Internationalism in the Age of Nationalism

Glenda Sluga

• Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780812207781
• Topic: Politica e relazioni internazionali
• Subtopic: Nazionalismo e patriottismo

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 Nationalism traces 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.

Chapter 1

The International Turn

In the early twentieth century, if someone had asked Europeans or Americans to predict where the world was headed, chances were they would have pointed toward internationalism of a new twentieth-century kind. As John Hobson, the British economist, explained, it had become impossible “to trace down those issues which are presented to us as great social issues, political or economic, and to find any solution which is satisfactory that does not present the elements of internationality.”¹ For the future American secretary of state Robert Lansing, the nineteenth century belonged to nationality; the driving force of the twentieth century was internationality.²

Those of us fed on a more conventional historical diet might consider these assessments, made only a few years before the outbreak of the world’s first “total war,” misguided. The turn of the twentieth century was after all the apogee of nationalism, an era marked by the invention of new nationalities and nations.³ Nationalism is as commonly named the culprit of the outbreak and violent force of World War I as credited with the legitimation of the principle of nationality in the peace process that brought the war to an end. The apogee of nationalism was simultaneously the apogee of empire, accompanied by the rivalrous militarization of the world’s empires and acts of state-coordinated violence in the name of national pride, economic necessity, or territorial expansion.⁴ Given these circumstances, the claims made by Lansing and Hobson begin to make sense only once we parse the historical specificity of their political language and its intended meanings, and assess the extent to which their views of an international turn were shared.

As we will see, the turn-of-the-twentieth-century fascination with the novelty of internationality and the passing of the national reflected the self-consciousness with which an increasingly literate and mobile mainly middle-class public heaped their own ambitions for change onto the material changes in their everyday lives, and how they imagined those lives. Those same material changes were simultaneously opening up national and international public spheres, furnishing new public spaces of national and international congress that allowed for transnational connections and the “contamination of ideas.”⁵ Nationalism and internationalism were still likely to be perceived as antithetical or even agonistic: the revolutionary political internationalism of the working class opposed to the liberal nationalist aspirations of Europe’s middle classes. But the concept of a “new internationalism,” born of the “objective facts” of modernity, and out of the same historical processes as nations offered an increasingly attractive political conception of modernity and progress. The first historian of this phenomenon, Christian Lange—a Norwegian parliamentarian and founding member of one of the most significant experiments in the political scoping of internationalism in this period, the Inter-Parliamentary Union—went so far as to enthuse that the ideological innovation of the new internationalism was in essence its embrace of the nation.⁶

This chapter draws the strands of the history of nationalism back into the story of internationalism in the decades that Europeans like to refer to as the Belle Époque. It maps the contours of an international turn marked by the confident pre-World War I narratives of internationality and “objective internationalism” and the influential wartime associations that caucused the prospects for international government as a League of Nations. As important, it reconnects this early twentieth-century history of internationalism to the debates about race, empire, and nationalism that were intrinsic to contemporary liberal conceptions of progress and modernity. In all these ways, the history of turn-of-the-twentieth-century new internationalism provides us with the ideological and social backstory to the advent of the league and the UN.

Objective Internationalism at the Turn of the Twentieth Century

If we can trace the truth of the past by attention to principles that were constantly talked about, then the early twentieth century took a self-consciously international turn.⁷ As contemporaries understood it, the mechanisms of that turn were the new “objective facts” of steam, electricity, and trade. Roads and railways, canals and ocean carriers, and telephone, telegraph, cable, wireless, news, and mail services had all transformed economies and provided the opportunities for cooperation and sociability across the political borders of empires and nations. Even more importantly, they provided the infrastructure and motivation for the international institutions and associations devoted to all manner of internationalized political, economic, religious, and humanitarian issues proliferating across the world.⁸

The novelty of international organizations, their impact on everyday life, and their significance for the future are all the more apparent as the subject matter of contemporary commentaries and investigation. For those who were counting, it was possible to number ten new international organizations for each year of the 1890s and contrast them with the mid-nineteenth century, when there were only five.⁹ The International Telegraphic Union (1865), the Universal Postal Union (1874), the International Union for Weights and Measures (1875), the International Union of Custom Tariffs (1890), and the International Office for Public Hygiene (1907) all featured on the accumulating and increasingly well-rehearsed listings of the objective facts of internationalism.¹⁰ There were the international organizations with distinctive constituencies, such as the still familiar International Olympic Committee (1894), the International Co-operative Alliance (1895), the Universal Esperanto Association (1908). Some international organizations, such as the International Committee for Relief to the Wounded (1863, renamed the International Committee of the Red Cross in 1876), traced their origins back to the nineteenth-century humanitarian societies set up in the wake of the Congress of Vienna. The Young Men’s Christian Association (1844) gathered momentum in the latter decades of the nineteenth century, espousing “Christian principles of social and international conduct” and “the development of a right public conscience such as shall strengthen all those forces which are working for the promotion of peace and better understanding between classes, nations, and races.”¹¹ Middle-class European women had not always found it easy to access the international societies of the earlier nineteenth century such as the YMCA or the abolitionist movement (the 1840 World Anti-Slavery Conference held in London had actively excluded women). When the opportunities arose, women were quick to organize their own international associations and coordinating bodies, such as the International Council of Women (1888) and the International Woman Suffrage Alliance (1904). By 1910, an international conference and the Brussels-based Office Central des Associations Internationales coordinated the multiple interests of this burgeoning international society, as it was commonly identified.

