo River basin as a geography characterized by moral and historical emptiness—an emptiness that could and should be filled with civilized European institutions and commerce. Stanley's 1885 book portrays the river as possessing “extreme historical barrenness” and devoid of the classical associations attached to other African rivers such as the Nile and Niger:
No grand event is connected with its name; nothing has ever been performed in connection with the Congo to make its history popularly interesting to those who are not engaged in commerce or some special study of it. No military, naval, or scientific enterprise of any magnitude is associated with its name.Footnote 65
When Stanley does discuss the Congo's history, he focuses on its colonial history, that is, since the Portuguese first landed at the river's mouth in 1482. He writes of the “dismal local history that arouses a gruesome feeling when we recall the slave-trading days”—a gruesome past that Europeans hoped to expunge with the civilizing influence of their antislavery campaigns. In his travelogue Through the Dark Continent, Stanley says to a companion:
Now, look at this, the latest chart which Europeans have drawn of this region. It is a blank, perfectly white … I assure you, Frank, this enormous void is about to be filled up. Blank as it is, it has a singular fascination for me. Never has white paper possessed such a charm for me as this has, and I have already mentally peopled it, filled it with most wonderful pictures of towns, villages, rivers, countries and tribes.Footnote 66
This cartographic emptiness colored diplomats’ understanding of the Congo basin as a conceptually blank geographic space. In the nineteenth century, cartographers depicted the Congo River basin through the use of white space, reinforcing this conceptual emptiness. Earlier, European cartographers had filled the “unknown” spaces on African maps with animals, imaginary geographic features, and descriptive texts, but starting in the mid-eighteenth century, they began using blank spaces to represent unexplored regions.Footnote 67
In the late nineteenth century, one of the foremost cartographers of the African interior was Regnault de Lannoy de Bissy, who created a sixty-three-sheet map of Africa for France's Service géographique de l'armée. The Congo section of this map was used at the Berlin Conference.Footnote 68 Lannoy de Bissy was an officer in the French Corps of Engineers. Since he was a child, he had often visited Africa and developed an interest in the continent. In 1872, the French appointed him commander of an engineering unit in Algeria, and on hearing of the great David Livingstone's death in 1874, he was inspired to map the entire African continent. As he later wrote of this project, “the general map which summarized the results of his [Livingstone's] journeys over so many years was so reduced in scale that it gave no idea of the importance of the lands he had visited.”Footnote 69 He used existing explorers’ accounts and worked with a network of contributors to systematically map the routes taken by explorers so others could appreciate the enormity of their endeavors. Hence, the mapping project looked inward toward Europe in that it recorded the great accomplishments of European explorers.
The white space in the center of Lannoy de Bissy's map of Africa reflected this inward-looking character by showing the gaps in European cartographic expertise. To capture “objective” geographic knowledge, he depended exclusively on the expertise of European cartographers, including the British Ernst George Ravenstein, the Belgian Lieutenant Van de Velde, and the Italian Federico Bonola, stationed in Cairo, to the exclusion of local knowledge.Footnote 70 For the Congo section, he used Stanley's accounts and left much of the region blank. However, despite his intentions, Lannoy de Bissy helped translate the emptiness described in Stanley's writings to the cartographic plane, making an implicit argument about a blank geography ready to be filled. After viewing Lannoy de Bissy's Congo section, French imperialist Auguste Terrier excitedly remarked that he “looked forward to filling in the ‘blanks’ of this map.”Footnote 71 A wealth of scholarship in critical geography demonstrates that maps are not merely innocent reflections of physical reality but arguments about knowledge, power, and legitimate authority that have independent political effects.Footnote 72 At Berlin, Lannoy de Bissy's cartographic blankness helped reinforce the diplomats’ geographic assumptions about central Africa as a “de-socialized space”Footnote 73 devoid of legitimate institutions that mattered.
