** This is Jamie Martin’s author response to our forum on his recent book The Meddlers: Sovereignty, Empire, and the Birth of Global Economic Governance.**
It’s a great honor and privilege to have one’s book read so closely by a group of scholars that one holds in such high esteem. In what follows, I will respond, in turn, to the important points they raise about its conceptual and historical claims, as well as its implications for political action today.
First, I want to pick up Mira Siegelberg’s fascinating discussion of the relationship between the concepts of sovereignty and non-interference. She is right to emphasize subtle differences between the two. The Meddlers charted the long history of efforts by international organizations to constrain the policy autonomy of their members and of the forms of resistance this generated. These were related, but distinct, to contemporaneous struggles over claiming legal sovereignty. By the early twentieth century, the concept of interference was used to describe the unwanted meddling by an outside power in the domestic political, economic, and legal domains of a sovereign polity. Its loose definition, and the intractable questions it generated (What counted as “domestic?” When should such meddling be considered “unwanted?” Could an official statement, as much as an intervention backed by military force, be considered such an infraction?) allowed it to be deployed widely and with uneven results.
The concept first took modern shape during the era of revolution and counterrevolution following the Napoleonic Wars, concerning the question of whether an insurrection or civil war could be suppressed by a foreign power. By the end of the nineteenth century – an era that paired high imperialism with unprecedented capital mobility – it was used to describe interventions by lenders in the domestic affairs of borrowers. The era’s coercive practices of debt diplomacy generated extensive legal debate about whether such interventions were compatible with the formal sovereignty of debtors like Greece, Venezuela, or the Ottoman Empire. By the turn of the 20th century, “interference” (or the commonly used French ingérence), was a highly legible, if baggy, term of art in legal and diplomatic debate in many national contexts. Claiming something was an act of interference, in other words, was a speech act with obvious political force. Whether or not such a claim had real effects, however, depended on factors unrelated to legal argument: the resource endowments, military strength, or strategic relationships of the state claiming a right to non-interference. (Today one might also include its dollar reserve assets or nuclear status.) These factors determined the degree of autonomy it could enjoy. Seen in this way, debates about sovereignty were often a red herring. For alongside legal claims for sovereign equality (among those states that enjoyed it, of course) there existed a huge degree of variation in how much this legal status translated into actual self-determination.
This is not to say that claims to sovereignty did not matter; of course they did. But achieving formal sovereignty was only ever the first step toward autonomy. This is an obvious point for a scholar of decolonization or neocolonialism. What The Meddlers sought to add was to show how the birth and evolution of global economic governance took place within a broader terrain of struggle over making economic internationalism compatible with self-determination, which sovereignty by itself never guaranteed. In this history, “semi-sovereign” states were key units of analysis: not only the recently decolonized, but also defeated Central Powers like Weimar Germany in the 1920s or the struggling post-Habsburg Austrian republic, as well as otherwise very different polities – from Liberia, and China, to Chile – that shared similar experiences with informal empire. Faced with manifold incursions into their domestic arenas, representatives from these countries all claimed a right to non-interference. While this was a technical term for defending national sovereignty—it was the language through which sovereignty claims were expressed—it was also a term that itself disclosed the limitations of formal sovereignty, which by itself was an unreliable index for political autonomy.
My understanding of this world of uneven autonomies was shaped by studies of the League’s Mandates system, by Susan Pedersen, Antony Anghie, and others. These studies, as Madeline Woker points out in her illuminating review, were key to informing my analysis of the internationalization of empire in the twentieth century. In the economic realm, however, there were meaningful differences from what the Permanent Mandates Commission (PMC) and, say, the League’s Financial Committee could achieve. The PMC was intended more to oversee the actions of the Mandatory Powers than to prescribe detailed fiscal reforms or control the spending of foreign loans, such as the League’s Financial Committee did with its financial reconstruction and refugee resettlement schemes of the 1920s. The PMC’s economic portfolio was also generally limited to two issues: ensuring mandatory powers committed to open-door policies concerning trade and investment and preventing forced labor. And, as Pedersen has shown, it was not particularly forceful in doing either. Moreover, it was itself never in the business of directly setting policy, concerning tariffs, public finance, or production and export quotas. It is because of these differences that the PMC was not central to my story, although Woker is right to point out that it was, of course, not unconcerned with economic questions.
