The abstract of the paper:

IR has yet to fully make sense of the nineteenth-century relationship between internationalism and the empire-system. Prevailing functionalist “origin stories” of global governance have a hard time doing so—in part, this paper argues, because they assume expert-derived depoliticisation to be a fait accompli: the by no means automatic outcome of a contentious process is fixed as a given analytical assumption. Examining a surprisingly neglected, pivotal case of international cooperation—the making of the Suez Canal—the paper makes the case for a historicised alternative to such views. Technocratic internationalism, a set of ideas and practices that guided the canal project, introduced a supposedly impartial idiom that both masked and enabled informal empire in the shape of “intervention from nowhere”. The Suez Canal is an emblematic case of this, and a key space in which the parameters of an internationalism compatible with empire were envisioned. Imperial power relations were so extensively taken for granted that an apparently cosmopolitan project like technocratic internationalism could be turned into an argument in favour of empire. The paper argues that, first, technocratic appeals to internationality facilitated large-scale infrastructure projects that actually constituted aggressive economic and political interventions; and second, that technocratic internationalism evolved as part of a new informal repertoire of empire-system practices. It was through technocratic internationalism that empire-system logics, assumptions, and hierarchies could be sustained by being held constant as neutral, unproblematic aspects of modern global governance.