{"title":"The World in Blocs: Leo Amery, the British Empire and Regionalist Anti-internationalism, 1903–1947","authors":"Liane Hewitt","doi":"10.1017/S1740022822000262","DOIUrl":null,"url":null,"abstract":"Abstract A new liberal international order was born in 1918. Many rejected this regime embodied by the League of Nations and attempts to restore free trade. Among the critics were a host of European ‘regionalists’ who envisioned a world organized into federal super-states. They feared that geopolitical hegemony would soon belong to territorially contiguous super-states, such as the US and the Soviet Union. If the historiography has focused on the varieties of interwar internationalism, it has underplayed the extent of this regionalist challenge. This paper proposes to take seriously the dialectic between internationalist and regionalist visions of world order by charting the half-century political career of British imperialist and statesman Leopold Amery: from his lifelong campaign for British imperial economic union organized around preferential tariffs, through to his fervent critique of both the League and post-1945 American internationalism. Amery’s exploits demonstrate that one of the most significant revolts against the liberal international order originated not only from the revisionist powers—the USSR, Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and Imperial Japan—but also from the supposed heartland of liberal internationalism itself: the British Empire.","PeriodicalId":46192,"journal":{"name":"Journal of Global History","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":1.7000,"publicationDate":"2022-12-19","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":"0","resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":null,"PeriodicalName":"Journal of Global History","FirstCategoryId":"98","ListUrlMain":"https://doi.org/10.1017/S1740022822000262","RegionNum":1,"RegionCategory":"历史学","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":null,"EPubDate":"","PubModel":"","JCR":"Q1","JCRName":"HISTORY","Score":null,"Total":0}
引用次数: 0
Abstract
Abstract A new liberal international order was born in 1918. Many rejected this regime embodied by the League of Nations and attempts to restore free trade. Among the critics were a host of European ‘regionalists’ who envisioned a world organized into federal super-states. They feared that geopolitical hegemony would soon belong to territorially contiguous super-states, such as the US and the Soviet Union. If the historiography has focused on the varieties of interwar internationalism, it has underplayed the extent of this regionalist challenge. This paper proposes to take seriously the dialectic between internationalist and regionalist visions of world order by charting the half-century political career of British imperialist and statesman Leopold Amery: from his lifelong campaign for British imperial economic union organized around preferential tariffs, through to his fervent critique of both the League and post-1945 American internationalism. Amery’s exploits demonstrate that one of the most significant revolts against the liberal international order originated not only from the revisionist powers—the USSR, Nazi Germany, Fascist Italy, and Imperial Japan—but also from the supposed heartland of liberal internationalism itself: the British Empire.
期刊介绍:
Journal of Global History addresses the main problems of global change over time, together with the diverse histories of globalization. It also examines counter-currents to globalization, including those that have structured other spatial units. The journal seeks to transcend the dichotomy between "the West and the rest", straddle traditional regional boundaries, relate material to cultural and political history, and overcome thematic fragmentation in historiography. The journal also acts as a forum for interdisciplinary conversations across a wide variety of social and natural sciences. Published for London School of Economics and Political Science