Postwar International Order Research Articles

Polish Conductresses and the Insecurities of Female Labour Migration to France, 1925–1929

In this article we argue that the reports of conductresses accompanying female migrants shed new light on the nature of interwar labour migration. As they mitigated the anxiety and insecurity that women faced during the process of migration, they fulfilled a crucial role in the highly restrictive post-1918 international migration regime. The Polish government introduced conductresses in 1925 to respond to news of the mistreatment and sexual exploitation of Polish women working in France. Developed in close collaboration with international organizations and the League of Nations, the work of these conductresses on land and sea routes was framed as those of ‘moral guardians’ protecting female migrants from the dangers of sex trafficking. However, we argue that their main function was to mitigate the uncertainties of the post-war international order, as traditional routes of migration were ruptured and both dispatching and receiving countries attempted to control and restrict migration. Female migrants had no networks with existing diasporas, were often illiterate, and mistrusted both Polish and French institutions. By addressing these challenges, the conductresses took on roles far beyond their function as moral authority: they acted as translators, knowledge imparters, mediators, and network forgers. Both in Poland and at the international level, the Polish conductress scheme was regarded a success, as they managed to provide a relatively ‘secure’ migration experience within a migration regime designed to walk a fine line between demands for foreign labour on the one hand and the rising ideal of economic protectionism on the other.

Desire at play: Tourism, credit cards and the American Express Money Card travel board game

This article analyses the American Express travel board game Money Card (1972) as it highlights the intertwinement between the rise of a distinctive form of tourism as a modern mass industry and the expansion of the capitalist market, the primacy of the dollar, and U.S. hegemony. In a period marked by a shift from paper money to credit cards and global credit markets, American Express was the most powerful and easily identifiable symbol of the new post-war international economic order dominated by U.S. economic and political power. Placing the American Express Money Card board game within the shift from the post-war economy of reconstruction to credit expansion and neoliberalism, brings to the forefront the ways in which the game presented tourism as a ritual in celebration of capitalism. As a form of armchair travel, the board game sold tourism as a re-enchantment of the world. The article explores how the board game framed the American Express Card as fetish object, portrayed Europe as up for sale, and created a desire for the services of American Express and consumerism more generally. It shows how players were trained to use credit cards, be good consumers, and participate in the economy of the tourist industry. By advancing a capitalist tourist dreamworld, Money Card shaped perceptions of travel to Europe and created a religious illusion, offering a re-enchantment of the world through tourism and credit cards.

Economic Responses to Nazi Aggression in Europe: Albert Hirschman and Paul Rosenstein-Rodan on the Economic Sovereignty of Central and Eastern Europe

Abstract Germany's expansion in Central and Eastern Europe was not just one among many aggressive moves by the Third Reich but the central strategy of the Nazi imperial project on the continent. Prominent economists, politicians, and think tanks agreed that crucial to this project was Germany's economic domination of the area, and they committed to developing a new vision for a postwar international order that avoided the instability and turmoil of the interwar years. This article discusses the analyses of the crisis of Central and Eastern Europe and solutions to it that Albert Hirschman and Paul Rosenstein-Rodan, then both virtually unknown and working independently one from the other, produced during World War II—Hirschman with a focus on the international dimension and Rosenstein-Rodan with a focus on the domestic one. This article offers a synthetic discussion of how the war deeply affected their economic thinking and how, in turn, their analyses became foundational elements of new and important disciplinary fields in the postwar decades, such as international political economy and development economics.

Was the post-war international trade order bound to succeed while the Bretton Woods monetary order established in 1944 was doomed to fail?

This paper explores the reasons embedded in the original architecture of both the international trade and monetary regimes that determined different outcomes for both. It proposes that the original version of the Bretton Woods monetary regime showed faster its essential failures and basically had to be replaced as early as 1971, while the trade regime embodied in the GATT and later in the WTO managed to at least survive until present day. It posits that correspondence (or the lack of it) of the basic characteristics of the said regimes with the underlying political reality where the regimes would apply (in line with Ruggie´s depiction of «embedded liberalism») accounts for the differentiated outcomes. It explains that the international trade regime showed more flexible traits that allowed it to adjust to the underlying political and led to its survival. The lack of that adaptability element would likewise explain the early demise of the original Bretton woods scheme.

