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Against the Liberal Order​

The Soviet Union, Turkey, and Statist Internationalism, 1919-1939​ 

Oxford University Press, 2024​

Against the Liberal Order is a history of interactions between the interwar Soviet Union and early Republican Turkey, and the book 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 cross-border ties 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. What anti-imperialism meant, however, was unclear. 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 Bolshevik and Kemalist elites explored joint measures to accelerate development, they 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.

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Listen to a podcast about the book:

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Review of Democracy (also available on Spotify and other apps)

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New Books Network (also available on Spotify and other apps)

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