Inclusion and Exclusion in International Ordering: An Interview with Glenda Sluga

The image of two men, sitting awkwardly across each other in a solemn conference table, suddenly sprouted everywhere in my Twitter feed last winter. As a terrifying war erupted over competing visions of eastern Europe’s place in the international order, this somewhat surreal picture of the rulers of France and Russia conferencing offered little respite. It was precisely at this time that I had the pleasure to converse with the incoming Toynbee Prize Foundation President Glenda Sluga about her most recent monograph The Invention of International Order: Remaking Europe after Napoleon (Princeton University Press). As the so-called international order comes under increasing pressure in Ukraine and beyond, Sluga’s timely book invites us to engage with the “two centuries of multilateral principles, practices, and expectations” to understand the promises and limits of our contemporary arrangements (p. xi). It places the recent meeting between Macron and Putin in the context of the rise and consolidation of “a new professional, procedural, and bureaucratic approach to diplomacy, based on the sociability of men” (p. 6). After all, our modern notions of international “politics” or “society” were forged in the aftermath of a previous European-wide conflagration that had France and Russia at its helm: the Napoleonic wars.

Sluga’s account does not aim to blindly celebrate nor to categorically condemn this modern political imaginary of international ordering. Others have dismissed the post-Napoleonic diplomatic constellation as reactionary or have lauded it as protoliberal. Sluga, above all, is interested in questioning it. She invites us to: reflect on for whom this order has been built; push against the ways it narrows our perspective; and grapple with its inner tensions and contradictions (p. 282). At the heart of the book, I would suggest, lies a concern about the paradoxical record of European modernity: a project that “has offered an expansive horizon of political expectations but delivered a voice only for some” (p. 7). By taking women, non-Europeans, and “non-state” actors seriously as political agents, she shows how bankers, Jews, or ambassadrices were ironically crucial in the making of a system that came to exclude them from the historical record. And, unsurprisingly, these exclusions lead to tensions that threaten to upend international order from within and without—from 1821, 1848, or 1853 to 2022. In our conversation, we attempt to make sense of these paradoxes, contradictions, and ambiguities of international ordering.

—Daniel R. Quiroga-Villamarín, Graduate Institute Geneva

N.B.: this conversation was planned before the War in Eastern Europe erupted in February 2022 and before Professor Sluga was elected President of the Toynbee Prize Foundation.

Daniel Ricardo Quiroga Villamarín: I was wondering if you could tell us more about you came to this particular project. Of course, in the preface and acknowledgements you share some of your disappointments with the way women were portrayed in the traditional histories of the Congress of Vienna and beyond. But I was wondering if you could say more about the relationship of this monograph with some of your previous work on the histories of internationalisms (and especially illiberal internationalisms), which have been very influential for my own research agenda.

Glenda Sluga: I started working on The Invention of International Order before Internationalisms in the Age of Nationalisms (University of Pennsylvania, 2013), and my original motivation was, partly, related to the absence of women in the history of international politics and diplomacy. Occasionally the historiography gives us some clues to this theme: for example, Hilda Spiel (we must note, she is not recognized as a historian by the Austrians), who picks up on the presence of women at the Congress of Vienna. Women are both present and invisible, and that is a theme I've looked at for a long time.

Also, I was interested in the end of the Napoleonic Wars because it is often regarded as an early nineteenth century threshold moment, a turning point. Of course, the turning point is different depending on the literature you look at. In some cultural histories, the Congress of Vienna marks the shift from cosmopolitanism to nationalism. At that time, I was working on cosmopolitanism and nationalism; so, I thought, well, this is a good turning point to explore, let's see what happens. In this literature, cosmopolitanism is seen as part of an ancien régime world that nationalism eventually displaces as a model. As I worked on it, more and more, my research evolved into a larger project tied to the book that came out before this on histories of internationalism, chasing my more general interest in the history of “international” sites of politics.

Although we use the concept ‘international politics,’ I think we don't really think of it as a site of politics in the way we think of ‘nation spaces’ as political, as spaces where questions of democracy and rights are taken up where there is a broad engagement with a public. Within the international realm, it is usually only states—really men and government actors—that historians notice. What interests me is that once you start looking for women, it is clear that there was a broader public engagement with the questions taken up in what I call the politics between states, literally the international spaces which were imagined as political. So, it's not just about what the states amongst themselves discussed via their formal representatives, but actually a history of political spaces in which questions of representation, rights, morality, that one would expect to find more usually within the nation-state context, open up.