In addition to the moral and historical emptiness Stanley describes in his writings and the white spaces in cartographic depictions, another group of experts at the Berlin Conference also helped constitute the Congo as conceptually empty. International jurists attended the conference as legal advisors who helped national delegations navigate the intricacies of international law. Typical among this group was Sir Travers Twiss, a prominent international jurist who attended the conference as a technical expert attached to the British delegation. In particular, official records show that British diplomats consulted Twiss often on how to formalize legal principles governing effective occupation, and he even chaired subcommittees on the issue at the conference.Footnote 74 According to Andrew Fitzmaurice, Twiss's views on international law reflected jurists from Germany, France, Italy, and the United StatesFootnote 75—here, the weight of a transnational network of legal experts reinforced his authoritative epistemic position.
Jurists such as Twiss understood indigenous populations’ legal competency in seemingly contradictory ways. First, they saw Africans as less legally competent than Europeans. In his Law of Nations, a book referenced in British diplomatic correspondence,Footnote 76 Twiss argued that the Law of Nations was between Christian states and Europeans and excluded the societies of Africa. In formulating standardized rules for how European empires might effectively occupy new territories in Africa, the diplomats at Berlin made an implicit argument that African control over their own territories was not legally “effective.” At the same time, to facilitate inter-imperial competition, jurists framed Africans as capable of signing away their sovereignty to European powers. In the early 1880s, Twiss helped Stanley obtain the “free will” of inhabitants along the Congo River by concluding as many treaties as possible with local chiefs. Twiss and Stanley established more than 400 treaties in four years; some chiefs signed away their sovereign rights for some reams of cloth, uniforms, and bottles of gin.Footnote 77 As Anthony Anghie explains, “The ability of natives to enter into such treaties was paradoxical, given that they were characterized as entirely lacking in legal status … International lawyers granted the natives such status, quasi-sovereignty, for the purpose of enabling them to transfer rights, property, and sovereignty.”Footnote 78 The practical effect of both excluding African societies from the Law of Nations and granting them quasi-sovereignty to sign away their rights was the same. Both led to dispossession and the sidelining of indigenous institutions.Footnote 79
The legal arguments reinforced European's understanding of the Congo basin as a geography characterized by absence and waiting to be filled by European civilization and institutions. However, this was far from reality. For centuries before European colonizers arrived to claim the Congo, despite the lack of formal writing, the societies that populated Central Africa communicated through a complex drummed language known as the langage tambourine. Often amplified by rivers, a system of drummers could carry these tonal messages up to 600 kilometers in a day.Footnote 80 From the mid-fourteenth century onward, powerful political authorities who exercised control over defined territories along the Congo River grew into kingdoms such as the Kongo, the Lunda, the Luba, and the Kuba.
Since the late fifteenth century, when Europeans arrived on the scene, local political institutions and cultures had developed alongside and in entanglement with inter-imperial European rivalries as they competed to explore, colonize, and spread Christianity to the indigenous populations. For example, after the arrival of the Portuguese, the son of a local ruler changed his name from Nzinga Myemba to Afonso I, became Christian, and learned enough Portuguese to pen a series of letters directly to King João III. Even as he complained to João III of the destabilizing effect of the intensifying slave trade, Afonso I relied on the wealth gained from trade with Europeans to sustain his political power over the Kongo Kingdom for the next forty years.Footnote 81
Civil wars erupted in the Kongo Kingdom in the eighteenth century stemming from disagreements over not only who would rule but also what constitutional limitations should be placed on the monarch's power. As John Thornton's scholarship shows, this disagreement emerged from two differing founding myths of the Kongo Kingdom. One framed the king as the conqueror and hence an absolute ruler over the people. However, another myth described the king as a blacksmith and hence a forger of alliances and the bringer of reconciliation. In this second myth, the king's authority depended on popular acclaim.Footnote 82 These civil wars played into the hands of European slave traders, and large populations of Kongolese were transported across the Atlantic. Thornton contends that the Kongolese brought their political philosophy on the constitutional limitation of monarchy with them to North America and the Caribbean, where its lingering influence can be seen in the Haitian Revolution.
These fleeting examples cannot possibly do justice to the diverse and sophisticated histories, political institutions, and agencies that animated the Congo River basin. By 1885, the Congo had also become an international site, with explorers, merchants, colonial administrators, and missionaries all competing for glory, wealth, political influence, and souls. However, despite the evidence that the region was alive with political activity and institutions, Stanley's and others’ description of the Congo as conceptually empty constituted diplomats’ geographical and political assumptions.
