The Emergence of Globalism

Visions of World Order in Britain and the United States, 1939–1950

Or Rosenboim

• Publisher: Princeton University Press
• Year: 2017
• Print ISBN: 9780691191508, 9780691168722
• eBook ISBN: 9781400885237
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: World History
• Index: History

How competing visions of world order in the 1940s gave rise to the modern concept of globalism

During and after the Second World War, public intellectuals in Britain and the United States grappled with concerns about the future of democracy, the prospects of liberty, and the decline of the imperial system. Without using the term "globalization," they identified a shift toward technological, economic, cultural, and political interconnectedness and developed a "globalist" ideology to reflect this new postwar reality. The Emergence of Globalism examines the competing visions of world order that shaped these debates and led to the development of globalism as a modern political concept.

Shedding critical light on this neglected chapter in the history of political thought, Or Rosenboim describes how a transnational network of globalist thinkers emerged from the traumas of war and expatriation in the 1940s and how their ideas drew widely from political philosophy, geopolitics, economics, imperial thought, constitutional law, theology, and philosophy of science. She presents compelling portraits of Raymond Aron, Owen Lattimore, Lionel Robbins, Barbara Wootton, Friedrich Hayek, Lionel Curtis, Richard McKeon, Michael Polanyi, Lewis Mumford, Jacques Maritain, Reinhold Niebuhr, H. G. Wells, and others. Rosenboim shows how the globalist debate they embarked on sought to balance the tensions between a growing recognition of pluralism on the one hand and an appreciation of the unity of humankind on the other.

An engaging look at the ideas that have shaped today's world, The Emergence of Globalism is a major work of intellectual history that is certain to fundamentally transform our understanding of the globalist ideal and its origins.

CHAPTER 1

Introduction

A New Global Order

ON 21 FEBRUARY 1939, a few months after British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain travelled to Munich in an attempt to appease Adolf Hitler, the Royal Institute of International Affairs in London held a panel discussion about world order. The main speaker, Lionel Curtis, argued that interdependency was the main characteristic of the modern world: ‘What one small country, a Serbia or a Czechoslovakia, does or leaves undone instantly affects the whole of human society’. He added that in spite of the fact that ‘socially and economically human society is now one closely integrated unit’, the political order reflected fragmentation rather than unity. His conclusion was clearly stated: ‘I am now convinced that a world commonwealth embracing all nations and kindreds [sic] and tongues is the goal at which we must aim before we can hope to move to a higher plane of civilisation. Indeed, I will now go so far as to say that unless we conceive that goal in time, and take steps to approach it, our present stage of civilisation is doomed to collapse’.¹ Curtis’s address was followed by a lively debate about the merits of his suggestions, which reassured him of the public interest in the problem of ‘world order’ and led him to convene a Chatham House study group on the topic.

Curtis was not the only one to find the problem of world order particularly timely and intriguing. In January 1940, H. G. Wells published his own global vision, under the title The New World Order. Whether It Is Attainable, How It Can Be Attained and What Sort of World a World at Peace Will Have to Be.² By then, Europe was already at war. The National Peace Council in London organised a panel discussion about Wells’s book, including the philosopher C. E. M. Joad and the Spanish diplomat Salvador de Madariaga, at which the author was confronted with proponents of alternative visions of post-war world order.³ In the United States, the sinologist and geopolitical thinker Owen Lattimore published in 1942 an article on ‘Asia in a New World Order’, while his friend, US Vice President Henry Wallace, gave an address at Ohio Wesleyan University on the Christian foundations of a new world order.⁴ Luigi Sturzo, Hans Kuhn, E. H. Carr, Robert M. Hutchins, and Quincy Wright were just some of many commentators and intellectuals who wrote books and delivered speeches under the title of ‘world order’.⁵

Google Ngram analysis of twentieth-century English-language publications registers a significant rise of interest in ‘world order’ in the 1940s, with its frequency peaking in 1945. But the concern with the problem of order extended beyond references to the specific expression ‘world order’. The fundamental problem of ordering and reordering the world after a devastating conflict seemed a worthy preoccupation for many public intellectuals in Britain and the United States. The destabilising war was perceived not only as a menacing prospect of doom, but also as an opportunity to question and redefine the fundamental categories of politics. These reconsiderations were often motivated by the perception of a growing tendency towards technological, economic, cultural, and political interconnectedness, which for many mid-century thinkers gave rise to a new political concept, the global.