Although we use the concept ‘international politics,’ I think we don't really think of it as a site of politics in the way we think of ‘nation spaces’ as political, as spaces where questions of democracy and rights are taken up where there is a broad engagement with a public. Within the international realm, it is usually only states—really men and government actors—that historians notice. What interests me is that once you start looking for women, it is clear that there was a broader public engagement with the questions taken up in what I call the politics between states, literally the international spaces which were imagined as political. So, it's not just about what the states amongst themselves discussed via their formal representatives, but actually a history of political spaces in which questions of representation, rights, morality, that one would expect to find more usually within the nation-state context, open up.

So that's really what connects this book to my broader work on the history of internationalism: the idea that not only do you get these different political struggles going on in international spaces, but also that those spaces might constitute a kind of public sphere. To be sure, not a global public sphere, because that would presume that it's everywhere. But an international public sphere because it occurs in the space between states. I use the term international, because it's not anachronistic for the period. As we know, Bentham coined the term in English in the late 18th century; later, in the 1820s, he reflected on how the word had grown in popularity. It is also true that ‘international’ was not used very much in the documents I came across, so I thought it useful to designate international as a politics between states—to emphasize the politics part of it.

DRQV: If we talk about space ‘opening up,’ then the scale of ‘Europe’ becomes an important category as well. But before we get to that, I just want to follow up on what you said about this dichotomy between cosmopolitanism and nationalism. I really enjoy how your work presses against the learned dichotomies that I think historians, but especially international lawyers, have been taught. One that really seemed pivotal to me in your book is the dichotomy of ‘the republican/liberal’ versus the ‘monarchical/reactionary.’

I think your work shows very well how all these different actors of the post-Napoleonic moment are rare hybrids. You quote a quip from Metternich about how the Congress of Vienna is “floating between the present and the future” (p. 279). You even mention that in your book Germaine de Staël is seen as this monstrous hybrid of male and female. But the same is true for many of the other protagonists. Napoleon’s empire, of course, has refashioned many of the elements of the ancien régime. Germaine de Staël sees herself as a defender of moderate European liberties. Alexander I, who as you note rules over a “quasi-feudal” empire, became suddenly “the living symbol of Europe’s liberties” (p. 107). In turn, Metternich, who has retrospectively been cast as the architect of reaction, seems at first quite content with appeasing Napoleon after a dynastic marriage. Could you talk more about these strange hybrid constellations that show not only the “persistence of the ancien régime” but also the relevance of an ambiguous notion of “liberties” which exceed the contours of modern liberalism?

GS: If we go back to my interest in the Congress of Vienna (and the decade long history of peacemaking it has come to stand for) as a threshold, in fact, the closer one looks the more one sees that the “old” and the “new” are jostling together—as happens in any moment in history. The question, usually, is who wins out? The reactionaries or the progressives? If you think Vienna marks the break between cosmopolitanism and nationalism, then the progressives win because nationalism is understood to be more progressive than cosmopolitanism. But is it? The international society of states was actually associated with more “conservative” or ancien values in that period because it was inclusive—inclusive of the Ottoman Empire for example. A cosmopolitan ideal keeps returning—as the Kantian ideal, as the core of pacifism—in thinking about a more inclusive world, in the later 19th century concept of international solidarism, or even the 20th century projects of the League of Nations or the United Nations, etc.

So, I think that some of our conventional historiographical categories aren’t that helpful for understanding this period. They don't allow us to see the so-called conservative ancien règime actors who supported the potential for change, for example, or, alternatively, to remember that the modern nation state is constituted out of an exclusivist civilizational, gendered-ordering. Further, the kind of the ordering that goes on in that post-Napoleonic period continues Napoleonic reforms, such as the political principles of the Napoleonic Civil Code, etc.  If we go back to the period, Metternich, for example, not only accommodates Napoleon, he is very “modern” in other ways: he is very interested in science—in vaccines, for example—he is almost proto-Freudian in his psychological views of what's going on; he's also modern, because he is, in fact, a proponent of a modern gender order, where the masculine and feminine are separate spheres, and they're very clearly delineated in a bourgeois way. He was also taught by students of Kant, and he would become the representative of an idea of international society that, as I have mentioned, returns through the 19th century and the 20th century as emblematic of a liberal international order.