Constituting Europe as a Universal Geography
In addition to the geographical imaginary of the Congo basin as conceptually empty, another imaginary dominated European thinking on the enterprise at Berlin: they took for granted that Europe represents an abstract universal geography whose past historical developments serve as a model for future developments everywhere. This imaginary is more subtle than the first, but just as important for explaining the events at Berlin. Before an institutional model can be transplanted, policymakers must first accept the model as a successful candidate with important advantages for the recipients. In this section, I contend that the diplomats’ acceptance of the Vienna model of river governance as globally applicable relied on a smoothed-over narrative of European institutional successes that failed to reflect Europeans’ actual historical experiences with the Rhine and the Danube. While all stories about the past necessarily smooth over jagged historical realities, the way that European experiences on the Rhine and Danube were framed as a single progressive success story helped constitute this geographical imaginary. Hence, the political outcome of Berlin—the attempt to transplant European transboundary river institutions to the Congo—emerged from both an imaginary of a conceptually empty Congo basin and the interlinked imaginary of Europe as a universal geography not bound by the particularities of its historical context.
Throughout the Berlin Conference, diplomats assumed that principles and institutions developed at the 1815 Congress of Vienna and consolidated by the 1856 Treaty of Paris should be brought to Africa. Bismarck's invitation to conference participants included three agenda items. The second item was “the application to the Congo and Niger the principles adopted by the Congress of Vienna to ensure freedom of navigation on international rivers, principles applied later to the Danube.”Footnote 83 Participants amplified this aim in dispatches home and public statements before the conference.Footnote 84 To examine the specifics of applying the Congress of Vienna to West Africa, the conference convened a committee comprising diplomats from Germany, Belgium, France, Great Britain, and Portugal, along with Sir Travers Twiss. The committee produced a report that charts the establishment and consolidation of a system for the collective management of transboundary European rivers—from the imperfect application of these principles to the Rhine, which “incompletely realized the emancipation of this great stream,” to a more convincing application along the Danube, through a European Commission that “carried out its mission to the satisfaction of all the Powers interested and earned general confidence.” This narrative of success is important, the report notes, because it explains Articles 108 to 116 of the Final Act of the Congress of Vienna and “fix[es] their sense in a manner which is supported by authoritative principles and consecrated by experience.” The committee expresses the hope that diplomats will apply these precedents “in a way which will be fruitful in happy results.”Footnote 85
This report tells a clear story of normative and institutional progress throughout the nineteenth century, and states that while the concrete examples derive from the European experience, these precedents can and should be applied to transboundary rivers everywhere.Footnote 86 In earlier writings, Twiss had told a similar success story about the development of principles to govern transboundary rivers, one of the “most beneficial arrangements” to emerge from the 1815 Congress of Vienna. Twiss's narrative evokes a story of progress, from competition through inefficient barriers to trade, to a more civilized politics of cooperation that enabled “nature to cement the peaceful relations of mankind, by facilitating their mutual intercourse.”Footnote 87 Twiss then suggests that Europe's historical experiences with transboundary rivers should serve as a model for what he termed the “Congo Question.” These stories of normative and institutional consolidation and success reflect the assumption that Europe is a universal laboratory for international laws and institutions, and that its triumphs can be exported elsewhere with similar fruitful results.
In particular, the diplomats looked to the European Commission of the Lower Danube as the institutional model for the proposed Congo Commission. Before the Berlin Conference, the British Foreign Office wrote to the British representative on the Danube Commission, Mr. Sanderson, asking him to clarify “the manner in which, in practice, effect is given to the decision of the European Commission of the Danube,” so the same model could be applied to the Congo.Footnote 88 Sanderson's response describes how the Danube Commission functions as an IO—how it administers financial affairs and how it establishes and enforces rules and regulations on the Danube delta. In particular, Sanderson outlines how the commission navigates its delicate role of enforcing regulations and adjudicating between rival states.Footnote 89 The final agreement at Berlin reflected this exchange, with the proposed Congo Commission modeled on the Danube Commission and mimicking its functions to remove hindrances to free navigation, collect standardized fees, draft navigation regulations, and police the river. The proposed Congo Commission would also be neutral in times of war, “in conformity with the system adopted for the European Commission of the Lower Danube.”Footnote 90 Hence, Articles 17–20 of the General Acts of the Berlin Conference perpetuated a narrative of institutional continuity, and this narrative was buttressed by an underlying assumption that Europe and its historical development held generalizable lessons for geographies everywhere.
