Historical Claims to the International: The Case of the Suez Canal Experts

Abstract

What IR scholars refer to as “the international” gets constructed and performed to specific ends, depending on time and place. This results in a plurality of claims to the international, subject to historical variation. To bring such variation into view, this article shows how nineteenth-century claims to internationality were tied to particular conceptions of legitimacy. The article explores this legitimation-by-experts through a case study of the 1855–56 Suez Canal Commission. Based on original archival research, the article shows that expert advice played an important role in claiming the internationality of the Suez Canal by limiting contestation to technical aspects. The central argument is that expertise and claims to the international can get co-constituted in arrangements that are intended to produce legitimacy. These arrangements narrow the terms of contestation in self-serving ways. A technocratic claim to the international was tightly linked to the mobilization and making of the Suez Canal experts, on two fronts. One, expertise and internationality were repeatedly articulated in conjunction, so they would signify each other. Two, the article shows that expert involvement was driven by legitimation concerns more than by epistemic optimization purposes. In sum, the article proposes a new way of historicizing internationality claims and sheds light on the distinctiveness of international expertise.