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Owen Lattimore and Nicholas John Spykman, Who Contributed to Shaping the Pluralistic Nature of International Studies in the United States During the 1940S

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Owen Lattimore and Nicholas John Spykman, Who Contributed to Shaping the Pluralistic Nature of International Studies in the United States During the 1940S City Research Online City, University of London Institutional Repository Citation: Rosenboim, O. (2015). Geopolitics and empire: visions of regional world order in the 1940s. Modern Intellectual History, 12(2), pp. 353-381. doi: 10.1017/S1479244314000547 This is the accepted version of the paper. This version of the publication may differ from the final published version. Permanent repository link: https://openaccess.city.ac.uk/id/eprint/18393/ Link to published version: http://dx.doi.org/10.1017/S1479244314000547 Copyright: City Research Online aims to make research outputs of City, University of London available to a wider audience. Copyright and Moral Rights remain with the author(s) and/or copyright holders. URLs from City Research Online may be freely distributed and linked to. Reuse: Copies of full items can be used for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-profit purposes without prior permission or charge. Provided that the authors, title and full bibliographic details are credited, a hyperlink and/or URL is given for the original metadata page and the content is not changed in any way. City Research Online: http://openaccess.city.ac.uk/ [email protected] 1. Introduction The study of international relations is concerned, explicitly and implicitly, with the category of space. The geographic space, its perceptions and representations, provide a fundamental and intriguing conceptual framework for understanding and analyzing international relations. Yet as the political scientist Harvey Starr suggested in his 2013 ISA presidential address, International Relations scholars ignore the notion of ‘space’, misinterpret it as deterministic, or dismiss it as irrelevant to their analysis.1 Starr’s proposal of taking the concept of ‘space’ more seriously applies also for historians of international thought: in this article I propose to trace back the role spatial categories, in particular geopolitics, played in shaping 1940s international thought. I will discuss two geopolitical theories to explore how interpretations of political space informed American ideas of postwar world order. In the early 1940s American international thinkers used spatial concepts to outline the postwar political map, and envisage the role of the United State in it. Geopolitics, which they understood as the dynamic, ever-changing interaction between political government writ-large and natural geography, provided both research questions and interpretative tools. Since the approach to geopolitics that many promoted rejected the static, deterministic and immutable perception of geography, I suggest that the term ‘dynamic geopolitics’ describes well their ideas of reciprocal influence of the human and the natural spheres. Wartime geopoliticians would have shared Starr’s view that “geography affects changing perceptions of the possibilities and probabilities provided by the geographic environment.”2 Spatial 1 Harvey Starr, ‘On Geopolitics: Spaces and Places’, International Studies Quarterly (2013) 1-7. 2 Ibid, 1. 1 representations and geographical perceptions revolving around a dynamic and complex notion of geopolitics were gaining popularity among scholars of world politics. However, as will be shown, geopolitics failed to make a long-lasting conceptual contribution to political science, or define the research aims of the nascent discipline of International Relations (IR).3 In what follows I return to two key figures in geopolitical thought, Owen Lattimore and Nicholas John Spykman, who contributed to shaping the pluralistic nature of international studies in the United States during the 1940s. Both identified in the war a unique potential for international change based on geopolitical relations. Taking as the starting point of my argument the assumption that implicit spatial representations in political thought derive from concrete experiences of a given society, I explore the spatial representations in their theories. 4 The intellectual links between geopolitical thought and world order suggests that ideas about political space formed an indispensable part of theorizing international relations in the 1940s. Their notions of political space offered an alternative to legal conception of internationalism, and a new way of imagining pluralism and diversity in world politics, particularly in relation to imperialism and regionalism. 5 3 The marginalization of geopolitics within international relations scholarship is evident in Starr’s call for its reintegration in the discipline’s conceptual toolbox: ‘It is important to stress that despite living in the interdependent, transnational, and globalized world of the twenty-first century, geographic factors such as territory and borders are still integral and meaningful elements of world politics.’ Ibid., 7. 4 Carlo Galli, Political Spaces and Global War (Minneapolis, 2010), 5. 5 Martti Koskenniemi, The Gentle Civilizer of Nations (Cambridge University Press, 2002); Martti Koskenniemi, From Apology to Utopia: The Structure of International Legal Argument (Helsinki, 1989); For an alternative account of the League of Nations and legal internationalism see Stephen Wertheim, ‘The League That Wasn’t: American Designs for a Legalist-Sanctionist League of Nations and the Intellectual Origins of International Organization, 1914–1920’, Diplomatic History 35 (2011), 797–836. 2 However, as the decade drew to a close the geopolitical visions of international relations lost favor with academic scholars and the general public alike, and were eventually left out of the canon of International Relations (IR) scholarship.6 At the end of the war this was far from predictable. Both Spykman and Lattimore held key academic positions in international studies departments in the United States, contributed to discussion of international affairs in scholarly journals and mass-distribution newspapers, and were appreciated by colleagues and politicians alike. Lattimore (1900-1989) was an American sinologist, who grew up in China and made its culture, politics and languages his expertise.7 Upon his return to the United States as a graduate student at Harvard College in 1928, he met with the prominent geographer Isaiah Bowman who became his academic patron.8 In 1939, Bowman, then president of Johns Hopkins University, appointed Lattimore as the director of the Walter Hines Page School of International Relations. At the same time, Lattimore acted as editor of Pacific Affairs, the journal of the Institute of Pacific Relations. These institutional links allowed him to advance his interdisciplinary vision for the study of international relations in the United States. Lattimore’s expertise was appreciated by the political establishment. In 1942 US President F. D. Roosevelt appointed him as advisor to Chiang Kai-shek in China. By then he was considered the foremost American expert on the 6 The history of the birth of International Relations as a discipline, and the hegemonic position of ‘realism’ within it is told in Nicolas Guilhot, The Invention of International Relations Theory (New York, 2011). See also Campbell Craig, Glimmer of a New Leviathan: Total War in the Realism of Niebuhr, Morgenthau, and Waltz (New York, 2003). 7 Robert P. Newman, Owen Lattimore and the ‘Loss’ of China (Berkeley, Calif., 1992), 6; Owen Lattimore, ‘Preface’, in Studies in Frontier History (London, 1962), 16. 8 On Bowman see Neil Smith, American Empire: Roosevelt’s Geographer and the Prelude to Globalization (Berkeley, Calif., 2003). 3 Far East, and an ‘American geopolitical masterhand’.9 Lattimore’s controversially optimistic attitude towards Soviet Russia encouraged Senator Joseph McCarthy to accuse him, in 1951, of Soviet espionage. Lattimore’s biographer argued persuasively that these accusations were false, and indeed Lattimore was fully acquitted, yet his reputation suffered a severe blow and in 1963 he relocated to University of Leeds, UK, where he founded the Mongolian Studies program. Nicholas John Spykman (1893-1944) was born in the Netherlands, and travelled extensively in Asia and the Middle East before emigrating to the United States. He earned his PhD from the University of California, Berkeley.10 Later, with Arnold Wolfers and Frederick Sherwood Dunn he founded the Yale Institute of International Studies (YIIS) where he promoted an interdisciplinary approach to international relations with emphasis on geography and geopolitics.11 Spykman's two bestselling books on international relations, America’s Strategy in World Politics (1942) and The Geography of Peace (published posthumously in 1944), won the praise of critics from academia and politics alike, including Isaiah Bowman. 12 Later, Spykman was mentioned among the masterminds of Containment Policy, and 9 The latter title was given by no other than German geopolitician Karl Haushofer, cited in Paul Wohl, "An American 'Geopolitical Masterhand.' ", Asia 41 (1941). 10 Kenneth W Thompson, Masters of International Thought: Major Twentieth-century Theorists and the World Crisis (Baton Rouge, 1980), 92; Nicholas J. Spykman, The Social Theory of Georg Simmel (New York, 1964). 11 The YIIS’s contribution to the development of IR in the United States has been well-shown in Paulo Jorge Batista Ramos, The Role of the Yale Institute of International Studies in the Construction of the United States Security Ideology, 1935-1951 (unpublished Ph.D. thesis, University of Manchester, 2003). 12 Nicholas J Spykman, The Geography of the Peace (Hamden, Conn., 1944); Nicholas John Spykman, America’s Strategy
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