Waqar Zaidi

Objective

Most historians of twentieth-century science and technology assume that the nation-state should be the central unit of historical analysis, yet much rhetoric about science and technology has stressed the international nature of both. I believe that a lack of appreciation of the complexity of the relationship between the national and international is an unaddressed core problem in the historiography of twentieth-century science and technology, and has led to, for example, an over-emphasis on the national and nationalistic in a wide range of studies. In this project I hope to rethink this relationship and so make an important contribution to this rapidly developing area of scholarship.

Research Project

Historians of science and technology currently deal with the ideologies of nationalism and internationalism very differently. For the inter-war period, for example, science is associated with both nationalism and internationalism, whereas technology is strongly associated with nationalism and nationalist ideology. This is true even for the richest literature on the topic, that of cultural historians of aviation such as Robert Wohl and Peter Fritzsche.[1]
I intend to challenge this view of technology in general, and of aviation in particular, by showing that there existed a profoundly internationalist approach to aviation, in Britain and in other nations,of which a particularly clear example was the International Air Police. Proposals for its formation were central to much liberal internationalist thought in the inter-war period, and yet despite the developing interest in these liberals, this ‘technological internationalism' has not yet been studied.[2]
Appropriating concepts of an international police force dating back to the late nineteenth century, many in both Europe and America in the interwar period conceived the aeroplane as a powerful and potentially destructive modern technology and called for its removal from the control of the nation-state, and into the hands of some form of supranational authority. This authority should, it was argued, control and use an international air police force consisting of aeroplanes in order to monitor and control aviation both between and within nation-states.

Writers such as H.G. Wells argued that such a force could guarantee the global rule of a scientific elite, whereas world federationists such as David Davies and political economists such as J.A. Hobson looked to such a police force as a way of bolstering the flagging authority of the League of Nations. Diplomats and politicians such as Philip Noel Baker and Robert Cecil, meanwhile, saw within such proposals the possibility of arms control in Europe. These concepts crystallised at crucial moments, for example into proposals for the internationalisation of civil aviation by the French delegation at the Geneva Disarmament Conference in 1932-33, and fund-raising for the creation of a Volunteer International Air Police Force to protect Chinese cities from Japanese bombing in 1938. Although an International Air police was never formed, thanks in part to strong opposition from national airforces, calls for its formation persisted into the early 1950s, whilst the aeroplane was still considered to be the sole method of delivering atomic weapons.

These various proposals for this air police force provide a unique site for the exploration of the complex relationship between technology and nationalism and internationalism in the interwar period and at other times, and allow one to engage with, and critique, the existing literature on technological nationalism. My project will trace these inter-war proposals back to pre-world war one conceptualisations and forwards to British and French government disarmament policies in the 1930s. I will also consider opposition, and public reaction to, these proposals. Finally, I will investigate their relationship to proposals for the international control of atomic energy in the 1940s. Sources include inter-war newspapers and pamphlets, various national archives, and the archives of British internationalist organisations and of relevant internationalists.