China and the liberal international order: a pragmatic and dynamic approach

Abstract How can we make sense of China's perceptions of and relationship with the liberal international order (LIO)? The majority of notable works on this topic have been written by foreign scholars who emphasize China's discontent with, or challenges it poses to, the LIO, while Chinese scholars have either focused solely on academic debates or attempted to interpret official foreign policies. This article aims to provide a balanced analysis of China's view of order by examining theoretical thought and policy practices from a Chinese perspective, drawing insights from both Chinese academic writings and government statements. We argue that there exists a perceptual difference between China and the West in understanding the postwar international order, with China emphasizing the functional part of the order and the West regarding it as based on its preferred ideological values. This perceptual difference has caused international suspicion about China's potential intentions to overthrow the LIO. In practice, China's approach has remained pragmatic, interacting dynamically with different subcomponents of the LIO. Although China's recent interactions with the LIO appear more ambitious, internal and external constraints, insufficient capacity, and lack of universally appealing values are preventing the birth of a Chinese version of international order.

Planning for the Aftermath. Longue Durée Histories for a New International Legal Order in Kelsen, Lauterpacht and De Visscher

Abstract As early as the 1930s, the development of plans for an international legal order to be created in the aftermath of the Second World War were commonplace. This particularly concerned a group of refugee scholars hailing from the German-speaking academic world. The plans of three scholars that were personally affected by the Nazi regime are discussed, those of Hans Kelsen, Hersch Lauterpacht and Charles De Visscher. This contribution compares the plans of the three scholars as formulated in the period between 1934 and 1947, as well as the historical narratives at their core, and ventures to answer the question whether these narratives should be seen as ‘invented traditions’ or that the scholars perceive them as significant and crucial stages of development at the basis of their plans for a post-War international legal order.

Silences of Bretton Woods: gender inequality, racial discrimination and environmental degradation

In the formal deliberations of the Bretton Woods conference, little was said about gender inequality, racial discrimination, or environmental degradation. At the time, however, the significance of these issues to international economic governance was prominently discussed elsewhere, including in other conferences planning the postwar international order. The fact that the Bretton Woods architects chose to ignore these issues, thus, was an anomaly that needs to be recognized as an important part of the content of the conference and its ‘embedded liberal’ normative framework. Explaining these silences also reveals important dimensions of the politics of Bretton Woods that have been understudied. More generally, this history highlights how efforts to encourage the Bretton Woods institutions to engage more with these three issues—and political resistance to those efforts—are not unique to the current era but were present at the founding of these bodies. It also contributes to recent calls for IPE scholars to devote more attention to the study of gender inequality, racial discrimination, and environmental degradation. These issues may be ‘blind spots’ in contemporary IPE, but discussions of their relevance to international economic governance have deep historical roots, including at the creation of the postwar international economic order.

Co-Optation at the Creation: Leaders, Elite Consensus, and Postwar International Order

This article analyzes how democratic leaders cultivate an elite consensus in favor of participating in international institutions. We theorize two tactics to prevent elite dissent. Delegating early policy development to technocratic and nonpartisan experts can set a depoliticized tone. Later integration of opposition elites into the process can create powerful advocates that expand support to a consensus. We assess contrasting fates of the United Nations (UN) and International Trade Organization (ITO). Haunted by Woodrow Wilson’s failure to win approval for the League of Nations, leaders outsourced early planning for a UN to the Council on Foreign Relations. Later, Franklin D. Roosevelt and top aides tapped moderate Republicans for the US delegation to San Francisco, creating powerful Republican advocates. In contrast, leaders developed the ITO in-house and excluded legislative elites in final negotiations, provoking elite dissent. These tactics shed new light on leaders, elites, and the domestic politics of international order and hegemony.

Delivering on Ideas: British Plans for Post-war Regional and International Order, January – August 1944

This article examines British planning for a post-war international order which took place throughout the spring and summer of 1944. The history of this planning process has been largely overlooked in the historiography examining both the creation of the United Nations organisation as well as British diplomacy in the period. When historians have addressed the creation of the organisation, focus has been on the efforts of the Roosevelt administration, usually at the expense of the other great and small powers who contributed in important ways. The work here describes how British officials ordered their thinking on the post-war world and assembled detailed plans for what would become the United Nations organisation. Importantly, the planning in these months involved a concurrent effort to develop an alternative ordering mechanism for the European continent – known as the ‘Western Security Group’ – which, in theory, might balance against a revanchist Germany and hostile Russia. There was thus, by the summer of 1944, a new grand strategy for the post-war period, one which rested on the seemingly paradoxical positions of a world organisation and a balance of power on the European continent. Understanding how British officials arrived at this policy – and specifically how they aligned these disparate strategic strands of regional and international planning – shines light on an important element in the intellectual thought and diplomatic practice of British statesmen in this most consequential of periods.