These examples highlight that our own understanding of a liberal international order has roots in historically specific moments, contexts, and challenges. I wanted to tackle the historiography that was, I felt, anachronistic in the sense that it was trying to impose a much later idea of a liberal international order—and of liberalism—on this period. Instead, I argue, the early 19th century idea of international order brings together world-views that we now tend to assume were very segregated and separate, but they were not. In sum, I'm just trying to probe some of the inconsistencies and anachronisms in our historical perspective on politics in the past, to show that it's much more complicated.

DRQV: I want to pause for a second on the notion of Europe. One ancien régime notion that does seem to disappear (or at least mutate) is the old dream of a Holy Roman Empire. Foucault once quipped that “Europe as a juridical-political entity, as a system and diplomatic and political security, is the yoke that the most powerful countries (of this Europe) imposed on Germany every time they tried to make it forget the dream of the sleeping emperor” (Security, Territory, Populations p. 304). How do we make sense of the emergence of Europe and the fall from grace of this old age imaginary of Holy Roman Ordering?

GS: A concern that emerges after Vienna is how can states prevent France from starting a new war. The solution decided by the victors of the war against France is to build up larger states around French borders. Otherwise, you have these vulnerable little principalities all around the French border. So, the Holy Roman Empire’s replacement by a German federation becomes a strategic tool, especially as it allows the reintegration of the small political units comprising the former Holy Roman Empire into larger whole (ironically, on the model of Napoleon’s own ‘mediatization’ strategy). There is a moment where some of the figures who represented those smaller ancien principalities were eager to jump on the bandwagon of constitutions—even the revolutionary promise of representation, popular representation—in order to maintain their rights, their rights to taxation, and other forms of sovereignty, given they were facing political annihilation. Studying the principalities is interesting because, again, it shows the extent to which there were women there—as regents, queens, duchesses, princesses. They were sovereign rulers, sometimes de facto, but they were negotiating as sovereigns. So, the assumption that in the context of state actors there are only men isn't true. Some of the state actors of the former Holy Roman Empire are a good example of that.

DRQV: Of course, one must not idealize the social worlds of the ancien régime (a danger that I see in many contemporary productions that revolve around the good graces of aristocratic life). But something that becomes clear from your book is that one of the processes happening is the erosion of a long rooted “relatively diverse aristocratic cosmopolitan brotherhood” (p. 21). Relatively seems to be doing a lot of work here, and I understand you refer to the ways in which this brotherhood also allowed for the equal participation of non-Christians (like the Ottomans) and of aristocratic women in the theatre of diplomacy. Your work highlights that the rise of a more bourgeois form of politics eventually excluded these set of actors through the creation of dichotomies between the public and the private, the imperial and the international, the political and the economical, and so on. So, I wanted to ask you more about that—who was included in this aristocratic cosmopolitan diplomatic social order?

GS: I would say that none of this is deterministic, in the sense that, I wouldn’t call the aristocratic world more inclusive structurally. However, we know that modernity is defined in terms of exclusivist border-drawing, bolstered by invocations of differences: race, gender, civilization, even class. Politics revolves around the delineation and the classification of these differences in ways that impact the relative political status of different groups. As we know, in the ancien régime context, of course, differences also mattered, not least between the aristocracy and everybody else. But in that aristocratic world, the existence of more ambiguous laws gave women of means more room to maneuver, for example. This is part of a gender history that is well known. Aristocratic women often had access to power or influence. Then you have the bourgeois women who in the early 19th century also exerted influence thanks to their wealth and accruing cultural/moral status. Germaine de Staël is a useful case study.  She was already in the aristocratic world because her father was the Minister of Finance for Louis XVI. But she was bourgeois and wealthy. Her marriage to a rather dim-witted and profligate Swedish diplomat is often attributed to the fact that it gave her a title—baroness. My point is not that women can do anything in the ancien world, but that they assumed public social roles that were decried in a bourgeois-identified 19th century. The relative status of women in ancien and bourgeois-defined societies is a topic of Germaine de Staël’s own writing (vedi her novel Corinne ou l’Italie). I wouldn't make any larger claims. Staël also laments the lack of transparency in that same ancien political order. She would argue that where you don't have a republic, or at the least a constitutional monarchy, you don't have any way of ensuring political transparency. She hardly advocated for the superiority of the pre-revolutionary political world into which she was born, although she was in fact able to maneuver in its more ambiguous cultural spaces. And then there was the foment of the Enlightenment and the Republic of Letters—an intellectual cultural milieu layered over and across the ancien setting that Staël would repeatedly engage to her preferred political ends.

