Nation and Class Subjectivity in International Law and its Institutions in the Middle East (1919-1939)

This dissertation makes visible the neglected economic dimensions of the interventions by interwar international institutions in three cases: the League of Nations' intervention in the dispute between Turkey and the French Mandate for Syria and the Lebanon over the province of Alexandretta (1936), the dispute between Turkey and the British Mandate of Iraq over the province of Mosul (1925), and the technical assistance missions of the International Labour Organization (ILO) to Egypt (1931). To different degrees, international legal institutions were involved in nation-building projects in the interwar Middle East, over-determining "the problem of nationalities" at the expense of other factors. These three episodes problematize the absence of "class" as an analytical category in both critical international legal scholarship and the actual politics of international institutions, and similarly the inattention to the struggle over capital that operated beneath the legal mechanisms used by the League and the ILO. They show the specificities of the Arab semi-periphery that reflected the nationalist anger and revolutionary anti-colonialism of the periphery and yet served, at the same time, as ideal places for capital accumulation and foreign investments from the core countries. Therefore, the episodes presented in this dissertation illuminate the ways in which class society and capital accumulation together with national self-determination were constitutive of the new interwar global order imagined for the semi-periphery by international legal institutions.