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Georgios Giannakopoulos, "The Interpreters: British Internationalism and Empire in Southeastern Europe, 1870-1930" (Manchester UP, 2025)
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C
Welcome back to the New Books Network. I am Vladislavilich, an Assistant professor of Modern European History at Florida International University. In today's episode, I have the privilege to host Georgiosianokopoulos Lecturer in Modern History and Associate dean at City St George's University of London. We will be discussing his captivating new book the British Internationalism and Empire in Southeastern Europe, 1870-1930. Hot off the Manchester University Press. This deeply researched study follows two generations of British intellectuals who are fascinated with the peoples and politics of southeastern Europe. These itinerant figures used their intimate relationships with the region to reshape British discourses about empire, diversity and nationalism. In their travels, writings and encounters, the interpreters not only outlined a version of southeastern Europe's history that still resonates today, but also articulated lasting questions about the limits of liberal internationalism, democracy and imperial rule. Georgios, welcome to the New Books Network, and thank you for taking the time to talk to me about your book.
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B
Thank you for having me, Vlad. I'm very excited about this.
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C
Let's start by briefly discussing how you first came to the idea of writing about the interpreters and why call your actors interpreters?
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B
Thanks. So this book, strangely, has three lives. The beginning of it was when I was just only a student in Athens. And it may sound strange, but the events of the early 2000s, and I refer here to the Twin Towers, the civilizational discourse In America, the 911 moment, if you will, that moment, and I was at the time still an undergraduate student in politics and history, got me thinking about big categories, the east, the west, and kind of the resurfacing of civilizational discourses. And it was around that time that I discovered the writings of Edward Said as someone interested in, you know, critical American thinking, and in our case, Said obviously is American, Palestinian. And that started a very interesting spiral of me trying to understand, you know, how those categories between west, east and, you know, geopolitical landscapes, imaginary topographic geographies, how they are produced. Then I quickly pivoted to how those types of categories can be used or have used historically to explain the region adjacent to Greece, southeastern Europe, namely. So that's with the first life. The second life, I'm fast forwarding a bit of this project was again, I was still in Greece finishing my master's dissertation on a British historian, Arnold Toynbee, who among other things produced a theory of civilization and had a very interesting involvement in the Greek Turkish politics as they become violent towards the end of the Ottoman Empire. And this kind of line of questioning, keeping again, the critique of categories, the critique of spatial categories, or rather the making of particular regions in the imagination of people. So this kind of questions, linked up questions about, you know, knowledge production of, you know, Greece, Turkey and the wider region and the Balkans. And then I'm fast forwarding the third, if you will, pre life of this project is when I later moved to the UK at a time where the Greek state started collapsing, but was lucky enough to secure a scholarship from the Greek Scholarship foundation and then started reimagining this project as a project that would be, among other things, about the politics of knowledge production and the international thought, the politics of regional expertise in a wider region, not just Greece and Turkey, but a region defined by empires as they collapse or disintegrate, and then new nation states are formed. And this allowed me to kind of broaden the spectrum of my story and include writing and British writing about what we would call East Central Europe, what we would call called the Balkans or Southeastern Europe. All these regions, all these names and titles. I know our contestants, scholars are defining it in different ways, but in the end, so starting from the twin towers in 9 11, going through to Greece and Turkey and British thinking about those moments of imperial collapse, moving on to wider questions about breed is an Anglophone actually thinking and international thinking on national questions and imperial order in a wider region defined by empires that in the course and that's the arc of the book that are in crisis or in local crisis in some way, and during the course of the First World War, essentially collapse.
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C
So the book's main intervention revolves around the notion that Southeastern Europe, right, helped British intellectuals develop complex rhetorical strategies to square these dilemmas of empire, nationality, liberalism. So how did the interpreters, again, as you call your main actors and their efforts to make the region legible to international publics, merge with Britain's own political exigencies and questions? You know, I'm using scare quotes here.
