Featured Scholar: Sandra Ricker

Please introduce yourself

My name is Sandra. I’m currently an Ax:son Johnson Fellow at the Kissinger Center at SAIS. I did my PhD at the European University Institute in Florence. Before that, I did a Master’s at University College London (UCL) and a Bachelor’s at the University of Heidelberg in Germany. I actually started out studying philology and then moved to history through various twists and turns

Could you explain philology for those Americans who, like me, have a hazy understanding of that discipline?

Philology is the study of language and literature, so it involves both linguistics with its various sub-fields and literary and cultural studies. And I also listened in on a few lectures in History and Sociology, and then decided to pursue further studies in this direction by doing a Master’s with a focus on international history at UCL.

How would you say that your intellectual interests have evolved from philology to now history and international relations? What common threads do you see?

The literary studies I completed as a part of my degree in German and English philology involved a deep engagement with culture: so I took a lot of seminars on 20th century German literature, including the Weimar Republic, which was my first brush with some of the topics I’m thinking about now: Germany over the course of the 19th and 20th centuries, in its shifting political and social configurations and their impact on its place in the international order. I approached this from a cultural angle first, and then started thinking about it in political and now also in legal terms, because I’ve become interested in questions of international law as regards the international order.

How would you describe your research?

I look at the place of the Weimar Republic in the international order of the interwar years through the prism of international law. Specifically, I trace the efforts of circles of progressive German elites sought to achieve a break with the imperial past. After the war, various jurists, diplomats, a range of academics, pacifist and feminist activists but also politicians, particularly Social Democrats and liberals, thought that the end of the German Empire in defeat and revolution came with deep implications for the role of a ‘new Germany’ in the ‘new international order. They supported the democratization of German politics and society, many of them as elected representatives or expert advisers during the constitutional deliberations in the National Assembly—in their view this called for a corresponding equitable democratic international order under the ‘world rule of law’ centered on the League of Nations.

Was that a case of these German progressive and liberals seeing postwar Germany as, in some ways, analogous to the weaker parties, the colonized nations?

There was certainly a sense that Germany had become one of the ‘small states’ of Europe, constrained by an unequal treaty that did not conform to the new principles of international order propagated by the Allies. Polemical metaphors of the inter-Allied control commissions foreseen by the Treaty of Versailles as a vehicle for Allied colonization, for example, were common but there were also more searching reflections on Germany’s reduced status. In this context international law was invoked in various quarters as the ‘weapon of the weak’. Many of the protagonists of my history of the Weimar Republic’s engagement with the League of Nations, among them pacifist jurists such as Walther Schücking and Hans Wehberg, however, saw in (international) law a truly transformative force and advocated a principled ‘legal politics’ that was not narrowly focused on German priorities and interests. German liberal and conservative politicians, however, and I would count Gustav Stresemann among them, approached multilateralism and international law more strategically once they had arranged themselves with the republic.

Could you speak to the usage of international law in plebiscites and referendums for territories that were disputed between Germany and its neighbors after 1919, such as Poland and Czechoslovakia?

In this era, national self-determination became a key ordering concept, included in the peace program propagated both by the Allies and the Bolshevik revolutionary movement, prompting international lawyers to respond in innovate ways to its demands.

In particular, territories disputed between Germany and Poland—Upper Silesia, Allenstein and Marienwerder—posed thorny problems. For example, should German-speaking residents who had settled more recently be granted a vote when their presence was the result of deliberate imperial policies? The Polish response was, of course, a resounding no. This points to a deeper problem surrounding plebiscites as an instrument of national self-determination—there were different political conceptions of national self-determination (some of them including a class dimension) as well as the just adjudication of such territorial disputes which could not be resolved by a vote.

Relating your research to today, what are the angles of connection that jump out to you?

My research takes on certain question that, I believe, have broader relevance regarding so-called ‘revisionist’ states, broadly defined—states chafing against their position in the international order, often initially seeking to shift it from the ‘inside’, by coaxing the terms and the logic of an existing system into furthering their claims and interests or, in the extreme case, deciding to use unilateral force, sometimes by recourse to a new or different set of principles. How do such states conceive their position in the international order and operate in international institutions? What role does international law play in that context? What critiques of the distribution of power and resources in the world do they offer? But I think it will be my task over the coming years to think about this more carefully.

Thinking here of China seeking a “place in the sun”?

I don’t want to draw analogies too comfortably, not least as China was subjected to German colonialism in the nineteenth century. I do know that some Chinese historians, however, among them Qiyu Xu, have studied Germany’s ‘fragile rise’, as he calls it, during the decades before the First World War as a strategic ‘lesson’ on what to avoid as a so-called rising power. Historically, certain German observers in the 1920s, especially in the context of the Ruhr crisis, also compared the Weimar Republic and China, arguing that the sovereignty of both states was compromised by unequal treaties.

Fascinating. What are you excited to do with the Ax:son Johnson Fellowship?

I will transform my thesis into a book, expanding its cast of characters and perspectives To do this, I also would like to look at more sources here in the US—I’ve already brought in the British, French and Polish perspectives to a degree, but so far the US American perspective is still somewhat missing.

I also plan to start a new project on the history of the concept of aggression. And so being here in Washington will definitely be very useful for that, in terms of primary sources but also intellectual inspiration.