Leonie Holthaus

Experiments in international administration: The forgotten functionalism of James Arthur Salter

In this article, we reintroduce the political thought of James Arthur Salter (1881–1975), a British diplomat, politician, and university professor, who made a seminal contribution to the emergence of International Relations theory in the interwar years. His academic writings were informed by his professional engagement with the Allied Maritime Transport Council (AMTC) during the First World War and the technical branches of the League of Nations. Salter promoted a distinctly transgovernmental form of expert cooperation in international advisory bodies connected to national ministries. His vision of a depoliticised transnational expertocracy inspired various IR functionalists, not least David Mitrany. Salter suggested such forms of governance also for British national politics, drawing what we call here an ‘international analogy’. His work illustrates very well how the emergence of IR theory was connected to broader trends in political theory, in particular in efforts at adapting democracy to the increasing complexities of industrial modernity.

L.T. Hobhouse and the transformation of liberal internationalism

This article explores L. T. Hobhouses transformation of liberal internationalism at the beginning of the twentieth century. It argues that Hobhouses thought contributes to understanding dilemmas within the frame of liberal internationalism and the emergence of international functionalism. Using a philosophical approach, Hobhouse tackled international concerns throughout his life, alongside J. A. Hobson, Gilbert Murray, James Bryce, H. N. Brailsford, Norman Angell, and G. L. Dickinson. He restated a belief in human progress and association in ever-greater circles. But he noted, contra former hopes, that nationalism furthered democracy only briefly, and that liberal democracy remained incapable of bringing about effective international cooperation and moral universalism. In order to resolve this impasse, Hobhouse suggested substituting political with economic democracy on an international scale. The aim was to create an international functional organisation consisting of vocational and civic associations and states, which would allow individuals to entertain multiple, overlapping, and transnational loyalties. He thus anticipated proposals for global reform that became increasingly popular after the end of World War II. However, in spite of his concern with domestic social equality and his borrowing from international socialism, Hobhouse failed to qualify his internationalism with an analogous interest in equality.

David Mitrany and the Purposes of Functional Pluralism

In this chapter, I introduce David Mitrany as a theoretically well-versed thinker who developed the tenets of his thought through studies of South European history and pluralist democratic theory. I show that he qualified international theory with an interest in social equality and the maintenance of social pluralism to legitimate welfarist international organisation. He conceived of the International Labour Organization as a role model and argued that future international organisations should follow this example. I discuss to what extent his vision influenced the origins of the United Nations specialised agencies and distinguish between his functional pluralism and the more authoritarian realist functionalism of E.H. Carr.

Prussianism, Hitlerism, Realism: The German Legacy in British International Thought

The myth of the First Great Debate dominates the historiography of International Relations (IR). It maintains that realism evolved immediately before, during, and after the Second World War a s the critique of idealism, which it blamed for underestimating the analytical relevance of power in international relations as well as the importance of the international system’s anarchic structure. According to this myth, in other words, there is no continuity between idealism—sometimes called liberalism—and realism. The evolution of realism is cut off from ideological and cultural contexts and located in an apolitical, scientific, analytically focused realm. Since the 1990s and the “historiographical turn” in IR, a revisionist literature has questioned this disciplinary myth and the corresponding characterization of the origins of realism in the field (Bell 2001). But this revisionism has arguably only gone so far. There remains broad agreement that IR realism, as a self-conscious tradition, is of Anglophone origin, but gained wide support after the Second World War as a “discourse of disillusionment,” informed by German political theory and motivated by the attempt to understand the horror of German totalitarianism (Ashworth 2011; Bell 2010; Hobson 2012; Sylvest 2008).1

The Nineteenth Century and the Origins of Modern Democracy

In this chapter, I trace the intertwined origins of modern international relations and modern democracy back to the nineteenth century. I emphasise the transnational nature of the struggles for democracy and the burgeoning definition of democracy as representative democracy. To introduce the debates that preceded the emergence of pluralism, I focus on the ambiguous relationship between advocacy for democracy and nationalism, on Lord Acton’s stance on nationalism and representative democracy, and on the British critic of parliamentarianism at the turn of the century. I end by outlining how pluralist thinkers developed these themes.

G.D.H. Cole’s Wars: At the Homefront

In this chapter, I show that G.D.H. Cole referenced many socialist and republican sources of inspiration when he argued that not poverty but a lack of liberty was the most important democratic problem. I argue that Cole’s defences of democracy and his opposition to the reduction of democratic rights during the First Word War are most representative of pluralism. I pause on how Cole developed his case against conscription into a substantial critique of representative democracy and participatory democratic theory. His account of non-governmental organisations as forces of an emerging world society was an intrinsic part this nascent democratic theory. The German political theorist Carl Schmitt forcefully attacked but also misrepresented Cole’s pluralism. Still, Schmitt’s defences of ethnic homogeneity and Cole’s pluralism are antagonistic.

L.T. Hobhouse’s Qualification of the Democratic Peace Thesis

In this chapter, I map liberal internationalist influences upon L.T. Hobhouse’s thought and then illustrate how he qualified available ideas with an interest in democracy, civil society, and social differentiation. However, from an international perspective, Hobhouse allowed for a possible decline of democracy. In the context of the South African Wars (1898/1899), he diagnosed the end of democratic nationalism and saw democratic values threatened through the rise of a new materialistic and undemocratic form of nationalism in British society. Hobhouse revealed contradictions between liberal democratic principles and British imperialism and argued that a democratic minimum of socioeconomic equality was critical to the establishment of public opinion as a safeguard of peace.

Nationalism, Liberal Democracy, and the Prospects for International Cooperation

In this chapter, I highlight Hobhouse’s temporary abandonment of his pluralist perspective during a period in which he aligned his thought with the official declaration of Britain’s fight for democracy and against Prussianism during the First World War. However, after the war and in view of continuing nationalism in Britain and on the European continent, he furthered the development of pluralism when he recognised that democratic attitudes and deliberation depended on transnational loyalties as checks against democracy-destroying nationalism. Hobhouse did not ponder the causal impacts of democracy and transnationalism on peace in a mutually exclusive way. Instead, he thought about liberal democracy and transnationalism as complementary and envisioned the furtherance of democracy-enhancing transnational loyalties in a mixed international order consisting of states and societal associations.

Narratives of Democratic Decline and Reconstruction

In this chapter, I explore how G.D.H. Cole dealt with the end of the first wave of democratisation, declining chances of socialist mobilisation, and the great catastrophe of the twentieth century – fascist totalitarianism. I trace massive changes in Cole’s engagements back to his opposition to German fascism. He conceived of the Second World War as a necessary war, though he again opposed the wartime restrictions of democratic rights. Towards the war’s end, Cole was very concerned with the reconstruction of democracy and outlined how a European order might look after the moderation of nationalism and exaggerated understandings of national self-determination.

Twentieth-Century Representative Democracy and the Democratic Legitimacy of the United Nations

I begin this chapter by reviving David Mitrany’s critique of democratic welfare states. In this telling, citizens were accustomed to nationalist conceptions of political community and to the depoliticising effects of an uncontrolled bureaucracy. Pluralism’s earlier bearer of hope, European trade unions, stopped demanding further democratic participation and instead used their new position within the state to pursue sectional interests. Mitrany shifted his attention to non-governmental organisations and theorised functional participation and representation as a means to redemocratise the welfare state and United Nations (UN) specialised agencies such as the Food and Agriculture Organization or the World Bank. Mitrany was highly sceptical of the development discourse and the rise of modernisation theory amongst UN officials and the top-down managed reform of African and Asian states.