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Boundaries of the International: Law and Empire By Jennifer Pitts. (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2018. Pp 304.

Forthcoming in The Historian, by Or Rosenboim

The history of international law has captured the interest of historians, political theorists and jurists who sought to uncover the theoretical development of legal structures beyond the state. In recent years, scholars sought to challenge some of the theoretical premises that characterised existing literature to reveal the contradictions underpinning past ideas about the law of nations. In Boundaries of the International,Jennifer Pitts argues that global imperial relations set the foundation for the emergence of international law in Europe in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. In a brilliant and masterly analysis of key legal and diplomatic texts, Pitts argues that the law of nations sought to responded to and regulate the encounter between Europe and non-European societies. In this hierarchical, unequal and discriminatory context, claims about the law of nations emerged as the basis for a presumably universal legal system.

The book combines erudite historical narrative and sophisticated theoretical analysis of important legal thinkers, in order to challenge conventional accounts of the history of international law. Five thematic chapters examine the legal thought of the book’s dramatis personae, who include well-known thinkers such as Montesquieu, Vattel, Burke, J. S. Mill, and Maine, alongside less familiar writers. Thus, the book offers a fresh interpretation of the implication of international law in the European imperial project.

Pitt’s study is rich with ideas that cannot be distilled in a short review. Chapter 2, for example, examines the place of the Ottoman Empire within the nascent system of international law, through an insightful discussion of ‘oriental despotism’ as a new analytical tool used to mark the boundaries of the presumably universal law of nations. As religious differences ceased to justify the exclusion of the Ottoman Empire and other non-European polities from the legal universe governed by the law of nations, ‘oriental despotism emerged as the organizing category for the question of what sort of diplomatic and legal relations between European states and the Ottoman Empire [..]’ (37). While legal theorists employed this category to provide a ‘rational and accessible for all’ justification for the universal authority of the European states, diplomats with direct experience of Ottoman politics were more critical. Pitts pays particular attention to Sir James Porter, England’s ambassador to Constantinople from 1746 to 1762, and to the French orientalist Abraham Hyacinth Anquetil-Duperron, who provided effective critiques of Montesquieu’s concept of Ottoman despotism. For her, they represent an alternative, critical view, which identified early on the limits of European legal universalism.

Pitts’ remarkable book is an important contribution to contemporary debates on the history of international law, as well as its future prospects. ‘International law is the product of a history at once distinctively European and also, often devastatingly, global: its history is a history of aspirations to universal validity that itself cannot be told impartially’. Pitts’ impressive study leaves the reader with a feeling of uncertainty – perhaps shared by the author – that international law could ever be emancipated from the chains of its imperial past.

City, University of London                                                                               Or Rosenboim

The Year of Our Lord 1943: Christian humanism in an age of crisis

By Alan Jacobs (Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2018)

Book review for H-Diplo By Or Rosenboim

In his new book, cultural critic Alan Jacob puts the spotlight on 1943 as a significant moment in the development of Christian humanist thought. In January, the Casablanca Conference set out the strategy for the remainder of the war, underlining the confidence of the leaders of the Allied nations in their imminent military success. For Jacobs, the implications of this military turning point extended beyond the realm of political decision making: Western thoughts started turning towards life after the war. What could warrant the moral survival of humanity? What kind of education served to preserve humanity’ cultural and moral achievements? How to counter the rise of destructive technologies, whose impact was not only physical and material but also – importantly – spiritual?

Out of the vast plethora of proposals for post-war world orders that were discussed in European and American political and cultural circles, Jacobs focuses on the ideas of a group of ‘Christian humanists’, concerned with reviving the moral and cultural backbone of humanity. Writing before the atomic bombs were dropped on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki, these intellectuals were concerned with the technological advances that facilitated the victory. They reflected on the doomsday prospects announced by technological innovation, which, translated into political terms, promised a post-war world ruled by experts and technocrats. If the world would survive devastating conflict, a new moral framework was necessary to guarantee humanity’s future.

