The twentieth century, a time of profound disillusionment with nationalism, was also the great age of internationalism. To the twenty-first-century historian, the period from the late nineteenth ...century until the end of the Cold War is distinctive for its nationalist preoccupations, while internationalism is often construed as the purview of ideologues and idealists, a remnant of Enlightenment-era narratives of the progress of humanity into a global community. Glenda Sluga argues to the contrary, that the concepts of nationalism and internationalism were very much entwined throughout the twentieth century and mutually shaped the attitudes toward interdependence and transnationalism that influence global politics in the present day.Internationalism in the Age of Nationalismtraces the arc of internationalism through its rise before World War I, its apogee at the end of World War II, its reprise in the global seventies and the post-Cold War nineties, and its decline after 9/11. Drawing on original archival material and contemporary accounts, Sluga focuses on specific moments when visions of global community occupied the liberal political mainstream, often through the maneuvers of iconic organizations such as the League of Nations and the United Nations, which stood for the sovereignty of nation-states while creating the conditions under which marginalized colonial subjects and women could make their voices heard in an international arena. In this retelling of the history of the twentieth century, conceptions of sovereignty, community, and identity were the objects of trade and reinvention among diverse intellectual and social communities, and internationalism was imagined as the means of national independence and national rights, as well as the antidote to nationalism. This innovative history highlights the role of internationalism in the evolution of political, economic, social, and cultural modernity, and maps out a new way of thinking about the twentieth century.
Abstract
Several of the world's intergovernmental organizations have now existed for longer than many nation-states. The centenary of the peacemaking that ended the First World War offers the ...opportunity of making good policy use of new histories that inform us about the shifting horizon of international expectations, the social dimensions of international thinking and international political cultures, their nation-state roots, and the sum of this relatively marginalized international past. The aim of this article is to draw together the various strands of the new historical work undertaken in the last decade in order to orientate 1919 as a moment that launched the world into a century of often profound discussion about international organizations as necessary instruments of multilateralism. This discussion sometimes dwindled, and it did not prevent wars. However, it had significant impacts: from the spectrum of ideas it brought to bear on the question of how to solve the world's most serious problems, to the practices of international governance it helped introduce. As importantly, the international order shaped in 1919 created unprecedented political spaces for representing the diverse interests of the world's populations, even the stateless. At crucial moments in the twentieth century, world-scale solutions to world-scale problems gave people ideas—even when the window of opportunity was small. If this history is good for anything, I argue that it might be for orientating our present in relation to that international past, and how we begin to imagine the future of the international order, as we know it.
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The story of the women, financiers, and other unsung
figures who helped to shape the post-Napoleonic global
order In 1814, after decades of continental conflict, an
alliance of European empires ...captured Paris and exiled Napoleon
Bonaparte, defeating French military expansionism and establishing
the Concert of Europe. This new coalition planted the seeds for
today's international order, wedding the idea of a durable peace to
multilateralism, diplomacy, philanthropy, and rights, and making
Europe its center. Glenda Sluga reveals how at the end of the
Napoleonic wars, new conceptions of the politics between states
were the work not only of European statesmen but also of
politically ambitious aristocratic and bourgeois men and women who
seized the moment at an extraordinary crossroads in history. In
this panoramic book, Sluga reinvents the study of international
politics, its limitations, and its potential. She offers
multifaceted portraits of the leading statesmen of the age, such as
Tsar Alexander, Count Metternich, and Viscount Castlereagh, showing
how they operated in the context of social networks often presided
over by influential women, even as they entrenched politics as a
masculine endeavor. In this history, figures such as Madame de
Staël and Countess Dorothea Lieven insist on shaping the political
transformations underway, while bankers influence economic
developments and their families agitate for Jewish rights.
Monumental in scope, this groundbreaking book chronicles the
European women and men who embraced the promise of a new kind of
politics in the aftermath of the Napoleonic wars, and whose often
paradoxical contributions to modern diplomacy and international
politics still resonate today.
The story of the women, financiers, and other unsung figures who helped to shape the post-Napoleonic global order In 1814, after decades of continental conflict, an alliance of European empires ...captured Paris and exiled Napoleon Bonaparte, defeating French military expansionism and establishing the Concert of Europe. This new coalition planted the seeds for today's international order, wedding the idea of a durable peace to multilateralism, diplomacy, philanthropy, and rights, and making Europe its center. Glenda Sluga reveals how at the end of the Napoleonic wars, new conceptions of the politics between states were the work not only of European statesmen but also of politically ambitious aristocratic and bourgeois men and women who seized the moment at an extraordinary crossroads in history.In this panoramic book, Sluga reinvents the study of international politics, its limitations, and its potential. She offers multifaceted portraits of the leading statesmen of the age, such as Tsar Alexander, Count Metternich, and Viscount Castlereagh, showing how they operated in the context of social networks often presided over by influential women, even as they entrenched politics as a masculine endeavor. In this history, figures such as Madame de Staël and Countess Dorothea Lieven insist on shaping the political transformations underway, while bankers influence economic developments and their families agitate for Jewish rights.Monumental in scope, this groundbreaking book chronicles the European women and men who embraced the promise of a new kind of politics in the aftermath of the Napoleonic wars, and whose often paradoxical contributions to modern diplomacy and international politics still resonate today.
This article investigates the idea of cosmopolitanism associated with internationalism and the origins of UNESCO at the end of World War II. In the first few years of UNESCO's operation, delegates ...and functionaries portrayed "world citizenship" as the path to permanent world peace and as a necessary step in the evolution of human society from tribes to nations, from national consciousness to "one world." A key figure in that history was Julian Huxley, UNESCO's first director-general. This article argues that Huxley's conception of cosmopolitan internationalism provides an important link between the history of postwar international organizations and a long nineteenth-century vision of historical and political progress and of imperial policies and practices.
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Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to restore the history of internationalism to our understanding of the legacy of the First World War, and the role of universities in that past. It begins by ...emphasising the war’s twin legacy, namely, the twin principles of the peace: national self-determination and the League of Nations.
Design/methodology/approach
It focuses on the intersecting significance and meaning attributed to the related terms patriotism and humanity, nationalism and internationalism, during the war and after. A key focus is the memorialization of Edith Cavell, and the role of men and women in supporting a League of Nations.
Findings
The author finds that contrary to conventional historical opinion, internationalism was as significant as nationalism during the war and after, thanks to the influence and ideas of men and women connected through university networks.
Research limitations/implications
The author’s argument is based on an examination of British imperial sources in particular.
Originality/value
The implications of this argument are that historians need to recover the international past in histories of nationalism.
This afterword looks back at the transnational history of business to argue that the history of transnational business associations prospectively opens a vista onto a new kind of methodological ...cosmopolitanism.
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