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B
Yes. I owe you an answer to the term interpreters, and I'll take it from there. I thought long about how. So this is a cohort study. This is a study of a group of intellectuals that congregate in different settings. And they also obviously discuss with different sets of actors in the localities that they write about. So I spent a while thinking what would be the unifying characteristic. I toyed with various different words, words that have a meaning, though. For instance, mediators, a good friend has written a book called the Meddlers on another period. But I came down to the term interpreters because it seems to me that every act of interpretation, and that's something that linguistic theory is written a lot about, every act of interpretation always involves some misunderstanding. So there's some incommensurability. I hope I pronounce it well, between the person who's doing the interpreting and the actor who is vocalizing their own claim, demand voice So I just, I felt that this term captures, you know, an issue of, how to put it different, hierarchical power, knowledge formation, if that doesn't sound too confusing. And coming back to your question, as I went through the literature, and obviously I owe a lot of enormous debts, as I said earlier, to the scholarship on volcanism, Maria Todorova and others, as well as to the critical scholarship on the region and the scholarship that teases out the liberal imperialist propositions of various actors. So I owe debts to this type of scholarship. But what I thought was missing from the story, and that's what I tried to do, is to bring the British imperial context together in conversation and with some kind of attempting some kind of contrapuntal reading, as said, would say bring the British political context and imperial context in dialogue with what is happening in places like Austria, Hungary, the Ottoman Empire in the end of the 19th century. And here it seems to me that a very interesting through line to think about, how essentially to put it a bit provocatively, problems that we find in empires like Austria, Hungary and the Ottoman Empire are problems that the British Empire also faces in different ways. So a question or an issue that creates a through line in my story is the Irish question that if one thinks about the wider timescale, here we have the beginnings of the Irish question as a problem of imperial rule and nationalism in the mid 19th century, in the 1850s, 60s, most importantly, 70s onwards. And this is around that period as well, that the so called Eastern question comes into a different phase, meaning challenges of imperial rule and crisis in the Ottoman Empire. And at the same time, this is the period a bit later where the question of nationality, if you will, in Austria, Hungary plays an important role in debates about international order.
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C
Excellent. And so your point of departure is the 1870s. So what happened at this particular juncture to spur the interest of several prominent British intellectuals in south in Europe?
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B
So this takes me to obviously a term that I'm very fascinated about, as I'm sure many the Eastern question. Now, we could devote a whole episode on discussing what the Eastern question was, is, and the rest of it. But to cut a long story short, if we define the Eastern question as a problem of stability in the Ottoman Empire, then It is the 1870s that that problem becomes quite more acute. But on top of that, what we find in the 1870s in the British political context is that it's the first time where, or at least one of the first times where a problem of imperial order in the region that we would call southeastern Europe in our Case in Bulgaria, a problem of regional order becomes front and center in British politics. And this is because, and this is a bit of political history of Britain. The liberal camp in that period uses this foreign policy problem. Massacres of Christians in the Ottoman provinces of what is now Bulgaria uses this issue in the political debate against the Conservative party. So therefore, what happens in the 1870s for the anglophone British context is that a faraway land, you know, a land that is somewhere in the provinces of an empire now called Bulgaria, all of a sudden becomes a focal point in the British political debate.
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C
Pioneer interpreters were archaeologists. How did their digging for antiquity in southeastern Europe and the Eastern Mediterranean form new narratives both about the region's history and the boundaries of Western civilization as perceived from Britain?
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B
The way we usually tell this type of political stories is that we focus on figures who had some kind of political role, or diplomats, or people who wrote more straightforwardly about the politics in this region. And especially, I think, what historians of international thought, or even political thought tend to miss sometimes is what I would call strange kinds of writings, writings that are about material heritage, writings that are about, you know, that produce narratives about civilization and growth. And this is something that I try to do in the book. One of the figures I write about is a British archaeologist. His name is Arthur Evans. Now, what's interesting with Arthur Evans is, well, some of the listeners may know him, especially those who are familiar with Greece, as the person who excavated and discovered the civilization, the so called Minoan civilization in Crete in Greece. Well, he didn't quite excavate it himself, but that's a different story. And one of the founding figures, or rather one of the important people in the history of the Asmolean Museum in Oxford. So he's one of the characters I'm writing about. But what we don't know much about when it comes to him is his excavations in places like Dalmatia in the late 19th century. And what. And the kind of writings that. And his opposition to Austrian rule and Ottoman rule, and the kind of complex, or one might say simplistic narratives. The point I'm trying to make is his narratives about what is the historical purpose of the region. Does it belong to the west, does it belong to the East? And what I claim, using him, who is an archaeologist as a reference point, is that through his lenses, through his practice, we discover strategies of Christianizing a region that was far more complex than he made it out to be.