‘With a minimum of bitterness’: decolonization, the right to self-determination, and the Arab-Asian group

AbstractIn the late 1940s, postcolonial elites expanded the activities of the United Nations (UN) by using it as a platform to advance decolonization and foster Third World solidarity. The Arab-Asian group was the earliest manifestation of institutional cooperation among postcolonial nations after 1945. Initially comprised of twelve Arab and Asian UN member-states, the Arab-Asian group coordinated their diplomatic activities as part of an effort to bring national self-determination to the forefront of international debate. However, the emergence of the Arab-Asian group at the UN revealed a confluence of different political ideologies and approaches to decolonization in the early postwar era. Forging a network of postcolonial elites brought out divergent visions for the postwar international order, illustrated by the frictions within the Arab-Asian group even as it played key roles in the UN debates on the questions of Indonesia, the former Italian colonies in Africa, and the Korean War. The Arab-Asian group, an important antecedent to Afro-Asianism, Third Worldism, and non-alignment, encountered challenges over parallel projects pursued by its members, such as Carlos Romulo’s campaign for a Pacific Pact among non-communist Asian states or Jawaharlal Nehru’s articulation of neutralism. Therefore, while postwar international organizations were a formative setting for the emergence of postcolonial internationalism and South-South solidarity, the common goals pursued by these states did not always translate into uniformity or consensus on decolonization.

Russia’s Military Invasion of Ukraine in 2022: Aim, Reasons, and Implications

The publication examines the legal nature of wars, looks into the law of war genesis, reviews its conventions, as well as identifies the aim, objectives, causes together with the consequences of Russia’s military aggression on February 24, 2022; it provides a testimony on the war of aggression against Ukraine and identifies its threats to post-war international law and order. The aim of the article is to determine the background, nature, fundamentals and nature of the war the Russian Federation launched on February 24, 2022 against Ukraine within the context of confrontation with the values of Western democracy. Historical-legal dialectical, comparative-legal and system-structural methods, as well as methods of formal logic (induction and deduction, analysis and synthesis, abstraction and concretization, etc.) were used to study the issues. The application of these research methods entails a cross-sectoral scientific nature. Wars have accompanied the entire history of mankind. Since the 17th century the theoretical foundations of the law of war have been laid, which enshrined in international laws and customs of warfare (Geneva Conventions, Hague Convention, etc.) since the 19th century, thus forming the international humanitarian law. After World War II, violations of the latter by the belligerent party are viewed by the world community no less harshly than the mere war. The paper questions the purpose, reasons, conditions and intermediate consequences of the war of the Russian Federation against Ukraine. Obviously, the military aggression and the Russian invasion on February 24, 2022 marked the beginning of the de facto war, under a specific formal definition by a Russian official as a “special military operation” instead of naming it an attempt to avoid legal responsibility for war crimes committed in Ukraine. The article analyses the aggressive nature of this war on the part of the Russian Federation, demonstrates numerous violations of international law conventions by the Russian armed forces during the military invasion and temporary occupied territories in Ukraine. It emphasizes that the law of war has always been replaced by signing a peace treaty and relevant international agreements, which entails the obligation to severe the political, economic, and legal responsibility of the state violating international humanitarian law. The paper reviews the key institutions and legal tools for bringing the Russian Federation authorities to justice for the war crimes committed in Ukraine. So far, the President of Ukraine, the Supreme Council of Ukraine, and the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine have managed to apply legitimate international legal mechanisms, primarily the International Criminal Court and the UN Security Council, to prosecute Russia for violating the international humanitarian law and committing war crimes in Ukraine. At the same time, on the Ukrainian territories currently liberated from the Russian army’s occupation (Bucha, Gostomel, Irpin, etc.), it is already possible to implement a special mechanism of justice, which consists in the collaboration between national and international experts: specialists, investigators, prosecutors, and judges to collect objective and impartial evidence of gross violations of international law and war conventions in Ukraine. It is obvious that for Ukraine today both the victory and just punishment for the committed and continuing committed war crimes on its territory are important. The aftermath of World War II’s “Never Again” now requires, as never before, its effective guarantee and protection