In a sweepingly original narrative style, Jacobs examines the writings of a Christian intellectuals five Jacques Maritain, T. S. Eliot, C. S. Lewis, W. H. Auden and Simone Weil, to outline their reflective critiques of technology and its impact on the human soul. ‘They saw with uncanny clarity and exposed with incisive intelligence the means by which technology has arisen and the damage it had inflicted, and would continue to inflict, on the human person’ (206).While these thinkers were not part of a coherent group, or constituted a recognizable school of thought, Jacobs outlined the similarities between their visions of the post-war future of humanity in general and the Western democracies in particular: they all sought to figure out and answer to the question ‘how should humanity live after the war?’. Jacob weaves together the biographical stories, political visions and literary works of his dramatis personae into a compelling history of a Christian reaction to crisis. Evidently, these thinkers were not alone or unique in their concern about humanity’s future. Other intellectuals make guest appearance, revealing the complex networks of personal and professional acquaintances linking Christian humanists in the mid-twentieth century: Robert M. Hutchins, Mortimer Adler, Reinhold Niebuhr, Karl Mannheim, Christopher Dawson, Jacques Ellul, and J. H. Oldham. Together, these intellectuals wanted to ‘rescue the world for a deeply thoughtful, culturally rich Christianity, and to rescue that Christianity for the world’ (206).

Claims about humanity’s moral decline were not uncommon in mid-century political thought. The dichotomies of technology and morality, matter and spirit, generated reflections on the high cost of modernity and progress. Theodor Adorno and Max Horkheimer, the exiled German intellectuals who denounced the corruptive effect of enlightened modernity on humanity, found no solace in religion, and therefore little hope for redemption. Yet this book’s protagonists were more comfortably situated in the realm of optimism. Education provided the main cause for hope: as Jacobs states, ‘the primary task of this book is to explore this model of Christian humane learning as a force for social renewal.’ It is, perhaps, their Christian faith that reinforces their moral confidence, but, as Niebuhr had shown, faith is hardly enough to salvage humanity from the vices of power, both material and spiritual.

Jacobs diagnoses a degree of optimism in Maritain’s vision of Christianity and democracy, based on a personalist vision of human rights. These ideas have been scrutinized in detail, as Jacobs recognises, by Samuel Moyn in Christian Human Rights, but Jacobs is correct in highlighting the contribution of the oft-forgotten Weil to the emerging rights discourse. Weil was an original thinker about the interplay of morality and political order, who has not received, so far, the scholarly attention that her ideas deserve. Her life experience and intellectual force were characterised by a strong conviction about the need – and the possibility – of social and moral reform. Her writings weave together a wide range of ideas and experiences, based not only on her Christian faith but also on her first-hand knowledge of the social malaise of her time. In 1934, she spent months working in a factory, where she felt the dehumanizing effects of modern labour conditions. She described her reflections in a ‘factory diary’, later published as La condition ouvrière,as well as in her autobiography. The complete – physical and mental – dedication to exploring the conditions of modernity set Weil apart from the rest of the book’s protagonists, to my mind. For Weil, the life of the mind was much more closely related to the social organization of society than for Auden, Lewis, Maritain or Eliot.

In recent years, the humanist reaction to apparent moral crisis has interested scholars and cultural critics. Particular attention was granted to the mid-twentieth century, an era marked by the devastating implications of technology, most notably the atomic bomb. In 2009, Mark Greif published The Crisis of Man, a book that anticipated some of the themes and claims proposed by Jacobs. Greif discussed the ‘long’ mid-century, from 1933 to 1973, as an era of perceived crisis, that generated a range of responses from public intellectuals and scholars concerned with the future – and survival – of humanity. While Jacobs’ protagonists make only a passing appearance in Greif’s book, the underlying assumptions of the two books are similar: spiritual revival was identified as the appropriate and most effective answer to the material dangers facing humanity by technology of its own making. Another aspect that connects the two books is the relative minor place played by politics in their discussions.