- [16:42]
C
And so Eastern Europeans, politics of diversity, coexistence and communal strife, especially in the Ottoman Empire made possible the articulation of what you call radical new strains of liberal internationalism. How did some of the interpreters mobilize the histories of Ottoman Macedonia and Crete with which you deal in the book to criticize the axis of British imperialism?
- [17:09]
B
Yes, thanks for this. The first point I want to make here, and I'm. I'm quite skeptical to the overuse of the term liberal internationalism. I don't want to get into a long discussion about the genealogy of the term. Certainly what I mean in my study, when we look back in the early 20th century, liberal internationalism is certainly different than what we would call today liberal internationalism.
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B
In foreign policy, American debates, I just want to cave it by this. And I want also to say that the languages of liberty and internationalism in this period in the late 19th, 20th century, I find they're more amorphous. And actually they border with languages of socialist internationalism and not communist socialist internationalism. And I showcase this in the book using a radical journalist. Radical, That's a political term. At the time, just before the beginning of the or at the beginning of the Labour Party, he was a liberal, then became a labor figure. His name is Henry Brailsford. But what is interesting with a figure like Brailsford is that, and that's what I argue in the book. And that's an example of how one can bind together those two places, the British Empire and the kind of empires in southeastern Europe. So I argue that when he writes, and he's quite a prolific writer on international affairs, he writes about the Cretan question, and he actually does play a role in Crete as a humanitarian agent. Before that, he's in Greece as a fighter for liberty. But that's a different story. He also writes about Macedonia. So what I'm trying to say or what I'm saying in the book, is that by closely examining his writings on Crete, on Macedonia, what we discover is a logic of solving problems or discussing problems of imperial governance, that at the same time he's doing the same things when he's writing about and he's writing about the Irish question and the problem of the Irish peasant. So in his mind and his thinking and brace for, is a good example for this, the Irish peasant, the Bulgarian peasant, if you will, the Cretan peasant, have similar problems. But that's more interesting. What is on top of that, more interesting is that I show in the book how his critique of British imperialism and what the British do in Ireland, to put it that way, kind of connects with his critique of certain regional nationalism, nationalisms in Macedonia. What the Greeks are doing to Bulgaria, for instance, I'm simplifying here, but I'm just trying to showcase the kinds of connections that I find interesting. And so far that I find that kind of existing literature on this topic hasn't really kind of unearthed the nuance of those interesting and overlapping rhetorical strategies that address similar questions. You know, managing diversity, solving problems of imperial order, and managing humanitarian crisis, switching empires.
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C
How did the Habsburg's nationality questions serve as backdrop for protected debates about the home rule for Ireland and Scotland? And would you tell us a bit about Robert William Seydon Watson, a person who became the British interpreter of Habsburg politics extraordinaire?
