Of global war and global futures. Rereading the 1940s with the help of Rosenboim and Barkawi

Not very far from where I live in St. John’s there is a place called Placentia Bay. It is in this bay on August 1941 that the British Prime Minister Winston Churchill and the US President Franklin Delano Roosevelt met. Although the United States was still formally neutral (and the Soviet Union was not represented, although along with other Allied powers it later agreed to the principles), it was on the rendezvousing warships that the two leaders and their aides came up with a set of Allied war aims that would come to be known as the Atlantic Charter. While historians still debate the Charter’s role in the development of Allied war aims, its symbolic role in post-war reconstruction underscore the importance of the ‘trans-war’ period of the 1930s and 1940s for the development of the modern world.

The concept of a trans-war period is specifically referred to in one of the two books under review in this special section (Rosenboim 2017, 13), but what both books have in common is that they deal with important aspects of the trans-war. Simultaneously they are also joint winners of the 2019 Guicciardini book prize for the best book in historical international relations. Named after the Italian historian (and friend of Machiavelli) Francesco Guicciardini, it was the combination of historical analysis and theorizing about statecraft in Guicciardini’s work that fit well with the ethos of the Prize. The Guicciardini Prize is awarded annually by the Historical International Relations (HIST) Section of the International Studies Association. The HIST Section, I should add, has recently partnered with the Cambridge Review of International Affairs, and this special section on the two Guicciardini Prize winners is part of this partnership. The Prize, like the Section, is relatively new, with the first Prize being awarded in 2014. Since then eight books have been awarded the Prize, with the current winners having the distinction of being the first joint winners of the Prize. Here I must also declare an interest. I served as the Chair of the Prize Committee for the 2018 and 2019 prizes, and so was involved in the competition that honoured Barkawi and Rosenboim.

The Historical International Relations section itself provides a venue for those scholars who study International Relations (IR) through history and historical methods. This brings together both those who explore IR through an historical lens, and those actively engaged in the history of international thought (including the disciplinary history of IR). The joint winners this year represent both groups. Tarak Barkawi’s Soldiers of Empire is an example of how historical methods can be used to explore a past case relevant to our understandings of IR today, while Or Rosenboim’s Emergence of Globalism is an important work of international thought. Yet, despite their differences, they both challenge our views of the nature of the 1940s and the development of international relations in the subsequent post-war decades. Rosenboim’s re-reading of globalism, using the tools of intellectual history, and Barkawi’s re-reading of militaries, from a post-colonial perspective, do not only challenge how we see the trans-war years, they also force us to rethink the decades of the Cold War and post-Cold War. I see five broad themes that unite these two books: the importance of the 1940s and the trans-war period; the role of the second world war in changing global politics; a questioning of the role of states and nations; influences on the Cold War; and finally an engagement with race and colonialism.

The first issue that both books have in common is a stress on the 1940s and the trans-war period. While the Second World War is certainly not ignored in IR, we do tend to use a periodization that prioritizes the idea of inter-war and post-war epochs. This has the effect of presenting the War as a pivot point, while the years of its causes and its effects are redistributed to two different IR stories either side of it. The advantage of thinking in terms of a trans-war period ranging from the 1930s to the start of the Cold War is that it emphasizes the processes of rapid change in a ‘pivot period’ (rather than ‘pivot point’), where change becomes the fundamental reality. With the passing of old certainties both thought and institutions are forced to rapidly adapt within a climate where the yardsticks for measuring the fit with reality are in flux. Rosenboim explores this through the approaches to world order taken by public intellectuals, while Barkawi turns to the, often ad hoc, responses by the colonial British Indian Army to the changing nature of war.

Second, both books help us see how the Second World War shook up global politics. In the case of Barkawi this is how the War restructured armies. The pre-war Indian Army, built around the idea of martial races and strict racial categories, was shattered by the early defeats in South East Asia. While the foundations of the new Indian army that would eventually defeat the Japanese in Burma was built on the foundations of the old, this was a new colonial army drawn from a wider base of Indian society. The result was an army with greater Indian nationalist sympathies, and fewer political loyalties to the Raj. Yet, as Barkawi shows, through drill and other forms of cohesion a disparate army managed to hold together until the end of the war.

For Rosenboim it is approaches to global order that emerge as a result of the dislocations of war and post-war reconstruction. It is common for later IR scholars to look back on these experiments in global order as utopian dreaming unmoored from realities, and indeed this is the approach that we have inherited from the disciplinary myth of a realist-idealist debate. It is one of Rosenboim’s goals to question and transcend this myth (Liane Hartnett and Richard Devetak stress this in their reviews below). Indeed, what this realist-idealist myth misses is that many of these world order projects were in response to rapidly changing wartime realities that had ripped up the fragile world order that had been re-established after the First World War. In pivot periods there is no status quo to fall back on, and reality is rapid change, rather than tried and tested aphorisms of statecraft (another point made by Hartnett). Politics plays out on top of a reality that has undergone liquefaction, and thus calls for both new orders and reactionary returns to a previous or imagined stability tend to proliferate. This tension between order and instability is seen as a central aspect of the period for Rosenboim (3).

Third, both contribute to the questioning of the role of states and nations as defining features of IR. For Rosenboim, it is the new significance of the global, with its implied unity of the whole combined with the diversity of the units, that comes into sharp focus (4, 272). Globalism in Britain and the United States develops as an alternative to Empire, and concepts such as democracy and pluralism come into sharper focus (6-10). Her concentration on public intellectuals, with varying views of the role of the state in global order, also challenges many conventional histories of the origins of the post-war order that root their analyses in more national and official channels (277-278). Having said this, globalism in the trans-war period was a broad church, and while it often challenged Empire, it did not necessarily challenge the role of the state in global order, as the discussions of Aron and Carr in chapter 2 show.