Many of these international organizations were based in Europe (most popularly Berne, Brussels, Paris, and London); however, they were as remarked on in North and South America, and in the urbanized outposts of empires. Their activities extended into the non-European parts of the world, particularly Japan.¹² Some were the instruments of state cooperation, others were the manifestations of individual and social initiatives. As the sheer number of international organizations, their variety, and their functions as settings for transnational sociability, cooperation, and the spread of ideas captured the imaginations of their membership, they became the basis of claims that “objective internationalism” had arrived. Regardless of parochialism or vintage, these organizations were construed as evidence of the difference between twentieth-century internationalism and previous nineteenth-century versions.¹³ From a historical perspective, the articulation of this difference is less evidence of a really-existing internationalism, than of a new self-consciousness of the internationality of everyday life.

A typical product of this self-consciousness was the doctoral thesis on “Internationalism and the international administrative organization,” published in 1910 by a young French political science student in Lyon named Jean Claveirole.¹⁴ Claveirole was particularly endeared to the Berne-based Universal Postal Union, an international organization that had liberated postal delivery from incompatible national and local administrative practices and tariffs. The significance of this organization lay not just in the facility with which mail could now be sent but also the new ways of seeing oneself in the world it invited. Claveirole’s observations of the new age augured by the international administration of postal services entice the twenty-first-century reader into a past as foreign as it is familiar: “When I throw a stamped card for 10 centimes into a letter box, to some part of another continent, and it arrives in a few days; when I address a letter to a stranger and I add an ‘international response’ coupon, exchangeable in every country against a post stamp for the same value; can’t I say, even more justly than Socrates, that I am a citizen of the world?”¹⁵

For Claveirole, the act of posting a letter demonstrated the realism of the new internationalism, as it drew the individual into an international realm of sociability. As significantly, Claveroile claimed, the effect of the existence of international administrative organizations literally repeated the institutional and sociological processes that had led to the creation of nations such as France itself, albeit on a new international scale.

Before World War I, then, internationality was a word that signified both the existence of international organizations and practices and their social and cultural effects. Like the equally ambiguous “nationality” (a term that had worked its way into the majority of European political and legal lexicons only in the latter decades of the nineteenth century), internationality was used to bolster arguments for a particular way of being in the world.¹⁶ For John Hobson, internationality meant that “anything happening in the most remote part of the world makes its immediate impression upon the society of nations.”¹⁷ It could also imply an international subjectivity, what Hobson would describe as a new kind of “international man,” simultaneously national and international.¹⁸ Claveirole’s own fascination with internationality resonated the pervasiveness of nationality.

The Viennese-born Alfred Fried pushed the conceptual relationship between nationality and internationality almost as far as it could go. Born into the simultaneously polyglot and nationalist rhythms of the Habsburg Empire, Fried was an archetypal turn-of-the-century self-identified internationalist—an enthusiast of Esperanto as a universal language and a publisher of journals with pacifist and internationalist leanings. In 1892 (twenty years after the establishment of Germany as a political state), Fried set up the German Peace Society; twenty years later, he created the Verband für internationale Verständigung—the Society for International Understanding. He was not only a founder of and subscriber to international organizations, he made it his business to document their existence. The purpose of Fried’s directory, the Annuaire de la vie internationale, for example, was to log the manifestations of objective internationalism—and it remains a useful catalogue of turn-of-the-twentieth-century visions of “international life.”¹⁹ When in 1908 Fried published his Das Internationale Leben der Gegenwart, “International Life Today,” he wrote it as a travel guide to the country known as “das internationale Land,” a territory imagined through the mapping of intergovernmental treaties and the new Public International Unions.²⁰

There are good reasons why Fried’s map was dotted with public international unions or, as Claveirole preferred, international administrative organizations.²¹ In the early twentieth century, the organizations that coordinated and regulated the movement of people, things, and diseases across the borders of member political states were attributed a simultaneously political and social influence on internationalism by virtue of their administrative internationality; since then historians have credited these public international unions with the introduction into international relations of “new themes, new actors” and new “international norms.”²² The Universal Postal Union was exemplary of these organizations, down to its use of the language of “Union.” Its shared laws and rules were conceptualized as building administrative links between states and nationally defined practices, and, on that foundation, a future form of international government. It was not only nations as states that were invited into the sphere of international administration. In pursuit of its practical international goal, the United Postal Services included among its founding members a “non-sovereign” entity, Egypt.²³

Christian Lange’s involvement in the first Inter-Parliamentary Union conference held in Norway in 1899, was as indicative of the governmental dimensions of the new internationalism. The Inter-Parliamentary Union collected together parliamentarians, predominantly from Western and Northern Europe, committed to the development of international rules and laws for cooperation between liberal democracies.²⁴ For Lange, as for many parliamentarians of states designated “national,” the mutuality of national and international sociological phenomena determined their intrinsic compatibility. Undoubtedly this compatibility was often consummated as a union of political convenience. The historian Madeleine Herren has shown how, regardless of individual motivations, the creation of international administrative organizations suited the purposes of state government agendas, as a “back door to power.”²⁵ The Swiss government, for example, was extremely aware of the symbolic capital that could be accrued from the fact that its political capital Berne was the headquarters of many of these new public international unions. Swiss politicians made strategic use of the impetus of the new internationalism to compensate for what the Swiss federal government lacked in foreign policy initiatives.²⁶ Although the United States exhibited more than enough domestic foreign policy clout, in 1908, Theodore Roosevelt was sufficiently seduced by this new kind of “backdoor” power to lure international gatherings away from the European continent onto welcoming American shores.²⁷

In the age of the nation-state, there were many strategic or even pragmatic considerations underlying the recovery of the nation’s compatibility with internationalism. After all, the objective facts of steam, electricity, and trade, like international institutions that enabled an international sociability and allegedly fostered internationality, were the acknowledged framework connecting national communities across otherwise disconnected domestic landscapes. This nationalizing process ...