Jacobs’ book reflects on the interplay of political ideas, such as elitism, nationalism, personalism, and universalism, within the intellectual realm of the Christian humanists; yet such interactions were obviously not without contradictions. How would Weil’s vision of rights translate into a concrete political plan? What was Maritain’s conception of democracy and Christianity’s role within it? How did Hutchins’ and Adler’s humanist education inspire their political universalism? Such questions, which occupied the minds of the book’s protagonists – and those of their opponents – emerge from the book’s discussions, but are not analysed in detail. Niebuhr appears as the most ‘political’ of thinkers, but others engages in more political tribulations than appear in the book. For example, the Chicago world constitution, drafted in 1945-1947 by a group of humanists that included Robert Hutchins, Mortimer Adler, Richard McKeon and Giuseppe Antonio Borgese, inherited many of the conceptual frameworks of the educational Christian Humanist ethos that Hutchins advanced at the University of Chicago and sought to apply them to global politics and law. Maritain was a keen supporter of the constitution, and discussed it in his address to the UNESCO conference in Mexico City in 1948. The failure of this project does not undermine the fact that its proponents envisioned it as a direct result of their humanist world vision, which sought to revive humanity’s moral and spiritual standing after the destruction inflected on it by technology and war.

The complex and fascinating story that emerges from this book is, therefore, not only about a humanist resistance to materialism and technology, but also about a personal experience of displacement, detachment and exile. Weil, Maritain and Auden envisaged modernity through this lens of detachment, that conditioned their poetic and political reflections. During the war, the once-desired life of the immigrant, free from the shackles of society, because another cause for anxiety and distress. At the Moot, Eliot encountered European exiles such as Mannheim but also Michael Polanyi, the scientist and economist who embraced Christian faith and endorsed a humanist revival based on a community of faith. The sense of community remains, in the writings of Christian humanists, a strong lacuna which they sought, often unsuccessfully, to fill in.

Despite – or perhaps because of – their haughty aspirations, the visions of the Christian humanists were not always met with enthusiasm. Luigi Sturzo, an Italian catholic priest exiled by Mussolini to London then New York, regarded Maritain’s ideas of a Christian democracy with suspicion. As the founder of the Italian popular, then Christian Democratic party, Sturzo was keen to bring together Christian teachings, human values and democratic politics. Yet for him, Maritain’s vision lacked a real engagement with pluralism, which was the lifeline of any democratic system. Sturzo did not want a political system inspired by Christianity, but rather, a democratic system where Christians could operate freely and on equal terms with others. Jacob does not challenge Maritain’s claim that democracy and Christianity were closely intertwined rather than contradictory, and does not investigate in detail Maritain’s superficial treatment of democracy. Such discussions may be beyond the scope of the book, but the political assumptions behind them seem to me to be an inherent part of the Christian humanist vision, which the advance of technology and materialism as much as it feared the open-ended nature of democracy.

Did the Atomic bomb announce the final technological disaster, or the beginning of a new era? In the book, the nuclear bomb is mentioned only a couple of times. Possibly, for Christian humanists the new weapon of mass destruction was not a ground breaking novelty, but a continuation of a trend against which they had warned the public for a long time. Some mid-century thinkers, like Lewis Mumford, argued that the bomb epitomised the dichotomy of humanity versus technology as the final debasement of humanity. He denounced the cult of expertise, which infiltrated also the universities in terms of science and industry oriented research prevalence over humanities. In line with the gospel of Christian humanism, he called for a return to a moral education of humanity, based on the fundamental values of culture, faith and civilization. Mumford would have identified with Jacobs’ affirmation that, for Christian humanists, ‘the world has gone astray because its people had been poorly educated and if the total destruction of the human world were to be averted new ways of educating had to be found.’(xiv) for him, as for the protagonists of the book, the values that should illuminate the process of re-education were grounded in the cultural and historical experience of the West. The world worth saving from nuclear destruction did not encompass the entire globe. Despite Christianity’s claims for universality, Jacobs’ book highlights the geopolitical and conceptual limits of the mid-century humanist vision, that could not envisage a true interaction with non-Western people or values as a defining element of the post-war era.

