Statecraft and Salvation: Wilsonian Liberal Internationalism as Secularized Eschatology

Preface

vii Preface Iwas overcome with despair when in early August 2012, shortly after receiving one of my drafts, my editor responded, “Greetings from the beach! I am on vacation but reading it here and will comment shortly.” My first attempt at an academic treatise, I gathered, had been demoted to beach reading—the league occupied by Bridget Jones’s Diary and other masterpieces of light comedy. My editor was skimming through it for laughs during breaks from frolicking in foamy ocean water, piña colada in hand. Fortunately, my self-confidence recovered soon enough to spare me renewed doubts that I was no good at scholarship and that I should have, after all, pursued the much more hands-on career of an artificial insemination assistant in livestock agriculture, as my wise and well-traveled brother had once suggested. Over breakfast the next morning, jubilation promptly replaced the dark terror of the previous day. Boosted by espresso shots, I grew certain that my editor was reading my manuscript on the beach precisely because the manuscript was that good: an unsuspected masterpiece, an instant game changer, a defining moment in the history of Western civilization, a gateway to my immortality. Not Bridget Jones’s Diary, but St. Augustine’s Confessions, still widely read sixteen centuries after his death, was the proper analogy for what I was about to publish. viii PREFACE And so it was not until day three that I finally came to my senses and realized what should have been apparent right away: that I had neither a dud nor a gem of a manuscript, but rather the most dedicated editor out there. Carey Newman, director of Baylor University Press, thus deserves my warmest gratitude, and not just for taking my scribbles on his vacation along with his snorkel and swim trunks. His incisive feedback and suggestions for further reading enabled me to improve the manuscript dramatically, and the vivid prose he used to convey them constituted an educational experience in its own right. Members of his editorial and production team, including Jordan Rowan Fannin and Jenny Hunt, were just as impressive, showering me with undivided personal attention—as if I were the only author on their list. I am incredibly lucky to have stumbled upon them all. Well before they helped me bring the ship to harbor on bookstore and library shelves, however, many others taught me how to build and sail it in the first place. The first nebulous ideas that would later coalesce in this book reach all the way back to my M.Sc. in International Relations at the London School of Economics & Political Science, specifically to the day (about three weeks after September 11, 2001) I accidentally walked into Professor Christopher Coker’s course on strategic aspects of international affairs. Of all the important moments in my university education, this one was by far the most transformative, and Chris—with his emphasis on literature, philosophy, history, and culture as key to understanding modern violence, war, and statecraft—had provoked it. His extraordinarily chaotic and inspiring lectures, the closest thing to jazz in IR programs anywhere, were ably seconded by Chris Brown, Mark Hoffman, and the late Fred Halliday, my other instructors at LSE. I thank all four of them. When I moved to Oxford and began drafting my doctoral dissertation , from which this book is carved, Professor Jennifer Welsh felt so strongly about the project that she agreed to supervise it despite being overloaded with too many other advisees and, on top of it, finding herself in between two difficult pregnancies. Karma Nabulsi and Sudhir Hazareesingh , her colleagues in the Department of Politics and International Relations, watched over me as well, reading successive drafts and treating me to many perceptive comments, cups of coffee, and pleasant conversations at their home. Meanwhile, the Dulverton Trust cheerfully covered everything with a massively generous, all-inclusive scholarship award. Every now and then the English weather forced me to flee, but on those occasions my parents and grandparents readily provided me with a warm refuge in my native Šumperk, Czech Republic, as did my parents-in-law, PREFACE ix Paul and Linette Gamache, in Maine, for which I remain in debt to them all. Reading passages from this book will always take me back to my trusty Kona Paddy Wagon bicycle on the country roads between Oxford and Brize Norton, to the bakelite desk in my grandfather...