- [21:55]
B
Great. I'm glad you asked this question. I hope I won't spend the next hour talking about this. So I'm sure you caught me. Now, what's interesting to me and as I was researching, it became evident to me that there's generations of British writing about Austria hungary from the 19th century to the 20th century. Indeed, someone like Sethon Watson, who's another figure that I write in the book and I've written also separately on him, sits in a pivot line where Austria Hungary becomes or to put it in a different way, he has a big share in turning the narrative of Austria Hungary from a multinational empire with its problems to a prison house of nationalities. So Sitton Watson sits in the tradition of Anglophone literature that for a long time has turned us, made us or people, earlier people in older generations than me, to think of Austria Hungary as simply any liberal place where nationalities are being oppressed. Now there's more nuance to that. So this explains my interest with Siton Watson and when I started exploring his ideas further and also writing about some of his precursors, like Evans, who live at the same time with him, but they're a bit older, what became an interesting observation to me was how various national questions that spring up in the Habsburg Empire connect in the minds of some writers and thinkers with problems of imperial order in Britain, again, Ireland. Here is an interesting case, and one example that's a bit obscure is how, for instance, just before Sidon WATSON in the 1870s, 1880s, you have these conversations around what would be the future settlement for Ireland within the United Kingdom or Britain. And here you have different positions in the debate. Some people, obviously Irish nationalists, look to Austria, Hungary, you know, as providing a template, this dual type of monarchy. Obviously that serves the purpose of some Irish nationalists, but certainly not of some British imperialists. Others, liberal minded British imperialists, think of the place of Croatia within Austria Hungary as offering a template of what Ireland could become within the British Empire. So there's all sorts of interesting debates in this period, and this is again the period of like that prefaces Siton Watson. Now, Siton Watson is someone who, and I think the title of the book comes out of a journal that he wanted to found right before the First World War. And one of the iterations of the journal was called the Interpreters. So he enters the scene in the mid-1900s, as many as many of my characters, a young scholar who spends a lot of time traveling Europe when, you know, Oxford educated and the rest of it, and enters the scene as someone who, for a certain period of time in the mid-1900s to the First World War, writes intensely about national questions, or rather as he would call them, quotes racial questions in Austria, Hungary. But he uses race in a way that gestures more towards nationality. I should make this point and sit on. Watson, one would argue, adopts, though it's not quite as straightforward, a pet nationality, and that is the Slovaks. He writes a lot about the oppression of the Slovaks. And these are amidst complicated political and constitutional debates in the Austrian Hungarian Empire. So he doesn't make that stuff up. There's something on the ground that pertains to it. But he clearly, because of the complexity of Austro Hungarian politics, becomes a key point in reference, in debates, in political debates in intellectual circles about what is Austria, Hungary. And obviously this type of question becomes very important during the war where Austria Hungary is a key part of the empires that fired against Britain and France.
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C
Yeah. Ultimately you show in remarkable detail how some of the interpreters became policy advisors and even policy makers during the First World War. How did their expertise shape official British efforts to remake the regional order in the aftermath of war and imperial collapse?
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B
Yeah, this takes us to the point of impact, indeed, in the kind of arc that I sketch in the book, from the 1870s to the 1930s, if you will, the intensification of political impact takes place around the First World War, that's for sure, because it is certain figures, and they're all most male figures, not all of them, but most. I can speak to that later. I mean, to the gender dynamic. So most of these figures become either junior diplomats or play some role in what they would say in a liberal language, enlightening the public about complex national problems. And clearly in Britain during the First World War or in the beginning of the First World War, and later, there's a massive demand to educate the public on what is the cause that Britain is fighting for. Don't forget, and here's an interesting example, that the kind of rhetoric surround it is that Britain is fighting for the protection of small states and little nations in the continent that are being crushed by the Germans. Well, Belgium is the point in case. But then there's another interesting point in case, and this is Serbia. And it becomes incredibly difficult in the public debate to understand what is Serbia's history? How does Serbia fit into this and sit on Watsonism? And not only sit on Watson and others are among a group of people who try to not just simply propagate national causes, but also educate the public and the policymakers about what they are. But of course, the reading of what you know, the Yugoslavs, if you will, the Serbs, the Slovaks and the like, are doing the checks. The reading of what those communities are doing is a reading that is infused by nationalist tropes. And this also is a product of the interactions they have with local elites.
- [29:12]
C
And you noted that not all of your actors are men. Would you care to kind of briefly discuss the gender dynamics of the book as a project? Yes.
- [29:24]
B
And reflecting on this, I find that this is something I could have thought a bit more about. So my story is a story predominantly about men who in different ways, in not straightforward ways, theorize international politics and produce knowledge about southeastern Europe, with Britain being a point of reference in mind. That said, one of the figures in my narrative, and I think it's important to mention, is Mary Edith Durham, who is well known, again, archaeologist, an ethnographer, rather anthropologist, who becomes incredibly influential and important in the Albanian and broadly speaking, Yugoslavian space, mostly Albanian space. But that's not to say and just to. Sorry. And with Darren. What is interesting, and I track it in the book, is how in the 1920s and early 1930s, she criticizes sit and Watson. There's a polemic between the two of them about how the war came about and also what happens in the region that then becomes Yugoslavia and Albania. So I discuss this in the book, but the wider point I want to make about the German dynamics is that there is a lot of international thinking in this period that's produced by women. And there's exciting work about this. One of the problems that I had when I was conceptualizing this project and then writing it, is that women's writing and thinking on international relations, international politics at the time doesn't come through established channels. And there's research showing how the different professions that women had at the time, you know, created a disparity. But that's not to say that there is no thinking from women on international politics at this time. But the spaces that I am interested in in the book and the kind of networks I try to unearth, they're very gendered networks. And this is also tells us something about the structure of debates on international politics in this period.
