Against the Liberal Order: The Soviet Union, Turkey, and Statist Internationalism from 1919 to 1939

UW Center for Russia, East Europe and Central Asia (CREECA) lecture series, Room 206. Coffee/tea and cookies at 3:45 pm.

media release: 

About the Lecture: This talk will offer an overview of Against the Liberal Order, which came out with Oxford University Press in 2024. The book 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 World War I, 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.

About the Speaker: Sam Hirst teaches the history of international relations at Bilkent University in Ankara, Turkey. His first book, Against the Liberal Order, came out with Oxford University Press in 2024. Currently, he is working on a second project about international responses to American economic hegemony in the aftermath of the World War II. Articles that draw on the research for this second project have been published in the journals Diplomatic History and Turkish Studies. Before moving to Turkey, where he has taught for nearly 10 years, he taught for four years in Russia and for one year in Kazakhstan. He received his Ph.D. in history from the University of Pennsylvania in 2012.