NGOs: A New History of Transnational Civil Society by Thomas Davies, and: Shaping the Transnational Sphere: Experts, Networks and Issues from the 1840s to the 1930s ed. by Davide Rodogno, Bernhard Struck, and Jakob Vogel (review)

Two recent offerings from quite different perspectives consider the nature of transnational civil society. Thomas Davies’s NGOs: A New History of Transnational Civil Society aims to provide a narrative of world history from 1767 to the present in which private associations, not national governments, are the primary focus. By contrast, Shaping the Transnational Sphere is an edited volume in which the various contributors aim to provide close case studies of the interactions of transnational experts, networks, or associations and national governments during the mid-nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. While one takes a macro- and the other a micro-view of the transnational sphere, they both seek to measure the impact of transnationalism on two centuries dominated by the rise of nationalism and the consolidation of nation-states.

In NGOs, Thomas Davies sets out to correct the perception that transnational private associations (anachronistically termed international nongovernmental organizations, or INGOs) first rose to prominence after 1945 and became uniquely influential from the 1990s onward. While the research of numerous historians over the last decade has demonstrated the fallacy of this view, it is one that nonetheless persists in many accounts.¹ In addition to “revealing how INGOs have a far longer history than traditionally assumed,” Davies also aims to show that transnational civil society was not an invention of Western culture but had eastern origins as well; to consider a broader range of INGOs than previous studies; to delineate a cyclical pattern of INGO development; and to provide an explanatory framework for the rise and fall of INGO influence (p. 2).

Davies successfully documents the “far longer history” of a plethora of transnational organizations. He covers a broad chronological scope, beginning his study in the 1760s and following it through to the present day. He divides his chapters by three major waves of INGO activity: 1767 to 1914, 1914 to 1939, and 1939 to the present. Davies employs a cyclical model of INGO development, in which each wave is characterized by proliferation and decline. He explains these cycles through a set of scientific/technological, environmental, economic, social, external political, and internal political factors influencing the rise and fall of transnational civil society. Davies also rejects the idea that any one wave represented the peak of INGO activity, pointing instead to achievements in each period. Drawing extensively from secondary sources, he includes an impressive number of organizations that reached across borders, and makes no analytical distinction among scientific societies, political movements, or religious charities. In addition to the sheer number of organizations surveyed, Davies considers the size of each one’s membership and the geographic scope of its chapters and activities. NGOs thereby convincingly argues for the existence of transnational society from at least the mid-1700s onward.

At the same time, the main historiographical debate regarding the transnational sphere centers not upon the existence of transnational organizations, but on whether or not they changed the way nation-states conducted their affairs. This is not a question that can be adequately answered by documenting the profusion of INGOs and the size of their membership. Davies cites the end of the slave trade, interwar disarmament, and the end of human rights abuses during the Cold War as key achievements produced by INGO activity. Yet he does not provide specific evidence of how these were accomplished; we are expected to equate effort with impact. For example, Davies considers the interwar disarmament conferences to be one of the main achievements of transnational civil society during the interwar years, but he never addresses the fact that the disarmament agreements remained a series of unenforced...