DRQV: I want to zoom into the way you bring these women back into the narrative. I was reminded of one of your previous articles, “Add Women and Stir: Gender and the History of International Politics.” It’s a wonderful title, and you make a very interesting argument about how just adding woman and stirring might not be enough—that the way we add them changes our understanding of high politics. So, I was wondering if we can talk more about how that question of “adding woman and stirring” resonated with this monograph.

GS: If we go back to the historiography of gender and women, by the 1980s everyone had shifted away from ‘adding women’ to gender history, saying that adding and stirring wasn't enough. But actually, in the context of history of high politics, the ‘adding women’ phase was rather negligible. So, adding women because they were there seems to me crucial. Then once we do that, the next step is to examine what it requires you to change in the larger narrative, right? You have to stir women in and see if it changes the larger narrative. I think it does in really fundamental ways. One of those ways is that you discover a history of diplomacy in which women regard themselves as (informal) diplomats—whether as ambassadrices, wives of diplomats, or any many other ways in which they are able to exercise some kind of agency (for instance, writing reports, etc.). Another forgotten space in this history is the salon, in which women are the salonnières. The salon is a space in which diplomacy—as a cultural practice of negotiation and conversation—was actually practiced at a very high level. So, there is an argument for seeing women as forbearers of modern diplomacy and its ambitions. By the early 20th century, as I argue in the book, we are told that diplomacy is anything but the type of conversation that salonnières facilitated, right? But in fact, this lost salon lineage of female diplomacy seems to explain why of all the political roles that women can take in the modern era, the one that seems easiest for them to rise in, is within foreign ministries as Secretaries of State. The United States has had quite a number of female Secretaries of State on both sides of the political fence, even though a female President is harder to imagine and elect. That is true in other countries as well. I do wonder whether this phenomenon is related in some way to this longer gender history of women’s diplomacy. So, once you “add women in and you stir,” you see that there's a different genealogy for international politics and diplomacy. You also see the extent of engagement of a broader public with the potential of this politics between states. I felt that stirring the women back in, in this context, allowed me to tell new stories about the long history of international and diplomatic thinking.

This lost salon lineage of female diplomacy seems to explain why of all the political roles that women can take in the modern era, the one that seems easiest for them to rise in, is within foreign ministries as Secretaries of State.

DRQV: This leads me to a question about the structure of your book. I found fascinating how your chapters interweaved structural and personal analysis. Could you tell us more about how you came to this approach? How does it allow you to integrate the biographies of Staël, Sagan, Eynard, Krüdener, and Lieven (among others) into the wider transformations you are mapping?

GS: Originally, this book was just going to be chapters on individual women. And I thought one of the problems was that it would “add women” but not stir them back in. Instead, I decided to alternate the story of individual women with chapters that provided thematic contexts, to understand why these individual lives took the form they did, and engage with the significance that these individual lives had for the broader stories told about the history of diplomacy, humanitarianism, or religion, or even the history of even international finance. So, I wanted to do both of those things.

I believe that there's a bigger story here, too, that has come to mind recently, because of the debate that's going on around Ukraine. One debate we are having is Mearsheimer versus Kotkin, the structural reasons why it's the West's fault, versus the structural reasons why Russia has always been this way, and then criticisms that none of these theories allows for valid agency. With my set of individuals, I wanted to stress agency, but also to capture change over the long term. My account tries to understand what changes and to what extent; by looking at individuals I wanted to examine how change takes place, particularly because these individuals were such important agents in the longue durée history of the invention of international order. The correspondence between the Duchess of Sagan and Metternich that takes place in the course of the last years of the war and then at the Congress of Vienna is so striking because there they are negotiating, it seems to me very clearly, their public concerns about politics—who can do politics in this space between states? What is politics for? What are the gendered dynamics of politics? They are negotiating on this very private level of intimate correspondence. So, their relationship also helped me understand the different levels at which transformation was taking place. The famous history of this period, Paul W. Schroeder's The Transformations of European Politics emphasizes transformation (which he argues was not immediate not clear cut, which I agree with). But I also want to highlight that these transformations took place on private as well as public levels, among women as well as men, and between them.

