Introduction

In his classical text on international organization, Swords to Ploughshares, Inis Claude (1959: 43) stated:

According to this quote, the nineteenth century was a period of war and anarchy among states and state-like entities that led to World War I. It was a period of preparation because the idea of international organization was not yet born, but rather emerged from the destructive consequences of that war. In this narrative, the foundation of the League of Nations is the starting point for the period in which the idea of organizing the international sphere was born and international organizations were established. In the second half of the twentieth century, and in particular after the end of the Cold War, international organizations emerged as ‘pieces of global governance’ (Karns and Mingst, 2010: 5–8) that were active in almost all policy fields. In organizing these policy fields, international organizations took over more and more extensive duties and responsibilities for their member states. However, their function was not limited to facilitating cooperation between member states. Quite the contrary; international organizations provided an action frame that served as a reference point for both states and non-state organizations.

Even though this is a very short and simplified description of the history of international organization(s), it is nevertheless widely shared by scholars in International Relations (IR). They see the twentieth century as the period of international organization and the foundation of international institutions of various kinds, most notably international organizations, that are evolving as actors in world politics in the twenty-first century.

This chapter takes a closer look at the emergence of the idea of international organization. It reflects on the actual concept of organization, which saw the light of day in the nineteenth century, and regards organization and the founding of (international) organizations as key features of global social change (see Albert and Werron, Chapter 1 in this volume).

Introduction

Periodization in global history is difficult. Since nineteenth-century historicism and for far too long, European epoch concepts have been generalized without any further ado. Eurocentrism is merely a symptom of an even more fundamental challenge of periodization, however: it relies on comparisons. Comparing, this chapter argues, is a far from innocent activity. On the contrary, comparing has a productive power. The aim of this chapter is to show what scholars actually do when they cut history up into epochs, and why they should make the objective of their narrative explicit – at least if they want to escape Eurocentrism and other shortcomings in global history.

After modernization theory lost its power of persuasion in the 1970s and 1980s, historians developed a strong dislike for theories of historical change. This seems to apply particularly to those doing global history. Nonetheless, historians, and global historians in particular, do deliver interpretations of historical change. What is often quite revealing in this respect are book titles such as Remaking the Modern World (1900–2015) (Bayly, 2018), The Transformation of the World (Osterhammel, 2014), or The Origins of Globalisation (de Zwart and van Zanden, 2018). If a book's title refers to space instead of historical change, as in A History of Southeast Asia (Reid, 2015) or The World in the Long Twentieth Century (Dickinson, 2018), then it will be chapter headings that interpret specific time periods as periods of historical change, such as ‘Becoming a Tropical Plantation, 1780–1900’ (Reid, 2015: 196–212) or ‘Population Explosion, 1800–2000’ (Dickinson, 2018: 9–19). Historians cannot do without periodization. If they do not mention distinct periodizations – epochs or periods that are given distinct names, for example – they at least apply weak periodizations such as explanations for the periods of study or sequence of caesurae they have chosen. Since a sequence of periods with clear-cut boundaries between epochs has gone out of fashion, scholars of global history currently tend to work with overlapping time periods, sometimes even transforming them into thematically differing processes during a given period (Dickinson, 2018). Interestingly enough, the thematic order often becomes prominent in the final summarizing chapters (Bayly, 2018; de Zwart and van Zanden, 2018).

Introduction

The starting point of this chapter is the suspicion that, while global history identifies a range of quite large-scale patterns and even structures, it remains somewhat reluctant to engage with large-scale theoretical accounts (or ‘narratives’) of long-term historical change. World society theory, on the other hand, provides exactly this kind of account, yet, at least in terms of the global unfolding of events, seems to lag behind when it comes to substantiating its claims in historical terms. Global history and world society theory are strong candidates when it comes to effecting an engagement between approaches from history and sociology on the subject in hand. But they are certainly not the only ones out there. Nevertheless, as the chapter will seek to argue, they promise to foster a productive dialogue when both traditions’ strengths are put to good use in reciprocally addressing one another's shortcomings. In that sense, although the chapter provides what is admittedly a parochial reading of both traditions, it does so with the programmatic purpose of stimulating common research agendas.

So, the present chapter attempts a rather bold tour d’horizon that seeks to establish the possibilities for a fruitful exchange between world society theory and global history approaches. It will do so by inspecting the use of ‘turning’ points in their accounts. What is the quality of significant change in both, and can these accounts of significant change be linked to one another? Posing this question means focusing on possible substantive overlaps. It explicitly does not mean asking for commonalities grounded in a common motive from Geschichtsphilosophie (the philosophy of history). Quite the contrary. The argument proceeds on the basis of an acknowledgement that global history and world society theory are probably united in standing quite firm in rejecting any motive from Geschichtsphilosophie (although, as will be argued later, in one respect the latter probably cannot be completely dispensed with when it comes to an epochal view of history). In global history this rejection takes the form of a narrative in which history unfolds as nothing but a transformation of complexity (‘entanglements’); in world society theory it takes the form of a theory of social evolution.

