Despite ubiquitous references to ‘ethnicity’ in both academic and public discourse, the history and politics of this concept remain largely unexplored. By constructing the first transnational and interlingual conceptual history of ethnicity, this book unearths the pivotal role that this concept played in the making of the international order. After critiquing existing accounts of the ‘expansion’ or ‘globalisation’ of international society, the chapter proposes to rethink the birth of the international order through a scrutiny of its major concepts. Fusing Reinhart Koselleck’s method of conceptual history with the philosophical writings of G. W. F. Hegel and Jacques Derrida, the chapter theorises the emergence of the international order as a dialectical process that both negated and preserved existing imperial hierarchies. The concept of ethnicity is ejected by this dialectical process as a residual category – an indigestible kernel of difference and particularity – that cannot be internalised by the work of sublation.

The first chapter introduces and outlines the project of the book. As a point of departure, it discusses the logic of the nation-state and explains why this ideal is fundamentally unrealistic and, therefore, inadequate as a principle for political organization. Contra liberal nationalists, it argues that even where the “standard liberal package” is granted to all citizens, the nation-state remains intrinsically exclusionary and unjust. Moreover, the chapter discusses the limitations of existing approaches to national pluralism, including liberal multiculturalism and constitutional patriotism before laying out the ensuing research agenda. In order to recover an alternative to the nation-state, the book proposes to examine the theoretical relationship between nations and political organization prior to the rise of the nation-state in the early modern period. The chapter addresses both methodology and source selection.

Chapter 2 critically approaches Skinner’s historical oeuvre and its problematic connection with his own theoretical perspective. It begins by analyzing his major work, The Foundation of Modern Political Thought, and his perspective regarding the origins of the modern concept of State. In it, we can observe the tension between his theory and the teleological perspective underlying that project. This problem indeed became more noticeable in his recent works addressed to trace the remote roots of “classical republicanism,” as associated to a “third idea of liberty”: the concept of “liberty as non-domination.” It then continues by analyzing the differences between Skinner’s and Pocock’s views of classical republicanism, and its connection with their different definitions of political languages. Lastly, we observe here how the normative temptation that fuels both Skinner’s and Pocock’s proposals of recovering classical republicanism entails an instrumental use of intellectual history aimed at making it play into the present, which inevitably leads to relapse into conceptual anachronisms.

This chapter explores Wagner’s rhetorical elisions across three substantives essential to eighteenth- and nineteenth-century conceptual history: nature, culture, and humanity. It begins by explicating Wagner’s engagement with contemporary philosophies of language, cognition, and climate in developing the racialised identities and implications of these interlocked categories. Disclosing Wagner’s participation in what philosopher Stephen Haymes describes as an ‘axiological preference for Western “holism” regarding what is valued’, this chapter suggests that his nature-thinking enforced an exclusionary humanism by elevating a Germanic subset of nature, culture, and humanity as solely deserving these monolithic titles.

The chapter concludes by exploring Wagner’s treatment of these categories in his libretti, particularly in Siegfried’s ‘forest murmurs’. Where some stage directors have sought to resuscitate Wagner by suggesting that his environmental imagery is separable from his infamous racism, this chapter ultimately argues that these conceptual paradigms were inextricably entwined, and were part of a synthetic regime of knowledge.

Roman concepts and institutions have been formative for Western political forms and the Romans’ thinking about power has had a deeper influence on Western traditions of political thought than is recognized in political theory. Recent developments have sparked the interest of political theorists in genres and artefacts that convey thinking about politics through means besides distinct argumentation. At the same time, the political turn in the study of Latin literature has opened the field to theoretical questions beyond the range of usual literary training. This chapter surveys issues, such as freedom, institutions, and foundation, which are central to Roman political thought, and maps a variety of methods for approaching how the Romans thought about politics. These include: close reading, rhetorical analysis, conceptual history, comparison with other media and cultural artefacts, and metaphorology. Illustrative interpretations span art and inscriptions, poetry and prose, with excurses on the reception and transformation of Roman political thinking in Augustine and Machiavelli. A sample reading of the death of Turnus in the Aeneid argues for a broad intellectual toolkit.

In a sort of conceptual history in action, this chapter looks at the labels attached to the settlers-turned-migrants that were hotly contested. The most prominent among them, retornados (returnees) and refugiados (refugees), inferred conflicting views about the nature of their mobility and belonging and thus evoked divergent emotional and political responses. By disentangling how domestic, foreign, and international actors, notably the UNHCR, fought over these labels, the chapter demonstrates how the mechanisms of the international postwar refugee regime were compatible with and helped reinforce an ethnic reordering of citizenship and the postcolonial nation in Portugal. Conceptually, the chapter argues that historicizing these battles over how to name, interpret, and handle those who were leaving the colonies can provide fresh vistas for the broader scholarly discussion about coerced migration.