Then there is the European dimension—which takes us back to your point, about how this international history is really at this point a European history. This is not because it involves only European countries, but rather because it is the moment in which Europe as a category is being defined in a particular way. In some accounts Russia is at the heart of this new idea of a post-Napoleonic, even liberal Europe. So how does it get displaced? Even when Russia is included in Europe, there is this suspicion among the other delegates of self-consciously European empires (including Britain) about its inherent difference. Then, of course, we have the Ottoman Empire, which over the course of peacemaking, and then the first half of the 19th century “Concert of Europe,” gets moved to the margins as the antithesis of Europe, a subaltern actor in this emerging international space. At the end of the Napoleonic Wars, a small number of European empires assume power and impose their own understanding of Europe on the whole continent. It is true now too, even though the actors change. If you think of the United Nations Security Council, the formula still remains: a small group of powerful empires contribute to the invention of a set of rules that they then exempt themselves from following.

DRQV: Definitively, and that is why is why, as reading your book, I was thinking that all the debates around Eastern Europe today are a very sad reminder of how questions about inclusion and exclusion still haunt us, in many ways.

There are many things I could take from your response, but perhaps I would like now to turn to your sources. You just mentioned you were working with correspondence—in this case from Metternich and Sagan. Could you talk more about the challenges of these primary sources? Because I think it's also a very interesting that ‘adding and stirring women’ also forces us to displace the traditional sources of diplomatic history, at least to a degree. In the book you mentioned that while all these different diplomats were captivated by the ‘scriptomania’ of the post-Napoleonic settlement (p. 253). And yet, we often only look at the memoirs or papers of male actors. The same is of course true for the official narratives are preserved in state archives. So how did you bring these “private sources” back into the narrative?

GS: I've always been interested in juxtaposing archives that are not commonly brought together. I think that this is a really important thing to do in history—to move out of the fixed space of the state archives that animates the historiography of international politics to see what happens. In this case, it was easier than one would expect. In this period, a lot of the women that I do look at all have personal papers that are quite extensive, either because of who they were married to, or because they were themselves famous at the time. We just forgot about them afterwards. And then, understanding how they disappeared is just as important in terms of detective work. Why did we forget them? Why did historians write them out if they were famous at the time?

In any case I started with the Foreign Office collections (the French, the British, the Austrian, Genevan, and some of the published Russian and Prussian papers). It was also interesting to find that women were there—at least in some contexts. Because I also relied on personal papers, I could tell that there were conversations going on that weren't then reported back or that were edited out of the Foreign Office papers. Then some of the women were there in code because they were regarded as threats. I looked too at intercepted letters—there was a lot of interception of letters going on around the Congress. I discovered many of these letters were from women to other women, as well as from women to their husbands and husbands to their wives and sisters and family.

Of course, I went to the main people who have always been studied, like the Tsar, Castlereagh, Humboldt, and Metternich. Once I looked at their letters, I found that they were writing the whole time to their families and their wives. Then I started looking at more minor figures as well. In a way that isn’t true for now, letters were everywhere! One can use them in such illuminating ways. It seemed to me they really bring to life the period and allow you to get inside the minds of these people. Now of course, letters were also written under conditions of censorship. Sometimes that meant that actors would use false names or that they would post the letters to a third party. Sometimes it meant that they didn't talk about everything. Then people censored themselves. But that's also important and interesting to track. There's no shortage of sources. It's so exciting in that way.

DRQV: When you juxtaposed these official archives and informal private letters, I was captivated by the division between the formal and informal, partially because as I mentioned, my current project really revolves around the formal spaces of international conferences. I was wondering if we could talk more about those informal spaces that might still be exclusively male. Because in a way, you juxtapose the kind of formal male spaces with the more kind of informal gender fluid spaces. I was wondering if, while working on this project, you registered anything on male, yet informal, spaces. I was thinking of the army, the “men in horseback,” or the spa diplomacy that would later become so central in the 19th century.