To Realize Our Decolonization: South Korea’s Deployment of Troops to Vietnam

In the 1960s, less than two decades after its liberation, South Korea was still struggling to establish its position in the postwar international order amid waves of decolonization and the Cold War. As a newly independent country, South Korea had one task it considered to be of utmost importance: gaining international recognition by demonstrating its sovereignty to the world. This article focuses on Korea's nation-building process in this context through the dispatch of its troops to Vietnam, a crucial component of completing its decolonization. The subsequent text assesses what factors influenced South Korea's deployment of troops to Vietnam and how this policy gained greater social acquiescence. Koreans perceived the postwar international order as little changed from the previous era of imperialism, when Korea’s sovereignty had been forcefully usurped by Japan. This colonial experience, I contend, conditioned South Korea’s decision to deploy troops to Vietnam; the South Korean government adopted a method familiar to them of showing off its military power to gain international recognition. This logic also explains why domestic actors generally viewed the troop dispatch as legitimate, including intellectuals and opposing politicians who agreed that their country should pursue international recognition using all possible methods, including force.

Selling ‘New’ China: Marketing and the Unmaking of a Semi-colonial State

During the 1950s and early 1960s, Chinese communist trade officials used commercial marketing not just to spur trade with foreign capitalists, but also to redefine China’s national identity in the eyes of companies, consumers, and governments outside the socialist bloc. Chinese officials sought to unmake the perception of China as a backward, ‘semi-colonial’ state and to write a narrative of China as a modern, postcolonial member of the postwar international commercial order. This article examines two persistent themes that emerged within ‘new’ China’s commercial narrative of itself. First, Chinese officials developed a story of solidarity with decolonizing states based on the theme of shared oppression at the hands of imperialist aggressors. Second, Chinese officials used commercial marketing to call for open and inclusive trade, regardless of differences in domestic political systems or ideology. By doing so, these officials wrested ‘free trade’ for China’s own use as a cudgel for attacking U.S. sanctions and as a device for framing ‘new’ China as a champion of trade rights for postcolonial states. Both themes reveal how China sought to redefine its image in the eyes of diverse audiences outside the socialist bloc through international commerce.

Toward a post‐neoliberal social citizenship?

Toward a post‐neoliberal social citizenship?

The Anfu Parliament in Republican China. The life and death of a failed single-party state, 1918–20

ABSTRACT The Anfu Club, which governed China in 1918–20, has often been seen as a factionalist grouping of corrupt and incompetent politicians handpicked by the military and kept afloat by Japanese loans and state subsidies. The fact that they had achieved domination in parliament through vote-rigging was often seen as sufficient to write off their achievements. This article argues that Anfu, which was East Asia's first single-party state, oversaw one of the most accomplished periods in the legislative history of the Republic of China. It was a highly efficient legislature which passed much-needed laws, thanks to rigorous inner-party discipline. It had an internationalist diplomatic line and it hoped to participate in planning for the post-war international order. Due to a lack of consensus in the military over how a single-party state should be run, however, Anfu found itself abused and scapegoated frequently and fought back using constitutional means, impeaching officials including the Premier, slashing the military budget by 20 per cent, and demanding cabinet appointments appropriate to its status as the parliamentary majority. Eventually this caused a rupture between it and its rival forces in the military, leading to the 1920 civil war that precipitated Anfu's collapse.

Literary cosmopolitanism in the age of the League of Nations: Vernon Lee, Daniel Halévy and La Revue de Genève

In 1921, the newly founded French-language periodical, La Revue de Genève, featured an exchange of letters between Daniel Halévy and Vernon Lee in which the two writers articulated contrasting visions of national identity and international literary relations. Reflecting on the traumatic experience of the First World War, Halévy called for literature and the role of the writer to be depoliticized. Lee, by contrast, put forward a politicized model of cosmopolitanism that challenged the renewed emphasis on national sovereignty in the post-war international order. Their exchange sheds light on the tense negotiation of literary cosmopolitanism that followed the Versailles settlement and the establishment of the League of Nations.

역사가와 이데올로기: E. H. 카와 자유주의

For E. H. Carr as a twentieth-century historian, liberalism was his developmental background as well as an ideological obstacle to overcome. Through the First World War, Carr came to realize the bankruptcy of western civilization and began to criticize liberalism, a then dominant ideology, with the extensive reading and writing on the nineteenth-century Russian intelligentsia and Marx. Along with the Paris conference and resulting Versailles Peace Treaty in 1919 for a postwar international order, Carr denounced the contradictions and weaknesses of Liberalism from international affairs through politics and economics to philosophy, and established himself as a trenchant dissident in western society. After the Second World War, however, Carr went beyond criticism to offer various alternatives of mass democracy, planning, welfare and collectivism, which provided a new perspective for the contemporary western civilization despite their utopian aspects.