The Year of Our Lord 1943 is a fascinating and insightful reflection on intellectuals’ reaction to perceived crisis. In their literary, philosophical, journalistic and private writings, Eliot, Weil, Maritain, Auden and Lewis expressed their fear that humanity is approaching a destructive crisis of its own making. The book’s elegant style and gripping prose linger with the reader, along with a persistent reflection on the desirable and possible intellectual reactions to contemporary men-made crises, and on the human moral values worth preserving as a guidance for the future.

By Or Rosenboim, forthcoming in German Studies Review.

Quinn Slobobian, Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2018. ISBN: 978-0-674-97952-9, x + 381 pp.

In recent years, the intellectual foundation of neoliberalism has attracted the attention of historians and economists. Scholars like Angus Burgin and Dotan Leshem have looked to the past to define the meaning of neoliberalism and outline its future trajectories. Quinn Slobodian, a historian of modern German and international history based in Wellesley College, made a significant contribution to this growing body of scholarship with his remarkable study of neoliberalism in the twentieth century, Globalists. Slobodian’s main thesis in the book is that neoliberalism sought to adapt the liberal market-based global vision to the reality of the modern states-system in the post-imperial world.

The book’s dramatis personae are a group of economists centered around what Slobodian calls the ‘Geneva School’, which included Friedrich Hayek, Wilhelm Röpke, Ludwig von Mises, Michael Heilperin, Lionel Robbins and Gottfried Haberler, and Frieder Roessler. Thus, Slobodian argues that scholars who seek to understand the rise and the meaning of neoliberalism should shift their gaze away from the English-speaking intellectual sphere to the German speaking one. In this narrative, the Swiss city by the lake becomes a hub of intellectual, political and economic exchanges between mostly Central European economists – many of them refugees – concerned with the future of liberty after empire. The appropriation of their ideas by American economists in Chicago or by international organizations like the WTO came at a later stage. The origins of the neoliberal global worldview were anchored to Europe, and in particular to the political and economic legacy of the Habsburg Empire and fin-de-siècle Vienna.

The book’s meticulously researched narrative progresses in seven chapters, each dedicated to a different aspect of the globalists’ vision of renewed economic liberalism: from tariffs to federations, from constitutions to new international organizations, the globalists explored a wide range of means to adapt the state to their liberal idea of absolute property rights, wholly integrated world economy and individual liberty. Writing in the shadow of totalitarianism and fascism, these neoliberals advocated setting constrained to both democracy and nationalism. But their critique of the ideology of nationalism did not translate into a call to abolish all states or to establish a supranational political system (although some, like Hayek, were at one time federalists). Instead, they sought a structural adjustment that could embed the post-imperial world order within an integrated, liberal international institutional design. For them, ‘order was not a steady state, but an adjustment, an often painful process of learning’ (262). The market could not function on its own; the globalists’ role was to finetune its mechanisms and ensure its smooth operation on a global scale. Thus, Slobodian argues that neoliberalism ‘is less a theory of the market or of economics than of law and the state’ (268).

The main contribution of this original and compelling study is outlining a new context for assessing and understanding neoliberalism in which the state plays a major role. Politics and the law now play a much more central part in constructing the neoliberal worldview than previously assumed. Slobodian shows how the protagonists of the globalist neoliberalism envisioned a range of legal, institutional and political tools to ensure the integration of the world economy, and the preservation of the unequal global power relations after the decline of the European empires.