Barkawi’s study questions the link made between armies and patriotisms associated with states and nations (Anthony King and Rob Johnson expand on this in their reviews). This is an association that was also part of the classical realist approach in IR that emerged at the end of the trans-war period. Morgenthau, for example, attacked what he saw as the utopian vision of the Second World War as a fight between ideologies by arguing that what US service people fought for was the United States (Morgenthau 1952, 971). By contrast Barkawi uses the Indian Army to show that, while armies frequently appear national, they are often imperial and global in character (Barkawi 2017, 280). While for Barkawi army loyalties were not linked to ideologies (here he agrees with Morgenthau), they were also not necessarily linked to the idea of the nation or state either. Here Barkawi focuses on other ways in which armies create loyalty and esprit de corps, including drilling (a point explored in more depth in the reviews by Katharine Millar and Andrew Zimmerman below). Overlaying this is also a process of ‘the globalization of Western forms of military discipline’ (279). While the British Indian Army through its process of drill and organization is an example of this globalization, we also see this process in ostensibly national armies, such as the westernized Japanese Army that went so far in the late nineteenth century as to adopt a Western high fat and protein diet for its soldiers as part of this process (Collingham 2011, ch. 3).

Fourth, while neither book is about the Cold War per se, both help us shed a light on developments after 1950. Barkawi sees continuity between imperial armies, like the British Indian Army, and the armies of the Cold War. He argues that an imperial military order continued ‘beneath the veil of state sovereignty, through the roles played by great-power training of civil war combatants, support programmes, and the proliferation of military advisors’ (Barkawi, 280-281). Barkawi ends the book by drawing a brief parallel between the structures of the US-led forces that fought in Indochina during the Vietnam War and the British Indian Army. In this sense ‘Vietnamification’ can be seen as sharing much with the changes to the Indian Army after 1941. Thus the multinational imperial system exemplified by the British Indian Army did not vanish with the Raj after independence, but continued as the military template in the proxy wars that proliferated in the post-war decades.

For Rosenboim the transition from trans-war to Cold War is double edged. At one level it is a break. The blue skies global thinking of mainly British and American public intellectuals gives way to the realities of a divided world dominated by the spectre of nuclear war. This seems to point to a possible narrowing of international thought in the English-speaking world from the late 1940s as the Cold War matures (see Ashworth, 2019). Many of those writing on geopolitics, federation, and pluralist constitutional orders disappear from the front rows of international thought. Those that do survive in the new world, like Aron, take a decidedly unambitious approach to global order. The big exception here is David Mitrany, who further refined his idea of a functional global order from the 1950s well into the 1970s. Yet, Mitrany is the exception that proves the rule. His work addressed the logic of the Cold War in a different way than realists and neo-realists, by exploring how cooperation was possible under heightened ideological tensions.

At another level, though, there is also continuity. While many of the visions for world order were eclipsed by East-West tensions, Rosenboim sees continuity between these discussions in the 1940s and the history of the idea of globalization (282). While the Cold War brought national and alliance security to the forefront, it also saw some of the globalist ideas realised within the partially global western world. Isaiah Bowman, one of the subjects of chapter 3, was one of many American globalists who were instrumental in the formation of a post-war American-led order based around the powerful US economy and its alliances. Bowman’s dream of a world united by free trade and the free mobility of labour was not realised directly after the war, but it did partially emerge within the US system. In this sense the Cold War was also a child of trans-war globalists. This link between globalist trans-war ideologies and post-war order also emerges in Quinn Slobodian’s detailed history of neoliberalism (Slobodian, 2018). The overlap between Slobodian and Rosenboim comes in the important role played by Friedrich von Hayek in both of their narratives and their common link to the idea of globalism as a response to the end of empire. At the same time, many of the ideas discussed by Rosenboim resurface after the end of the Cold War in the development of hyper-globalization and new conceptions of security. Here the long shadow of the trans-war reaches all the way to the end of the century.

Fifth, and finally, race plays a role in both books. While Rosenboim stresses the role of globalism in addressing the end of empire, she also criticises many of her protagonists for lacking an understanding of race and of the ‘“rising wind” of protest against white domination’ (280). These are public intellectuals who fail to address the key issue of race at a time when decolonization, Pan-Africanism, and the Black Atlantic were coming to the fore as major parts of the pluralised global space (Jeppe Mulich rightly singles out this issue in his review below). The issue of race is front and centre in Barkawi’s book. While the racism of the globalist public intellectuals lay often in their failure to address race, the British Indian Army was an institution based on overt racist tropes and institutions. This Barkawi explores in some depth in chapter 1. What this engagement with race makes clear is that in order to understand the trans-war period it is also vital to see the changing roles of race and racism within the broader instability and reordering of global order.

Perhaps also these two books are both about experiments that were ultimately failures. In his review of Rosenboim, Ian Hall makes this point about the globalists. Equally, Barkawi’s book is also about an ultimate failure. Although the British Indian Army that emerged after 1941 did win a major campaign in Burma, it came at the end of empire, and the Army did not survive the decade. Instead, its units were incorporated into the new Pakistani and Indian armies. Failures or not, the subject matters of these two prize-winning books help to fill out our understanding of the trans-war pivot period in IR. In this case, they both stand out as excellent contributions to the growing field of historical international relations.

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Notes on contributors

Lucian M. Ashworth

Lucian M. Ashworth is a professor in the Political Science Department, Memorial University of Newfoundland. His main area of research expertise is the history of international thought, and he is the author of A History of International Thought, published by Routledge in 2014. Email: [email protected]