The effect of this imaginary of Europe as a site of universal possibilities can be seen in how the diplomats at Berlin smoothed over historical and political realities that did not conform to their ideas. The first example of such a fissure in the geographical imaginary was the distinction between the Niger and Congo Rivers—a distinction the British were eager to uphold. As Lord Aberdare of the National African Company wrote to Granville, since the British had developed the lower Niger and “the 100 factories now on the river are exclusively British … it would appear unreasonable to subject it to the same authorities as the undeveloped and unowned waters of the upper Congo.”Footnote 91 Hence, the British concerns about the absence of well-defined “civilized” states along the Congo stemmed from their insistence that the Niger was different because it was exclusively under British control and therefore did not need an international commission. This difference also underscores the dissimilarity between the Rhine and Danube Commissions—supposedly “civilized” European states controlled the banks of the Rhine, while discussions surrounding the Danube delta in the 1850s portrayed it as an anarchic geography not under the control of a legitimate power. This difference upends the narrative of seamless institutional progress toward a universal model.
How precisely did the British justify to themselves that the Congo basin might be governable through an international commission despite its lack of European-style states? The British Foreign Office's Africa expert, Percy Anderson, mused in an October 1884 memorandum that it would work if the king of the Belgians formed “a Riverain State in the shape of a native Confederation under European control, and then [applied] the Danuban Regulations, modified with regard to local conditions, to the river.” Given the favorable hydrological conditions at the Congo's mouth and “the docility of the natives, who seem ready to sign anything,” he believed the Danube model could be applicable.Footnote 92 In other words, Anderson envisions filling the conceptual emptiness of the Congo with a recognizable European form of governance—the “confederation”—under the watchful eye of a more “civilized’ European sovereign. Such a confederation was far-fetched, especially as Leopold's treaties with local leaders required the full surrender of their sovereignty.Footnote 93 However, the British willingness to overlook initial reservations about applying the Vienna model to the Congo reveals the power of this geographical imaginary, which elevated the European experience—with a few adjustments for local conditions—as universally applicable.
The second fissure in the geographical imaginary was that, while diplomats at the conference agreed that the Vienna principles should be applied to the Congo River, a few pushed back against using the Danube Commission as a model. Russian representative Count Kapnist, supported by Austrian representative Count Széchényi, argued that there was a “tendency to enlarge and generalize the range of the Acts relative to the Danube … and to turn these Acts and these resolutions into doctrines of international law.”Footnote 94 This protest reflects the historically situated deliberations behind the creation of the Danube Commission at the 1856 Paris Peace Conference, where the European Commission was created over the objections of the Russians and the Austrians. In fact, Count Kapnist insisted that the Congress of Vienna's Final Acts “have not been applied to the Danube, in conformity with the spirit and the letter” of the agreement.Footnote 95 He was right. The diplomats at the 1855 Vienna Conference and the 1856 Paris Conference knew that they were establishing an international institution on the Danube different from the riparian commissions outlined in the Final Acts of the Congress of Vienna. In fact, British representatives had insisted in 1855 that since the Danube differed from the Rhine, “the Treaty of Vienna is no longer the rule.”Footnote 96 Instead of a commission with just riparian states, like the Rhine Commission, the 1856 European Commission of the Danube contained British and French members who had no territorial possessions along the river. In the specific historical context of British and French military victory in the Crimean War, they were able to insist on this new and more “international” organization to govern the Danube's mouth.Footnote 97
However, in response to Count Kapnist's arguments at Berlin, very little was done to alter the proposal for a Congo Commission based on the Danube model. The word established was removed from the preamble, and the phrase “the general principles which regulate the free navigation” was changed to “the principles destined to regulate.Footnote 98 These small changes allowed diplomats to sidestep Russian and Austrian objections and smooth over their own messy, contingent histories in favor of a narrative of progressive institutional consolidation grounded in the Congress of Vienna's Final Acts. This process of smoothing over the historical record was central to the deliberations at Berlin because it at once reflected and reproduced a geographical imaginary of Europe as a site of universally applicable legal, normative, and institutional possibilities.