The book is set as a contextual intellectual history of the economists who made up the Geneva School, yet the contextualization provided is inevitably partial. Importantly, the readers lacks a clear view of the political and intellectual opposition to the neoliberal vision. Who was Hayek arguing against? What were the alternative visions and plans of a global order available after 1945? If the core of neoliberalism is to be found in Central Europe, it would be valuable to situate the proposals of the globalist neoliberals within the horizon of European post-war politics. In this sense, for example, the wartime federalist vision of Hayek and Robbins emerges as an alternative to a popular vision of welfare-based federalism, proposed by William Beveridge, Barbara Wootton and others who celebrated democracy as the true ethos of any federal or global order. Welfare politics, as reflected in the Marshall Plan and the European post-war reconstruction, make haphazard appearances in the book, whetting the readers’ appetite for an in-depth discussion. While the book avoids the pitfall of neoliberal triumphalism, it would have benefitted from a more detailed discussion of neoliberalism’s opponents.

Globalists is a rewarding reading for those interested in the historical trajectory of the state-economy nexus. With its eloquent prose and strong arguments, the book offers a compelling account of the history of neoliberalism as well as interesting insights on its future. By emphasizing the German and Austrian intellectual ties of the neoliberalist approach, Slobodian draws a map of interconnections that may serve as a guideline for future scholars. The many merits of the book are therefore crowned by the future paths of research that it has opened up for the study of European politics, international history and economic thought.

The recent tragedy in the Mediterranean, which cost the life of hundreds of African migrants, caught the attention of the media, at least for a brief moment. The European leaders were forced to pay attention to the rising problem, acknowledging that Italy should not carry the burden of dealing with illegal maritime migration alone. Many think of migration as a ‘problem’. Migrants, and especially the uninvited ones, are treated as a tolerable annoyance at best, and as criminal invaders as worst. In Britain, the Labour ‘immigration control’ mug stirred a little storm. In Israel, the constant attempts to jail or deport the illegal migrants who cross the southern border with Africa. In Italy, the fortunes of those who survive the perilous boat trip from North Africa to Lampedusa remain largely an untold story, that only starts to attract public attention.

Migration has been part of my life in the last decade. I arrived as a migrant to Italy, then to Britain. I walked through the complex bureaucratic routes providing documents, fingerprints, photos and certificates to comply with all the requirements to become a legal resident.  My experience was in no way life endangering, but it was not calm or enjoyable. My ancestors were migrants, too. Some had to flee their homes and seek refuge in foreign lands. Penniless, without a profession or a required skill, they tried to live and survive in Tajikistan, and then in the newly founded Israel. Other ancestors were born in Palestine, but their family histories were also stories of migrations, certificates, permissions and visas. Migrant are also part of my work, where I explore 20^th century thinkers concerned with world order. Many of them share a personal history of migration: David Mitrany, Antonio Borgese, Reinhold Niebuhr.

Perhaps it is, again, the usual syndrome of ‘not in my back yard’. We all know that there is a problem, but none of us wants to take the responsibility (and pay a possible price) for solving it. The problem is not only one of policy-making but also of social norms: most people don’t like migrants, and are not particularly interested in helping the weak. A visit at the immigration museum in Melbourne last week suggested a key strategy to dealing with migration beyond the official policies. What I liked at the museum was the focus on historical data along with personal stories. The idea of the ‘migrant’ finds a face and a life once you read about the knitting worker who came to Australia from poor Italy to seek a better life and worked hard to get it, or when you read about the German pastry chef who invented glorious cakes but was interned in a camp during the First World War.

To complicate the banal stories of national homogeneity that many like to tell, historians can revive the past of Western societies, weaved of migrations, colonisations and transfers of populations. Migrations have always been integral part of human search for a better life. Doubtlessly, not all refugees and migrants can easily integrate in society, and they should not be granted an automatic leave to stay. However, in view of the growing waves of migrants who flee a terrible life abroad, we should start by hearing their stories to understand their life choices and find the adequate solutions.