Japan and Changes of International Order: Concepts and Countermeasures

The issue of order is the core of international relations. Both the dimensions of history and reality should be explored in order that the relationship between Japan and the world should be acknowledged in a scientific way. This paper analyzes Japan’s cognition and practice from such three aspects as the evolution of Japan’s view of international orders from a historical perspective, the post-war international order and “the crisis of liberal international order” and Japan’s responses to the international order under the ongoing unprecedented changes in the world. Based on principles of pragmatism, Japan strove to maintain its independence while expressing its respect with the order within the framework of the Hua-Yi Order. In face of the impact of rising Western civilization, Japan attempted to extricate itself from and overthrew the Hua-Yi Order and achieve the objective of “leaving Asia and embracing Europe,” and then turned from a follower of the Western dominant order into a challenger. After being defeated in WWII, the US occupation and the democratic transformation, Japan chose to accept and integrate into the liberal international order dominated by the US and gradually formed a unique view of international order through constantly sizing up the international situation, maintaining dynamic adjustment and making efforts to seek advantages and avoid disadvantages. Faced with the changing international relations nowadays, Japan has been committed to enhancing the “comprehensive strategic activity” and repairing the liberal international order in crisis. The relationship between Japan and the international order not only reflects historical continuity but also presents newly emerging characteristics.

Кризис бреттон-вудской валютной системы и начало европейского валютного сотрудничества

The article aims to identify the impact of the crisis of the Bretton Woods monetary system on the beginning of European monetary cooperation. Russian scholars' publications on European monetary integration usually examine in detail the internal prerequisites for the emergence of the Werner Plan and only sketch the external environment. Drawing on available European and American sources, this research provides a more nuanced picture of the origins of European monetary cooperation in the context of a general collapse of the post-war international monetary order. The article begins with the characteristic of the main features of the Bretton Woods monetary system. In the late 1960s and early 1970s, the intrinsic contradictions of the Bretton Woods mechanism, such as the problem of liquidity, confidence in the key currencies, and the adjustment mechanism, generated numerous monetary crises. All efforts to reform the international monetary system stalled because of disagreements between countries with surplus and deficit payment balances. The research also focuses on the US monetary policy. As the US dollar was the main reserve currency, the stability of the entire monetary system depended on its position. Since the late 1960s, conflicts over monetary issues developed between the United States and Western European countries, culminating in the Nixon administration's unilateral decision to abolish the gold standard in August 1971. Monetary crises and the weakness of the dollar pushed the countries of the European Economic Community to develop their own currency grouping. The article analyses the Werner Plan of 1970 that proposed the creation of an Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) with a single European currency as the ultimate goal. Based on fixed exchange rates between European currencies, the EMU represented a regional replica of the Bretton Woods system. The single European currency was seen by Europeans as an alternative to the dollar and the unpredictable American policy. The author concludes that the end of transatlantic monetary cooperation gave an additional impetus to the development of European monetary integration. Although first European efforts to create the EMU had failed because of the different approaches of France and the Federal Republic of Germany as well as the economic crisis of the early 1970s, the Werner Plan marked a crucial phase in the history of European integration. The Werner Report became a blueprint for the European Monetary System (EMS) of the late 1970s. The success of the EMS paved the way for the creation of the European Monetary Union envisaged in the Maastricht Treaty of 1991 establishing the European Union and the adoption of a single European currency - the euro.

Wicksell, Myrdal and Swedish Intellectual Thought on Inequality

The ‘Swedish Model’ of the welfare state was born from a confluence of geographic, cultural, political, and economic factors in the immediate post-war period. Its intellectual history, however, lay in a much longer tradition that originated with the economist Knut Wicksell (1851 – 1926). A radical and progressive thinker on issues of inequality, social justice and the role of the state, Wicksell had a profound influence on Swedish economic thought. His concerns carried over to the next generation of Swedish economists, including Gunnar Myrdal (1898 – 1987) – Nobel Prize winning economist, public intellectual, architect of the Swedish welfare state, and technocrat of postwar international economic order. This paper takes Wicksell as its starting point, considering the intellectual history of Myrdal’s views on inequality and the welfare state as a ‘middle way’, a ‘system of social morals.’ Like Wicksell, Myrdal initially conceived of inequality as a national problem. However, Myrdal’s Beyond the Welfare State (1960) extended Swedish intellectual thought on domestic inequality to issues of international economic development. Myrdal argued that contemporary welfare programs were too narrow and irrationally nationalistic, concluding that what was needed was a welfare world, not a welfare state.