** This is the second of three reviews of Jamie Martin’s The Meddlers: Sovereignty, Empire, and the Birth of Global Economic Governance. Each day this week one review will be published, and Professor Martin will then respond on Friday. **
At the heart of Jamie Martin’s important book, The Meddlers is the question of how a group of bankers and bureaucrats sought to overcome the stigma facing international intervention in domestic economic matters after the First World War. One could imagine a different, more traditional, research agenda for a study of global economic governance than the one that guides the book, focused on the question of how states agree to give up control over areas of domestic policy in the name of international cooperation or even just for the sake of economic stability. Instead, what we find in The Meddlers is that the global significance of the powerful institutions that define global economic governance that we know today, including the IMF and the World Bank, transcends any stylized conflict between internationalism and nationalism. These institutions have often been criticized for their conditional lending practices and for imposing interventionist policies on developing nations in exchange for financial support. And as we learn from The Meddlers, understanding the roots of global economic governance – and the prospects for a more egalitarian international order – depends on grasping how the vision of stabilizing capitalism through international institutions first emerged in an age of empire.
Through a series of fascinating cases – from the League of Nations’ economic loan to interwar Austria, to its resettlement of refugees from Turkey in Greece, and its economic support for the nationalist government in China – The Meddlers challenges the idea that the origins of global economic governance lie in the Bretton Woods agreement after the Second World War. As the book clearly sets out, before First World War the western imperial powers had imposed highly interventionist and coercive measures to demand the repayment of loans on non-western governments, especially in the case of the Ottoman Empire. They delineated between the practice of respecting sovereignty in the realm of the so-called civilized states when it came to economic matters, and imposing imperial economic practices outside this defined sphere. What was so radical, then, after the First World War was the initiative taken by internationalists to envision international institutions that could assume the authority to intervene in economic matters in countries that were, at least formally speaking, recognized as sovereign and part of a common international society with representation at the central international organization, The League of Nations.
As The Meddlers shows, enacting this vision of international oversight over national economies meant developing strategies for legitimizing economic interventionism in the face of resistance to “interference.” The term “interference,” as the book argues, served as a “global lingua franca’ deployed by a diverse range of actors that expressed the explicit recognition of the fact that reaching into the realm of the economy had always been a clear signal of the dynamics of global power and status and marked the history of western meddling in non-western states.
The Meddlers therefore demonstrates the historical importance of strategies of legitimation and argument in the formation of institutions—the traditional object of study for historians of political thought—and the essential link between strategic argument and institutional organization and structure. The personnel and many of the assumptions and practices of empire persisted into the interwar era, but the need to justify economic interventionism in light of the questions of status and power that such interventions provoked was part and parcel of the institutional innovations that led to the establishment of global economic governance in the interwar period. As Martin wonderfully elucidates, legitimation was not simply about using the right language, but about institutional organization and structure. For example, in the fascinating chapter on proto development projects in Greece and China, The Meddlers explores how the League’s development efforts in China should be comprehended in light of the broader goal to legitimize international involvement through multilateral institutions.
From the book’s rich discoveries we learn that two solutions were put forward to overcome resistance to international financial and developmental interventions: the first strategy presented international institutions as sources of neutral expertise concerned with the overall stability of the system rather than particular interests. The second strategy was to portray such interventions as a form of self-help since governments would be represented in the organization: their initial buy-in implied that as a stakeholder any moves by the institution to interfere with economic policy could not be conceived as meddling, signaling the country’s weaker international status.
The concept of sovereignty is foregrounded in the book’s title but as I read, I wondered about the historical significance of the term “interference” and its relationship to the concept of sovereignty, though the two concepts are often presented as synonyms in the book. Martin explains that the charge of interference worked rhetorically to indicate the violation of sovereignty, and that this charge appealed to existing legal claims about sovereignty that implied insulation from the reach of external entities.[i]
Yet The Meddlers invites one to consider whether there are meaningful differences between the concept of interference and that of sovereignty, both in their historical applications and in their present implications for reforming international order. “Sovereignty” of course can be used in a more informal sense to designate control or autonomy but it also carries other intellectual, conceptual, and historical baggage. In the interwar period, the League of Nations formalized sovereignty and statehood as the basis for a multilateral international organization, and in the process worked to police the boundary between national and international spheres of authority. The League was not – as Martin points at one moment in the book – the “Parliament of Man” envisioned by Tennyson, but firmly based on the principle of the sovereignty of the representative state governments. However, despite the premise of state sovereignty that underwrote the foundation of the League, the fact that the organization was empowered to underwrite the separation between the national and the international, the domestic and the foreign, signaled to many actors in the interwar period that sovereignty was conditional and relative, especially for new states like Austria and Albania in the postimperial context after the First World War.