One analogue to the PMC that I did explore in detail, and that Charles Sabel describes in his generous review, was the International Tin Committee (ITC) and its related intergovernmental commodity agencies, which effectively dictated key economic policies in certain European colonies. These agencies were much more forceful as policy-making bodies than the PMC. The ITC, for example, allowed representatives of countries outside the British Empire to design quotas strictly limiting tin mining in British colonies. In the case of Malaya, this meant allowing the Dutch officials on this international bureaucracy, and its equivalent for rubber, to wield decisive power over the two most important domains of the Malayan export economy: the production of tin and rubber. By contrast, the PMC may have helped change norms and generate debate over trade policies, development, and colonial labor abuses. But it never exercised the same degree of direct leverage over colonial economic policy.
On the question of who resisted and who welcomed interference, Woker is right to suggest that political and economic elites in some national settings invited the intervention of outside powers for the sake of their own interests. The appeal to the deux ex machina of the foreign bondholder was then, as it remains today, an oft-used tool for defanging the opposition of rival parties, defending unpopular policies among skeptical voters, or breaking the deadlock of parliamentary struggle. As the political scientist Jonas B. Bunte has shown in his important book, Raise the Debt, the factors that determine how a government chooses among foreign creditors are, above all, domestic: namely, the strength of particular interest groups and the balance of national political forces it faces. In the past, as now, accepting a loan made conditional on fiscal austerity was particularly useful to sidestep the opposition of left parties or trade unions. It’s no coincidence that this tool was first developed in early 1920s Austria, where a conservative government sought to overcome social democratic opposition to the audacious schemes of fiscal retrenchment that it saw as necessary for the survival of the post-imperial republic.
The Meddlers described numerous instances where the appeal to this political logic was made – whether by League officials or by public and private actors in national settings. But it also emphasized how risky this bet always was. Maybe a political leader could invite such intervention to sidestep its opponents in the short term, but what price would it pay for doing so? By the end of the 1920s, the stigma associated with this had become so high that few governments were willing to accept it. The perceived humiliations of the states that had agreed to the terms of League loans earlier in the decade – Austria, Hungary, and Greece – outweighed the potential political advantages of foreign control. For a state like Yugoslavia, for example, where some leaders admitted the advantages of a League-controlled loan, they also saw how nationalist opposition made agreeing to one politically impossible. Serbia had, after all, been pulled into the First World War by resisting the era’s paradigmatic threat of foreign interference: Austria-Hungary’s July 1914 ultimatum to Belgrade following the assassination of Franz Ferdinand.
Why was it easier for institutions like the League to intervene in some domains of economic policy than in others? The toughest nut to crack was trade: there were very few instances of an international bureaucracy being empowered to adjudicate tariffs. For example, the participation of the United States in the League of Nations (which, of course, never happened) was made contingent at the Paris Peace Conference on the League never being able to influence US trade policy. This was, as much as anything else, a red line for the US senators anxious about the new institution. Before 1914, many international public unions created to deal with problems of commerce were explicitly prohibited from even discussing tariffs. In the 1940s, the International Trade Organization proposed alongside the Bretton Woods institutions was rejected, leaving the less interventionist GATT alternative for fifty years. Seen in this light, the establishment of the World Trade Organization in 1995 was much more precedent-busting than Bretton Woods itself; it was, after all, the only international economic organization to wield leverage over the economic policies of a hegemon (in this case the United States), and it likely did more to unsettle the global distribution of wealth, after China’s ascension in 2001, than any other international body. The history of this radical institution – and what appears, from the vantage point of the mid-2020s to have been its relatively short reign of real power – awaits full treatment.
Intervention in financial problems was easier than in trade for at least two reasons. First, these interventions always occurred in weaker states facing desperate straits, never in great powers. Dealing with trade never had the same kind of existential significance as an emergency bailout for a state facing financial collapse. Second, there were precedents from the nineteenth century for bending the will of debtors to the demands of creditors: the various debt commissions set up in Egypt, China, Greece, and elsewhere. There was no equivalent for questions of tariffs. Quite the opposite: trade policy had always been off limits for international bodies.