GS: That’s true. In the context of the Congress there were a lot of dinners to which women weren't invited. That happens especially when men are on the move. But I did notice that in the first few years of postwar peacemaking, the men came to feel uneasy when women (their wives, other wives) weren’t there to oil the wheels of sociability. It was assumed that diplomacy worked better when women were around creating the social world. Staël is so useful for this history too. In her history of this period—which she lived through, she is a witness of this history—she discusses the changing nature of the salon. Her argument is that Napoleon tried to transform the female salon into a formal male space of diplomacy. He tried to prevent women from having salons related to foreign policy, and men within the foreign ministry were tasked with taking over this role. In some ways this mirrored a transformation already underway in Britain during this same period in terms of the shifting role of the ambassador's wife, who was no longer an independent actor, but had to help her husband run events. That is very modern. Into the 20th century, the wife is the hostess who supports the man's events. But Staël protested Napoleon’s attempt to “modernize” diplomatic spaces in this gendered way.

I think you're right, there's a bigger history to be read here in a way that parallels what happens in national contexts, with the rise of dining societies, especially all-male dining societies. Before and after this period, these emerged as sites maintaining wartime relationships and networks and giving voice to the ambitions of middle-class men, even in times of peace. Sometimes, the women complained about not being invited. And of course, in the British context, Staël had long noticed the difference with regard to sociability in England: even when women were invited, after dinner, men would go to the smoking room and women would go to a different room. So, there was a separation of spheres going on, symptomatic of a modernized new bourgeois world.

DRQV: I now wanted to shift gears a little bit to the question of religion. I know it’s not very far away—we have already talked about how gender history has revealed the ways in which the bourgeois imagination connected women with religion in the modern era (I am thinking in particular of the work of Joan W. Scott). But one of the passages that made me chuckle was your account of a dinner between Alexander I, Metternich, and Krüdener, in which she leaves an extra dinner setting as a courtesy for Christ (p. 202). Indeed, as you put it, “[r]eligious principles and imperatives sit like a carbuncle on the surface of an international history conventionally told as the story of progress to a modern ‘rules-based’ politics and diplomacy” (p. 188). How are we to make sense of the fact that the allegedly “secular and modern” way of diplomacy was less open to the participation of non-Christians than the ancien régime tradition based on divine right?

GS: Well, the first thing I want to argue is that Russia was not as exceptional as we think it was. There is an historical literature that suggests the Tsar was different from the British or the French because he was more religious. In this view, his attempt to create a Holy Alliance was a sign of how out of sync he was with more secular modern view of politics between states of the British and Western Europeans. But so much of what was happening was embedded in religion. You don't have legal documents that invoke the authority of contracting parties until the 20th century. In this period, contracts invoke God, divine will, and constitutional monarchies embedded in religious authority. We have tended to forget that the political world was still culturally religious in many ways.

There is an historical literature that suggests the Tsar was different from the British or the French because he was more religious. In this view, his attempt to create a Holy Alliance was a sign of how out of sync he was with more secular modern view of politics between states of the British and Western Europeans. But so much of what was happening was embedded in religion. You don't have legal documents that invoke the authority of contracting parties until the 20th century. In this period, contracts invoke God, divine will, and constitutional monarchies embedded in religious authority. We have tended to forget that the political world was still culturally religious in many ways.

In fact, by the time you get to the mid-19th century, and the Congress of Paris (1856), which was meant to be a full-blown version of Congress of Vienna but better and more modern, some of the treaties that were getting enacted concerned religion. They were about taking away the right of the Russians to represent the Orthodox populations in the Ottoman Empire and giving that right—not getting rid of it—to the French and the British. They gave that authority over Christians more broadly, to the victors. And, at the same time, they removed any reciprocal right of the Ottomans to represent Muslims in Europe. All sorts of laws were enacted for the protection of Christian minorities, without reciprocity for non-Christians, Jews, Muslims, etc. And more dramatically, religion became a justified reason to have a war. Whereas in the years just after the Congress of Vienna or during the Congress system, religion could not be offered as a legitimate reason for intervention. Great Powers might intervene on economic grounds, or even on domestic grounds, but only rarely on religious grounds. The Tsar refused to use religious justifications and did not want to intervene in the Greek question in the Ottoman Empire until 1825, just before his death. That was clearly an important shift, so that the more you go into the 19th century —that is another paradox— the more religion became a justifiable extension of a humanitarian argument for political intervention in the interest of the dominant European empires.

DRQV: In this same vein of, let's say, reducing the distance between the liberal British and the reactionary religious Russians or Austrians. There was another passage that struck me towards the end of the book. It was Metternich’s confession that his preferred system of government would be constitutional monarchy with a female sovereign (p. 239). Do you think this account of the feminized sovereign resonates with how “bona fide liberals” in the United Kingdom (or even Republicans in Geneva or the United States) saw their own states?

