Technological Internationalism and World Order: Aviation, Atomic Energy, and the Search for International Peace, 1920-1950 by Waqar H. Zaidi (review).

Abstract

Reviewed by: Technological Internationalism and World Order: Aviation, Atomic Energy, and the Search for International Peace, 1920–1950 by Waqar H. Zaidi Jessica Lynne Pearson (bio) Technological Internationalism and World Order: Aviation, Atomic Energy, and the Search for International Peace, 1920–1950 By Waqar H. Zaidi. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2021. Pp. 320. How to harness the power of aviation and atomic energy for peace rather than mass destruction? This was the question that liberal internationalists were attempting to answer as they worked to develop international oversight mechanisms for these new technologies and to build a platform for lasting peace in the aftermath of global war. In Technological Internationalism and World Order, Waqar H. Zaidi explores a thread of twentieth-century internationalism that has escaped the attention of the growing community of scholars focused on this topic. By exploring a broad range of perspectives from the United States and Britain, Zaidi weaves a story of hope that the internationalization of these "machines of peace" could herald a new era of stability and order. Why airplanes and why atomic energy? As Zaidi explains, "[a]eroplanes stood for space-time compression and allowed internationalists to think of the world as a globe." Atomic energy, on the other hand, "promised cheap industrial power and freedom from want, and war was thought to have been transformed into a new type of mechanized industrial warfare" (p. 11). Technological internationalism, Zaidi argues, didn't eschew militarism, but rather embraced it as a pathway to global security. The story begins in 1920s Britain where internationalists like Philip Noel Baker and David Davies were working through the technical and diplomatic nuances of disarmament. International control over aviation was central to their thinking, a view that would become radicalized in the following decade. Advocates for the internationalization of aviation in the 1930s called for control over both military and civilian branches. During World War II, some representatives from the American and British governments advocated for the creation of a United Nations air force—a significant but underexplored component of wartime planning for a postwar world. The future of civil aviation was also on the minds of these technological internationalists as they sketched out their plans. In the final two chapters of the book, Zaidi turns our attention from aviation to atomic energy as internationalists in both Britain and the United States reacted to the atomic bombs that were dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Their impulse to bring this technology under international control, Zaidi contends, built on discourses and proposals from the interwar years. While the internationalization of aviation and atomic energy never came to pass, Zaidi encourages us not to discount this vision. The debates and discussions that constitute the focus of this book would have far-reaching [End Page 891] reverberations in the years that followed, from Cold War science fiction to the "techno-globalist rhetoric" of the 1980s and 1990s (p. 3). The greatest strength of Technological Internationalism and World Order lies in Zaidi's successful bridging of the interwar and postwar moments. Many of the arguments advanced by technological internationalists at the UN after 1945 built on ideas developed by their predecessors in the 1920s and 1930s. While many histories of internationalism have been delimited by important chronological cleavages (most notably the two world wars), Zaidi shows us a common thread that runs through two periods that are usually treated separately. Another strength of the book is the way that it contextualizes the contours of individual strands of thought and action within the broader movement. Technological internationalists, to be sure, held certain notions in common, but Zaidi is clear that this is not a one-size-fits-all label. Rather, internationalist visions of aviation and atomic energy's role in promoting peace were shaped in powerful ways by the specific geographic, political, social, and cultural contexts from which they emerged. If the book has any shortcoming, it is a limitation that Zaidi himself acknowledges in the final section of the introduction. Despite its emphasis on internationalism, transnationalism, and imperialism, the story that Zaidi tells in this book is largely an American and British one. Scholars of other regions, though, will no doubt find his elucidation of...