Conclusion
At the 1884–85 Berlin West Africa Conference, two geographical imaginaries framed how European diplomats understood their task of bringing civilization and order to the Congo River basin. First, the European policymakers understood the Congo as a conceptually empty geography devoid of historical, legal, and cartographic significance. This construction of the Congo River basin allowed the Europeans to envision the application of “advanced” European institutional models for river governance to a “backwards” emptiness. Second, they understood Europe as a universal geography at the forefront of a singular global development continuum—a geographical imaginary where the European past mapped onto the periphery's present. If Europe's progressive trajectory was universally applicable, then it was the moral duty of Europe to export their experience and expertise, including their experience with establishing IOs, to the colonial periphery. Both these geographical imaginaries conflate space and time, and in doing so, obscure the historical contexts that shaped both Europe and the Congo as specific geopolitical spaces. Conceptualizing the Congo basin as empty robs it of its history and political agency; and envisioning Europe as the locus of universal models obscures the contingent histories behind how the European institutions were created. In addition, this geographical understanding totalizes the European experience, giving Europe's successes and failures a progressive inevitability—a problematic assumption that hinders us from imagining a Europe otherwise.
In highlighting the power of geographical imaginaries in framing Europeans’ understanding of their political project at the Berlin Conference, I have highlighted the potential insights interdisciplinary research can bring to our understanding of international institutions, IOs as the formal manifestations of these institutions, and their role in global governance. While the literature on the transplantation and diffusion of institutions highlights the dangers of taking institutional models from Europe to other contexts, limited scholarship has studied the ideational framings behind what make European institutions so attractive as generalizable models. Why are policymakers so ready to turn to the European example? By focusing on a prominent nineteenth-century attempt to apply a European institutional model to the colonial periphery, I argue that our automatic turn to European model solutions rests on ideational assumptions about Europe as a particular type of geography and about its place in the global—assumptions that have enabled the perpetuation of international institutional models deriving from the European experience.
The attractiveness of European models did not end with the end of formal colonialism, and the geographical imaginaries of an abstract European space and a conceptually empty or contingently local periphery continue to inform the way we understand the expansion of international institutions. We see these imaginaries reflected in the expansion of the European Union—both its spread eastward and how it is upheld as a model for other global regions that seek integration and collective power. These imaginaries continue to haunt global security alliances, from the US–UK special relationship to the AUKUS security pact, that turn to the anglosphere as the source of global stability. We see these imaginaries operating in our quest for global development, from programs that promote civil societies and democratic governance to those that promise economic growth and environmental sustainability—templates for how to succeed politically and economically, with some adjustments for local context. The dominance of these imaginaries has also inspired ressentiment and resistance from both right-wing populists and left-wing activists, who agree on little except that the global imaginaries which legitimate a generalizable model for what counts as political progress should no longer hold. These contestations are fundamentally over rival imaginaries of the global that trace back to early global governance in the nineteenth century and the key international moments that shaped it, including the 1884–85 Berlin Conference. Examining these important constitutive moments can help us understand the tensions and fissures that threaten the current international order.
Acknowledgments
I thank George Lawson, Laleh Khalili, Peter Wilson, and Mark Laffey for their encouragement and invaluable comments on numerous versions of this paper. In addition, I thank the participants of the Durham University SGIA away days 2018, QMUL TheoryLab 2021, and Cambridge IR-History Seminar 2021 for their insightful questions and comments. Finally, I am grateful to the editors of IO and the three anonymous peer reviewers, who provided extensive and supportive comments that greatly improved the quality of this article.