GS: A couple of things about Metternich. First, I wonder if we can take him seriously in this context or if he was just toying with Sagan in their correspondence. Second, remember that in this correspondence he was clearly saying that women shouldn’t do politics. In a way, the message he was sending Sagan was “my old girlfriend did politics and I got rid of her, you should just do humanitarianism.” I'm not sure what Metternich’s statement says about any structural capacity of a cosmopolitan order to incorporate women. Yet it is also true that ancien cosmopolitanism is in stark contrast to the modern republican view of politics—where you couldn't imagine a female sovereign; actually, you could barely imagine a female citizen until the 20th century! The Republic was made up of male citizens, even when women sponsored them. I mean, we know that the history of modern politics is a history of the exclusion of women, who have to then fight for the right to be considered a political subject/citizen, because the political imaginary fostered by the French Revolution is quite powerfully masculine. The Republic is a republic of males. This same history of course concerns the exclusion of racially differentiated individuals who have to fight for political rights and have to shift dominant civilizational imaginaries.

DRQV: I would like to conclude with a last question. As of now, we have a (not very productive) debate raging between some international lawyers and historians about the differences between our fields, methods, and research protocols. One of the straw persons mobilized by some lawyers in the debate is that historians are largely antiquarians concerned only with the reconstruction of an objective past through the study of truthful primary materials (I am thinking here specially of Anne Orford’s recent book). In your book, chapter 16 offers a powerful counterargument against this straw person argument. You convincingly show that our accounts of international history are neither “objective” nor that the choice (or availability) of sources responds to any modernist idea of truth, as the political exclusion of women from diplomacy also entailed their removal from the historical record. Could you take more about how your work exposes from of the blind spots of academic history’s protocols of “remembering” (p. 257)?

GS: I do find this image of the modern historian as a chronicler strange. I chose to conclude with an emphasis on the paradoxes of history and the lack of a consensus about the political use of the past in the present. I hoped that focusing on paradox would allow us to better navigate anachronistic views of the past. Most importantly, for me at least, I wanted to show that at the end of the Napoleonic wars, two hundred years ago, individuals (state and non-state actors) tried to intervene with great enthusiasm and ferocity in the emerging international site of politics. What was at stake was peace and prosperity. Their assumptions included the view that prosperity relied not just on the politics that takes place within states, but actually on the relationship between them. I hope that that is the most important lesson of my monograph. The efforts that people have made to utilize this space of the politics between states in a way that might produce a better world is crucial. I think that this is a project that we have abandoned in the 21st century. And really, in the midst of this war, one of the hardest but also urgent things to do is to imagine a post-war peace—that is a better international order than the one that led to this.

DRQV: That would be a very uplifting note to finish on. Just before we do, I wanted to ask you if can tell us more about the connections between this monograph and your current project on “Twentieth Century Economic Thinking”? Of course, there are some strong connections between your chapters on Credit & Commerce and International Finance with the current international economic order.

GS: At the forefront of this new project, I am concerned with the space of politics between states. In the 20th century, as you know, we had the growth of all these international organizations—spaces where not just informal diplomacy took place, but also international thinking. I am interested in what ideas one finds there, particularly among women, again. In fact, women tend to be in these international spaces because they could not have representational jobs in national spaces for much of the 20th century. So, they turned to international organizations for rights and representation. But they also went there for meetings and for jobs. So, I'm now interested in the 20th century, in how women who were interested in economics, broadly, ended up in these institutions, what they did and thought, what influence they had. Not just women, although that is one of the connections of the new project with The Invention of International Order. I am now looking at women specifically as economists working in international organizations, and their ideas.

So, our project is really trying to say international economic history is not just about globalization—and globalization is not just the product of neoliberal strands of thinking. Quinn Slobodian’s work and others have shown us how ordo/neo/liberals engaged with international organizations from the League and after. I'm also looking at how businesses were involved in really fundamental ways in the early period of global environmental governance (in particular in how they were brought in by the UN). So, all kinds of non-state actors and the roles they've taken—for better or for worse—and the influence they have had are part of this international economic history, continuing the examination of non-state actors, their engagement in this space, and pulling out one of the threads woven into The Invention International Order, about the relationship of economic and political spheres. I am trying to reconnect these spheres in this international realm and see what new views onto the past we get, a new way of understanding how we got here, and where we are.