Introduction

Historians who account for global social change stand in a somewhat peculiar tradition that approaches the past of international organizations through national lenses. There is a predominant narrative that goes back to Immanuel Kant's short essay on ‘Perpetual Peace’ (Kant, 1977), and by and large the lead question in historiographical scholarship is: to what extent was Kant's vision realized in global politics? This chapter, by contrast, ventures into the technical basis of global sociability from a historical perspective. Such a view renders the nation an effect of global communication rather than an agent. The argument is that global numerical statistics on territories, populations and economic potentials over the past centuries have created a vast political space in which the nation features as a result, not as a prime mover. Numbers rule the world in manifold comparative frameworks by setting norms and designing communicative devices such as balance sheets for companies and states and comparative sets of statistics on territory, population and economic potential.

The topic covered in the following pages is the history of the United Nations (UN). Mainstream historiography treats UN history as a grand international power contest. Political historians are relatively well informed about past debates in the UN Security Council in which powerful nation states have articulated their interests more or less successfully. But beyond this assumedly political realm their accounts tend to fray. Historiography on the technical history of the UN as represented by the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) and its specialized bodies remains rather sketchy. The chapter tentatively suggests the notion of technical internationalism as a general framework for the analysis of these governing organs. Scholarship in the sociology of world society and international relations theory has produced ample evidence of the fact that global social change was never primarily powered by national interest nor – as it were – by great individuals. Structural processes of a more anonymous nature loom large. They constitute a global communicative convergence concerning the aims of social change and were agents of change in their own right.

Thanks to international organizations, geodetic information about the planet can be taken for granted and it is easy to tell the time anywhere according to a coherent system. It is roughly known how many people live in the world and how the population is distributed across the continents.

Introduction: politics and economics

Until the nineteenth century, politics and economics were not discrete fields. In Europe during the early modern period, power and profit formed a single logic: property and title went hand in hand with administrative offices; warfare was conducted by ‘privateers’ as well as ‘crown’ forces; and sovereignty was closely bound up with commerce. Power and profit only became formally demarcated during the course of the nineteenth century. During this period, ‘economic’ interactions were increasingly carried out through ‘faceless’ transactions via the ‘symbolic token’ of ‘generalized money’ (Simmel, 1978: 332–3). Under these conditions, every product was exchangeable, including labour. Hence, for the first time, ‘free labour’ could be sold (as wages) according to market logics. The bracketing of a ‘private’ sphere of market exchange had the simultaneous effect of generating a ‘public’ sphere of political regulation. The economy became the realm of civil society mediated by logics of market exchange (‘the self-regulating market’ organized through ‘the invisible hand’), while politics became the realm of the state governed by the national interest (‘raison d’état’).

The decoupling of politics and economics was as much ideal as it was real. It was ideal in that states and markets remained tightly intertwined: just as the market required the state to recognize private property and provide a legal apparatus that could sustain accumulation and enforce contracts, so the state required the revenues that accrued from property, accumulation and contracts. But it was also real inasmuch as market logics were given a degree of autonomy, both semantically and legally. The separation of states and markets that, from a contemporary viewpoint, appears natural can be traced to practices that emerged during the nineteenth century (Giddens, 1985: 135–6; Rosenberg, 1994: 126). Any discussion of the relationship between states and markets is putting back together what was once an organic whole.

This chapter examines the relationship between states and markets over the last century and a half, since the emergence of the first stage of globalization. Its goal is to demonstrate the extensive entanglements through which logics of rule and gain have been sustained. In keeping with the remit of this volume, it shows that these entanglements are not random, but structured. They are also laden with power asymmetries. In this way, the chapter both builds upon and extends insights from global history into international relations (IR) and historical sociology.

Introduction

Since the 1990s, the concept of ‘globalization’ – usually understood as the increasing economic, social and cultural integration of world regions – has become a leitmotif for popular and scholarly narratives of global social change in modernity (Eckel, 2018). The history of global economic integration is commonly narrated as forming two great ‘waves’ in the later nineteenth and later twentieth centuries, interspersed by an era of ‘deglobalization’ characterized by two world wars and the formation of autarchic economic ‘blocs’ (Chase-Dunn et al, 2000; Bordo et al, 2003). Theorists working in a Marxian worldsystems tradition have similarly associated two eras of stable capitalist globalization with the presence of strong economic and military hegemons: the British Empire in the nineteenth century and the United States in the twentieth (Arrighi, 1994).

