Against the liberal order: The Soviet Union, Turkey, and statist internationalism, 1919-1939

Abstract

Against the Liberal Order is a history of interactions between the interwar Soviet Union and early Republican Turkey, and it documents a distinctly state-led international politics. It begins in the aftermath of the First World War, when the victorious Allies sought to build an interconnected world with connections regulated by Western-led multilateral organizations. In this formative moment, the most prominent challengers to the new liberal order were Soviet and Turkish revolutionaries. As Mustafa Kemal Atatürk took up arms in 1920 to overturn the terms of the Paris Peace Conference, Vladimir Lenin provided military and economic aid as part of a partnership that both sides described as anti-imperialist. Over the course of the next two decades, the Soviet and Turkish states orchestrated bilateral exchange in spheres ranging from aviation to linguistics. Most importantly, Soviet engineers and architects helped colleagues in Ankara launch a five-year plan and erect massive state-owned factories to produce textiles and replace Western imports. As they explored joint measures to accelerate development, Bolshevik and Kemalist elites gradually arrived at a statist alternative to liberal internationalism. Their improvisations reveal much about the international politics of the interwar period, and their solutions prefigured Moscow’s outreach to states in Africa, Asia, and Latin America in the Cold War and beyond.