- [31:50]
C
And does the memory of the original interpreters survive into the 21st century? And are there any interpreters among us today?
- [32:00]
B
So the other thing that to pick up an earlier thread, if the political influence becomes very, very important during the First World War, then in the 1920s and 30s, as Britain's political interests are shifting, one can arguably say that the political influence of the scholars I write about in a way becomes marginal, though they create structures of knowledge that still exist today. Cease. The School of Eastern European and Slavonic Studies at ucl Sidon Watson is one of the founders of this academic chairs in Modern Greek Studies at King's College. Toynbee, who I write about as well, is a founder of this. So there's a story of declining, if you will, political impact, but there's also a story in my book, and that comes in towards the end of symbolic impact, of cultural impact. So what I'm most so interested in, and I Wish I had more time to do more work on this, but the book had to finish was about how do the books that they write fair in different localities in southeastern Europe. When are they translated? Is there any discussion about those books? Certainly in some cases there is discussion. Toynbee's book about Greece and Turkey gets discussed in Greece in the 2010s in an interesting way. In other cases, Brailsford's book on Macedonia gets translated in different ways and again discussed in interesting ways. So the one element, you know, what I want to. What I'm doing in the book is also trying to showcase how the impact survives as a cultural construct. But it's not just about books. It's also about the politics of memorialization in the public space. And it was quite a fortunate event that a person that I write a bit about, not much C.A. mcCartney. I was invited two years ago, I think, to a conference in his memory in Budapest. And I attended. It was a wonderful conference, very critical one, organized by very, very important and excellent colleagues. And in the context of that conference, the British ambassador in Hungary unveiled a plaque named after McCartney. So I was lucky enough to leave that moment and then take a picture, capture this, and kind of add it in the book. So the kinds of impacts that I'm interested in tracing as well is not the straightforward political impact routes, but what type of cultural imprint have this group of people that I call the interpreters live have left in places from, I don't know, Greece to Slovakia to Budapest to Hungary and many other places? So that points to the question about impact now, the question about other interpreters today. I try to raise this question in the end of the book, and I'm still thinking through this. But I think there is a line that can be traced to a certain way, liberal way of writing about southeastern Europe today, with intellectuals and public intellectuals today, or if not today, certainly in the 90s and in the 2000s that draw from the kind of trope and the kind of discussions about liberty and empire that I try to trace in the book. Now, Britain is not the same today or in the 90s as was in the early 1900s. So it's not necessarily imperial visions, or it could be post imperial visions. But I think there is something to be said about the kind of traces that this kind of writing that I identify has when we think about how crisis in the Balkans in the 1990s or transitions in East Central Europe in the 1990s were covered and the kind of knowledge production that framed it.
- [36:31]
C
Finally, will the book have influenced your future scholarly pursuits. What are you currently working on?
- [36:39]
B
Thank you. It does. It has. In a weird way, the more I think about this and the more I reflect on the book I wrote, the more I think that it deserves a sequel. That's to say, tracing liberal forms of writing about southeastern Europe from the Second World War to the 1990s and early 2000s. And here. And again, this is early stages, I'm thinking scholars who become intelligence agents who are flown and cultivate connections across southeastern Europe during the Second World War and patterns of writing about Cold War liberalism, really, that are pertinent to the region. And, of course, then patents on writing about transitions and unifications and violence and conflict in the 1990s. So that's an aspiration to see if I can produce a sequel out of the book. And something more immediate I'm working on now, which relates to my Greek history. More interests in an international key is a history of interventions, international interventions in modern Greece, from the Crimean War to the imf. This is a bit more of my kind of biographical book, if you will.
- [38:01]
C
Godspeed, Giorgios. It was a real pleasure talking to you today. Thank you for joining the New Books Network.
- [38:08]
B
Thank you very much.