This model of globalization as a homogeneous absolute – something that is either present or absent, rising or falling – obscures more than it reveals. As Stefan Link has argued, arguments that claim similarities between a ‘first’ and ‘second’ era of globalization – and thereby imply that our present ‘deglobalization’ will terminate in a bloody conflagration on the scale of World War II – understate the extent to which ‘different periods of globalization have relied on distinctive political and institutional architectures’. What is required is a more granular account of the ‘politics of globalization’ – one capable of appreciating the variety of ‘structured engagement’ between polities of all kinds and ‘foreign trade and capital’ (Link, 2018: 347).

States and markets, George Lawson tells us in the present volume, have been mutually constituted. The broadening and deepening of global economic integration has been enabled by state action, just as states have been empowered – and constrained – by the expansion of markets to a global scale. Drawing on Chapter 5 by Julian Go, we might further observe that the structure of the global political field was transformed by decolonization after the mid-twentieth century. The ‘reglobalization’ of the world economy after 1945 occurred in connection with the elaboration of an international, as opposed to an inter-imperial, understanding of a legitimate global order. Taking the mutual constitution of states and markets seriously must mean, therefore, that we examine the interactions between the basic structures of the international system and those of the global economy.

This chapter addresses what states can do, and what powers international organizations can have

Chapter 13 simultaneously rehabilitates and provincialises British imperialism. Rehabilitating the dark side of empire counters the Eurocentric conception of the ‘benign British civilizing mission’ while provincializing empire counters Eurofetishism's and Indian nationalism’s reification of European hyper-agency and power and their side-lining of Indian and Asian agency. Overall, it focusses on the combination of Western and non-Western agency in the making of the modern capitalist second global economy (SGE). It begins by problematizing the Eurofetishist/Indian nationalist thesis concerning the imperial de-industrialization of India's (as well as China's) cotton industry, arguing that Indian and Chinese peasants retained considerable agency and maintained the handicraft sector throughout the nineteenth- and well into the twentieth-century. The second and third sections highlight the ‘multicultural contact zone’ wherein the entangled agencies of Europeans and Asians converged to produce the SGE after about 1850. I highlight the agential roles of the Parsis, Kachchhis, Gujaratis, Omanis and Chinese and, albeit more briefly, the Nattukottai Chettiars, Sindworkies, Vāniyās, Multānīs and Shīkārpūris, as they interacted either relatively autonomously or with the British. The final section focuses on the symbiotic convergence of the Asian transcontinental bazaar with the European capitalist world-economy in the making of the SGE.

After the turbulence and volatility of the 1990s and the beginning of the 2000s, the period between 2002 and mid-2007 witnessed significantly high and relatively stable growth in the Turkish economy. The AKP's solution to the ongoing economic problems was entirely in line with the IMF-backed reform package devised by Kemal Derviş, the economy chief of the preceding coalition government. The AKP took the necessary measures to reinstate the faith of the country's long list of creditors by pledging allegiance to a programme approved by major international financial institutions. Several macroeconomic reforms introduced by Derviş as a response to the 2001 crisis were important in this respect. Public finances and the government's budget deficit were kept under control as a result of Derviş's reforms. The role of the Central Bank of the Republic of Turkey and the Banking Regulation and Supervisory Authority was increased and they were allowed to operate more independently of the government. Several revisions of banking laws strengthened the regulatory and supervisory framework to bring the practice of Turkish banks closer to international standards, in particular to European best practices. The capital requirement for Turkish banks was set at 12 per cent, which was even higher than the minimum requirement decided by Basel III, the international regulatory framework for banks,1 in order to minimize financial risks. At the end of 2001, the government injected $22 billion into the market through the Savings Deposit Insurance Fund to enhance the capital structure of state banks. Also, government securities held by private Turkish banks were exchanged for dollar-denominated bonds to help banks cover their negative foreign exchange positions.

Once in power, the AKP government stuck with these reforms and pursued policies that were directly in line with the 2001 reform agenda, which came to be known as “regulatory neoliberalism”. The AKP government adopted a strong reformist orientation, which fitted the requirements of the mainstream neoliberal reform agenda. A strong economic performance was helped by a favourable global liquidity environment that enabled Turkey to attract large inflows of short-term and long-term foreign capital in the first part of the 2000s. Turkey's growth in this period was ranked the third highest in the world, after China and India.