There was, it is true, one League body tasked with trade directly, the Economic Committee, which may indeed have had the effect, as scholars like Madeleine Dungy have shown, of shifting norms and rules around trade over the long term – even if it did not enforce meaningful tariff changes in the short term. Perhaps the League exercised a similar kind of “symbolic” power regarding member’ policies concerning tax evasion and double taxation, as Woker suggests. In this case, though, the League played a rather minor role in supporting bilateral negotiations. In other words, the power to deal with tax evasion was indirect, and the real action on this front was not in Geneva. The League’s Fiscal Committee itself was highly cautious of appearing to interfere in domestic fiscal questions, at times emphasizing that it did little beyond write reports. In the end, it was mostly ineffective in getting the main target of its tax evasion efforts, Switzerland, to deal with the problem, as Christophe Farquet has shown. For these reasons, it’s difficult to group its efforts alongside the work of the Financial Committee.
Finally, on the future of global economic governance as the power of the Paris Club of lenders diminishes: the politics of global dept diplomacy is clearly changing, as the number of global creditors and the complexity of their rival claims increase dramatically. The salience of this fact has become clearer since the pandemic, as the combination of daunting debt loads and higher interest rates has left more low and lower-middle income states in debt distress than in recent memory. In the ongoing negotiations over debt restructurings to which recent defaults have led, there are obvious forces of continuity at work: the IMF and private bondholders like Blackrock are still major stakeholders and still generally play by the old rules. But there are also real changes. The most important and obvious one, as Blaise Truong-Loï points out in his introduction, is that China is now the world’s largest official creditor. What this means for the future politics of global governance is unclear. Whether or not various global or regional institutions, like the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank or New Development Bank, achieve leverage as competitors to the Bretton Woods institutions depends, above all, on whether they can muster real resources and function as credible and politically-attractive alternatives.
Regarding climate: environmental issues are clearly in vogue at the Bretton Woods institutions. The extent to which this new focus is meaningfully changing policy, however, is also an open question. One might ask, more broadly, as some have in other reviews of my book, whether a focus on the politics of autonomy has the same urgency today in light of the need for globally-binding measures to address the climate emergency. Even if there were an international body that wielded leverage over climate-related policies, however – which there isn’t – its political success would depend on its ability to account for the developmentalist aims of its members and the complex domestic distributional and political tradeoffs that energy transitions invariably necessitate. Absent a “climate leviathan” in other words, the prospect for durable international cooperation will turn on the extent to which it pairs global action with respect for national autonomy. At the time of writing, such cooperation appears less likely than, at best, a kind of beggar-thy-neighbor logic of competitive industrial policy that collectively achieves some progress toward global decarbonization. There is something to be said for this willy-nilly approach, at least in its political realism. But its obvious danger is how much it’s fueled by Sino-US military rivalry. This makes a genuinely internationalist politics – as unrealistic as it appears today – as important as ever.
This brings me to Charles Sabel’s bold suggestions for new forms of international economic cooperation. Sabel is right to argue that global economic governance has developed as a patchwork of orthodox and heterodox practices and institutions – more so than as a succession of competing regimes with clear temporal boundaries, born or killed at great worldmaking moments like the Bretton Woods conference or in acts of sovereign decision-making, like Nixon’s closing of the gold window in 1971. With this point in mind, Sabel does what The Meddlers, as a work of history, did not: draw up actual blueprints for future forms of global governance. He outlines an ambitious and creative vision for a kind of green supply chain regulation that achieves buy-in from stakeholders in the Global North and South and that, by working along sectoral lines, achieves meaningful results without sinking into the political quicksand of grand dealmaking among great powers. Looking to build up a patchwork of ad hoc solutions like this is no less visionary than calls for grand bargains in the form of a “new Bretton Woods;” instead, it’s a project that takes to heart the messier histories of experimentation, and the long dialectical intertwinement of the old and the new, that is described in The Meddlers. As such, it’s almost certainly more politically realistic than a politics of nostalgia. Either way, there’s nothing more exciting for a historian than to see a careful reading of their work in the service of a real plan for action. Sabel also ends on a note of optimism – which, despite the dour history told in this book, was precisely what it too had hoped, perhaps against hope, to impart.