This chapter begins by summarising the development of the history of ideas out of which conceptual history emerged. It discusses in detail the founding figure of conceptual history, Reinhart Koselleck, and compares his approach to that of the influential Cambridge school, in particular Quentin Skinner and J. G. A. Pocock, and their ‘contextualism’. The bulk of the chapter is then dedicated to a discussion of a range of examples of how conceptual histories have helped to deconstruct a rainge of collective identities, including class, religious, racial and gender identities. In all of these areas we have seen an intense interest in linking the history of conceps with the study of emotions, social practices and the problematisation of the national container for historical studies. In particular the move to a transnational history of concepts has contributed in a major way to de-essentialising collective national identities but also transnational, i.e. European ones. Furthermore, conceptual history has been emphasising the importance of studying the translation of concepts into different languages and cultural spheres.

The worldwide exportation of the nation-state went hand in hand with the diffusion of the Western concept of religion, both of which are notably related to the expansion of the Westphalian order. Exploring the diffusion of the twin concepts of nation-state and religion intersects with two bodies of knowledge: nationalism and secularization. Combining them helps explain why and how religion and politics influence each other. Historical institutionalism and conceptual history are used to establish areas of politicization of religion in the qualitative phase of the research and to identify patterns in big data bases in the quantitative phase of the research. This approach is applied to the politicization of religion in Syria, Turkey, India, China and Russia.

This concluding chapter argues that the interplay between international law and empiricist history has served to offer a new grounding for formalism in an extremely fraught political context. Historical work is increasingly relied upon as a source of substantive claims about what law really means and of scientific methods for studying the past. Lawyers rely on the scientific tone and resulting truth effects of accounts presented by professional historians to intervene in contemporary debates by using the claims made in those narratives about international law’s ‘true’ origins or ‘real’ history. Appeals to contextualist histories allow lawyers to present their arguments as being grounded on evidence and to characterise the other side in a legal debate as ideologically motivated, presentist, or engaged in myth-making rather than proper scholarship. The chapter argues that international lawyers cannot look to historians (or anyone else for that matter) to save the day with impartial and verifiable evidence-based interpretations of what international law really is, means, or stands for. What then is to be done? The chapter concludes by exploring why and how we might study the international legal past even knowing that writing histories of international law is inevitably a partisan act.

This introductory chapter clarifies the methodological approach that will be applied in the intellectual history that follows. It differentiates between conceptual history and history of ideas and explains why the method adopted lies between them. On the one hand, a conceptual history is impossible, because the word “recognition” is rarely used in the different cultures under investigation, which employ different words to describe the same relation between two subjects, for instance “amour propre” in French and “sympathy” in English. On the other hand, this book is more than a simple history of ideas, because it compares the different cultures in order to reconstruct one and the same concern, namely how to understand the relations between subjects after the decline of the feudal order, in which these relations were taken as stable and unchangeable.

This chapter tracks the social life of the concept of ‘globalization’. The concept burst upon the world relatively recently; it was rarely used before the 1990s. This chapter follows the genealogy of the concept from its unlikely beginnings in the decades of the 1930s–1950s to the heated debates across the end of the twentieth century to the present. Before it became a buzzword, the concept began to be used in the most unlikely fields: in education to describe the global life of the mind; in international relations to describe the extension of the European Common Market; and in journalism to describe how the ‘American Negro and his problem are taking on a global significance’. The chapter begins to answer a basic question that has not before been researched in detail: through what lineages and processes did the concept of globalization become so important? Drawing on textual research and interviews with key originating figures in the field of global studies, the chapter attempts to get past the usual anecdotes about the formation and etymology of the concept that centre on alleged inventors of the term or references to the first use of the term ‘globalization’ in dictionaries.

As a historical model of how to end an extended period of international conflict and to establish a stable and peaceful international order, the Vienna Congress has claimed the attention of academics and politicians ever since 1815. Against this background the chapter will deal with the question of how the Congress of Vienna and the Vienna system were regarded by various actors and under changing political circumstances. Rather than merely collecting views and interpretations of the Congress and the international system taking shape in 1814/15, the chapter will ask how the varying interpretations of Vienna and the Vienna system reflected changing ideas and visions of international order and what they can tell us about national and international security cultures in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries.

The European peace and security system established in the course of the Congress of Vienna is presented here as a more complex arrangement than conveyed in the traditional political model of the balance of power. The statesmen and diplomats who drafted the settlements of 1814-1815 genuinely and succesfully sought to ban war and to establish a lasting peace after the long and bloody wars against Napoleon, a peace which endured until the outbreak of the Crimean War in 1853. Instead of a balance of power based on mutual military deterrence, they arrived at a balance of negotiation, a compromise based on active cooperation. As such, the order of Vienna, though imperfect, was a definite refinement compared to the traditional paradigm of the balance of power inherited from the Treaty of Utrecht. It created a Concert of Europe, which even beyond its impact throughout the nineteenth century still frames a European political ethos up to this day.