Thread by @ProfPaulPoast

Great discussion of when the phrase "Liberal International Order" appeared in the scholarly literature.

Prompts a broader question: when did folks [policy makers, academics, journalists] start using the phrase "International Order"?

[THREAD]

https://twitter.com/nils_gilman/status/1208553789533257735

For the sake of review, why do we care about this question? Because we've seen these phrases -- LIO and "international order" -- used A LOT over the past couple years

For those not aware of the debate, see this @DuckofMinerva post from 2018:

duckofminerva.com/2018/10/what-m…

To gain a sense of the use of the phrase "Liberal International Order", I turned to @Google Ngram.

books.google.com/ngrams

I first looked up "Liberal International Order" from 1940 to the present. As you can see, it pretty much is non-existent until the mid-1970s

Then I looked at variations of "Liberal International Order". They tend to track together, with "Liberal Order" being the most common phrase (and appearing earlier in the 1940s). But, again, not much prior to the 1970s.

Same if you go back to 1800

Those searches were form "Liberal Order". If you look at any use of the phrase, including lower case "liberal" and lower case "order", then the phrase does appear quite frequently in the 19th century

But I suspect that the phrase's use in the 19th Century was in reference to "internal" liberalism, such as the 1832 Reform Act in Britain (and, hence, the spike in the use of the phrase in the 1830s).

nationalarchives.gov.uk/education/poli…

All of the above is consistent with what @nils_gilman found in Jstor.

But what about the more general concept, "international order"?

This phrase does have some notable pre-1940 usage, but not pre-1900.

@bentleyballan found a similar trend in the Foreign Relations of the United States document series

https://twitter.com/bentleyballan/status/1208730842589212672

Who was using that phrase? Well, the late spike in the 1910's should give a hint.

You guessed it: Woodrow Wilson!

Most notably, the phrase appears in his February 11, 1918 address to a joint session of Congress

history.state.gov/historicaldocu…

Reading the address, Wilson uses the phrase “new international order” to contrast his idea for how to organize international relations with the OLD European balance of power system (as embodied in the Congress of Vienna/Concert of Europe)

This is consistent with the argument found in N. Gorden Levin's classic 1968 work, "Woodrow Wilson and World Politics"
amazon.com/Woodrow-Wilson…

Wilson wanted to offer an alternative to the old balance of power system of the European empires.

Never mind that the US was itself an Empire (h/t @dimmerwahr)

books.google.com/books?id=e16RD…

Of course, someone else also had a vision for an alternative to the European imperial balance of power system

Gordon argues that Wilson viewed the League of Nations as an alternative to both the imperial balance of power and the bolshevik spread of revolution.

Wilson's skepticism (fear?) of Bolshevism is found in these minutes from a January 1919 meeting of the Supreme War Council (heading into the Paris Peace Talks)

history.state.gov/historicaldocu…

Indeed, this is partially why the US sent forces to intervene in the Russian Civil War

books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr…

For more on the historical origins of the concepts "international order" and "liberal international order", Glenda Sluga (@Sydney_Uni) offers a nice overview in this @E_IR piece

e-ir.info/2017/05/22/the…

In sum, the phrase (if not the concept) "international order" is, like many ideas in IR, a product of WWI. Its explicit melding with "liberal" came a bit latter.

Whether the international system was ever "ordered" or "liberal" is a separate (& ongoing) discussion 😉

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