The Power of Geographical Imaginaries in the European International Order: Colonialism, the 1884–85 Berlin Conference, and Model International Organizations

Joanne Yao

International Organization, 2022, vol. 76, issue 4, 901-928

Abstract: This article examines the emergence of early international organizations and efforts to export European institutional models to the periphery as part of the global expansion of a European international order. In particular, it focuses on the 1884–85 Berlin Conference as a pivotal moment in that expansion and the failed attempt to transplant the Treaty of Vienna model for transboundary river governance to the Congo River. Scholarship on the spread of institutions has highlighted the dangers of applying institutional models from one context to another, but there has been limited attention on why European institutional models are so compelling in the first place. Based on primary historical material, I show that despite some awareness among the diplomats at Berlin that the African context differed from the European one, this knowledge did not disrupt their underlying confidence in the Vienna model. I contend that the reason this model was so compelling was that it was built on two interrelated geographical imaginaries that constituted the diplomats’ understanding of the global and the political possibilities available to them. The first imaginary constituted the periphery as conceptually empty and ready to be remade by European models; the second constituted Europe as the generative site of universal models. Together, these taken-for-granted imaginaries made the diplomats’ practices of adopting the Vienna model seem natural and self-evident. These imaginaries continue to have implications for international politics today as we consider one-size-fits-all technocratic solutions and benchmarks for global progress.

Date: 2022
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