Independence to 1970s

In the 1920s, less than 25 per cent of Turkey's population lived in urban centres with more than 5,000 inhabitants. The industry inherited from the Ottoman Empire was extremely weak, almost non-existent. The proportion of those living in either rural or urban areas remained little changed until after the Second World War, but rapid urbanization has happened since then. The proportion of the population living in urban centres had increased to 44 per cent by 1980 and to 68 per cent by 2005. Rapid urbanization also meant large movements within the labour force. Agriculture's share of total employment figures declined from about 80 per cent in 1913 to 34 per cent in 2005, whereas industry's share rose from about 9 to 23 per cent during the same period, and that of services increased from 11 to 43 per cent. Before the late 1970s, Turkey was considered an agricultural powerhouse that could feed its own people without any agricultural imports, and even exported some agricultural surplus. Similarly, agriculture's share of GDP declined from about 55 per cent in 1913 and 54 per cent in 1950 to 11 per cent in 2005. Industry's share of GDP increased from about 13 per cent in 1913 to 26 per cent in 2005, and the share of services increased from 34 to 64 per cent during the same period.

A decade of war beginning with the Balkan wars in 1912 had resulted in a dramatic 20 per cent decline in population and a more than 40 per cent decline in per capita income before the establishment of the Republic of Turkey in 1923. The gap between the high-income countries of Western Europe and the United States and the developing economies in the world widened considerably during the century before the First World War due to the rapid industrialization that took place in the countries in the former group. GDP per capita in the area within the present-day borders of Turkey was around $1,200 in 1913, less than 30 per cent of the level of GDP per capita in the high-income countries of Western Europe and the United States at that time.

If the 2013 Taksim Gezi protests were a turning point for the regime's relations with its urban population, what happened three years later on the night of 15/16 July almost became a breaking point for the survival of the regime. On that night, a section of the Turkish military, calling themselves the Peace at Home Council (Yurtta Sulh Konseyi), attempted to take power from the government of Recep Tayyip Erdoğan and the AKP via a coordinated operation in several major cities. Although all indications suggest that they came very close to their objective, they were ultimately defeated. Turkish fighter jets dropped bombs on their own parliament building, and the head of the joint chiefs of staff, Hulusi Akar, was kidnapped by his own security detail. For several hours, it looked as if the Turkish Republic was going to encounter the fourth shattering military coup in its 93-year history. While rockets slammed into the Grand National Assembly building in Ankara, plotters tried to detain the president as he holidayed in a resort on the Aegean. But he had left and the coup was thwarted by civilians and soldiers loyal to him. Erdoğan was evacuated to İstanbul, and the phone call from his plane urging people on to the street was the decisive moment in defeating the coup attempt (Lowen 2016). When the fateful night was over, when the coup-plotters were finally defeated, more than 250 people had been killed and 2,194 injured (Filkins 2016).

The Turkish government pointed the finger at the Turkish dissident, Fethullah Gulen for the failed coup attempt. Gulen, a cleric, businessman and cult leader who had lived in self-imposed exile in the United States since 1999, was, and continues to be, the leader of a pervasive and influential Islamist movement known as “Hizmet” (Service), which owns foundations, associations, media organizations, universities and schools in Turkey and many other countries. During the first decade of AKP rule, Gulen was a close ally of Erdoğan, and during the AKP's struggle to end the military's influence in Turkish politics, Gulen's movement played a major role as the strong arm of the government. Throughout this period, the AKP–Gulen alliance turned into their direct staffing of many public positions. The AKP and Gulenists shared an interest in finding a place for Islam in public life.

Chapter 4 also focuses on the Afro-Indian pivot of the FGE by highlighting interconnections between African slavers, consumers/prosumers and Indian cotton textile trade/production in the making of the FGE. The first section brings the power and agency of African slavers to the fore, revealing how they were able to negotiate with the European slavers from a position of equality and often strength. The Africans had developed a vast infrastructure and knowledge pool in their dealings with the Muslims since the seventh century when the Islamic slave trade first emerged in Africa. Critically, the Africans preferred Indian cotton textiles (ICTs) to the Manchester ‘fustians’ right through to the latter part of the eighteenth century. This reflected the strength of Gujarati Indian merchants and the weakness of their British counterparts. The chapter also interrogates fundamentalist postcolonialism's ‘anti-racist refusal’ to recognise the power and agency of the African slavers. Finally, the chapter reveals the entangled agencies of the African slavers and prosumers along with the Gujarati Indian textile merchant capitalists. The latter formed symbiotic bonds with African middlemen (Vashambadzi and Patamares) which, inter alia, gave Indian merchants a considerable advantage over the Portuguese.