Sovereignty is always a contested concept. However, in the decade following the First World War the concept became especially fraught. Some thought to do away with it altogether in an era that demanded transnational solutions to continental and global problems. New states that emerged from old empires claimed sovereignty, but their existence highlighted the puzzle of how this claim is determined in the first place, whether it depends on international recognition, and what that recognition implies about the nature of the power and authority assumed by the new state.
In a striking example from 1920 that I came across in the British National Archives, British officials discuss a proposed treaty between Poland and Danzig and clarify one of the reasons that the concept of sovereignty was so fraught in the interwar period. In the memoranda, officials distinguish between Poland, “an ordered government recognized by the powers,” and the Danzigers, who existed “by the will of the Powers.” As the officials explained referencing Danzig’s distinctive status, the Great Powers and the League of Nations were “within their rights in imposing the conditions of existence on a child of their own creation.”[ii] In this instance, the official distinguishes between Poland’s sovereign status and the deferred question of the sovereign status of Danzig. However, the language used by the official indicates how sovereignty was articulated as a relative concept rather than as an absolute.
The question, then, is whether the legal structure of sovereign statehood that took shape in the twentieth century contributes to the persistence of global power dynamics and hierarchies, especially as they play out in the realm of global economic governance. Critical Legal Scholars and others have argued that the way new states enter into international society through the recognition of statehood binds countries into a system built to preserve and reproduce hierarchy. According to this argument, sovereignty implicitly depends on the satisfaction of standards of development. Formal statehood, with its attendant claims to sovereignty, could therefore be understood as a kind of iron cage rather than the basis for freedom, limiting a political community’s scope for action and agency, and even as a “practice of subordinated inclusion” to borrow a phrase from Jennifer Pitts and Adom Getachew.[iii]
In this context, the way that the actors studied in The Meddlers self-consciously deploy the term “interference” comes across as resoundingly clear, free from the historical and legal weight carried by the concept of sovereignty. One of the admirable ambitions of the book is to think through what it would mean to make sovereign equality a working reality rather than a powerful fiction, and how the institutions of global economic governance would need to be reformed toward this end. And from this perspective one might consider the question of how the notion of “interference” could be conceptually productive – given that it does not seem to carry the same baggage as sovereignty. If interference was a “global lingua franca”, was it understood as conceptually distinct argumentatively and analytically from claims about sovereignty? And if this is the case, might this concept contain hitherto unexamined resources for envisioning a more genuinely equal global order?
In other words, if it is reasonable to distinguish the notion of “non-interference” from that of sovereignty, could non-interference function as an informal principle and regulative ideal that governs the IMF and the World Bank, and perhaps set the terms for the auto-limitation of the more materially powerful countries, especially the United States, in the name of instituting and preserving a more genuinely equal global order? On the other hand, perhaps sovereignty is enough of a regulative ideal, or should be, if we think of sovereignty in the basic sense of control and agency. It seems worth considering, though, whether the directness and intuitiveness of the notion of non-interference, its power as a global lingua franca, is one of the book’s striking discoveries.
[i] Jamie Martin, The Meddlers: Sovereignty, Empire, and the Birth of Global Economic Governance (Harvard University Press, 2022), 14.
[ii] Question of Danzig,” October 26, 1920, FO 893/8, TNA: PRO. Quoted in Mira Siegelberg, Statelessness: A Modern History (Harvard University Press, 2020), 56.
[iii] Sundhya Pahuja, Decolonising International Law: Development, Economic Growth and the Politics of Universality (Cambridge University Press, 2011) On the phrase “subordinated inclusion: see Jennifer Pitts and Adom Getachew, Introduction, W.E.B. Du Bois: International Thought(Cambridge University Press, 2022), xxxi.