The Emergence of Globalism is an intellectual history of the complex and nonlinear genealogy of globalism in mid-century visions of world order. Ever since the outbreak of the war, American, British, and émigré intellectuals had diagnosed the emergence of globalism as the defining condition of the post-war era. Their proposals for ordering the post-war world envisaged competing schemes of global orders motivated by concerns for the future of democracy, the prospects of liberty and diversity, and the decline of the imperial system. In this book, I explore the languages employed to outline the meaning of the ‘global’ as a political idea to shed light on the configurations of ‘world order’ as a normative foundation for geopolitical, economic, and legal structures.

Mid-century commentators, as well as later historians, have often invoked the term ‘world order’ when writing about international politics. The statistical data match the textual evidence in revealing that ever since the beginning of the war, public intellectuals in Britain and the United States have sought to imagine the shape of the world to come. The idea of order embodied their attempt to make sense and reorganise the belligerent and disordered post-war world.⁶ They hoped to overcome the political chaos that was seen as the tragic consequence of the international disorder, economic strife, and social unrest of the interwar years. The idea of order did not necessarily imply a rigid, unifying, or homogeneous system. Rather, many conceptions of world order revolved around the aspiration to accommodate change and flexibility as valuable and desirable aspects of human life. The tension between order and instability remained a central aspect of mid-century political commentary.

The political debates about world order explored in this study exhibited a growing sensitivity to a particular dimension of politics that I define as ‘global’. One of my main objectives is, therefore, to outline the competing meanings of the global as a political space in mid-century thought. If we examine the statistical analysis of published texts in English language provided by Google, we can see that the term ‘global’ started to gain ground just after the outbreak of the war. It was at that moment that the new political space of the global was generated as a response to the total and all-encompassing nature of the war, facilitated by technological innovations. If the war was global, an adequately global plan for peacetime order was necessary. Thinking about the global sphere did not signify the abandonment of all other constituent elements of politics; states, empires, federations, non-state communities, and supranational organisations were reimagined and redefined—but not necessarily abolished—before they could acquire a new place in the modern, global world. In this book, I use the term ‘global’ in the widest, most inclusive sense, as a perspective on politics, a sometimes abstract space that was modified, redefined, and challenged in lively transnational conversations.

The ‘global’ was invoked to outline a different political order than the international, transnational, and cosmopolitan spaces of politics. In the writings of mid-century public intellectuals, all four categories make their appearance in content if not by name. As a political category, the international attributes importance to the nation, or the state, as a defining, order-creating unit, and explores the relations between nations as sovereign entities.⁷ The transnational space stretches beyond national boundaries to explore interconnections across borders, without undermining the significance of national communities and states.⁸ Cosmopolitanism, by contrast, typically assumes that all human beings are part of a world community, and should orient their political and moral allegiances accordingly.⁹ Globalism emerged from an awareness of the political significance of the globe as a unitary whole made of interconnected, diverse political units. The recognition of the world’s ‘oneness’ did not always mean political monism. Globalism often implied a renewed awareness of diversity, and an attempt to envisage a world order to preserve it. The tension between diversity and unity is, therefore, a central aspect of the idea of globalism.

The assumption that the post-war order should reflect the spatial unity of the globe often relied on technological innovations like flights and telephone communications, which contributed, for mid-century commentators, to the world’s interconnectedness. One of the best-selling books advocating this view was One World, the account of the 1942 world tour of the American Republican politician Wendell Willkie.¹⁰ Two years after his defeat in the presidential race to Franklin D. Roosevelt, Willkie embarked on a private airplane for a goodwill tour of Egypt, Palestine, Turkey, Russia, Siberia, and China, meeting with leading politicians and local residents. His book provides colourful and enthusiastic commentary on disparate topics: from the beauty of Mongolia and Mount Scopus seen from the air to Charles de Gaulle’s Beirut home, where ‘every corner, every wall, held busts, statues, and pictures of Napoleon’, to an enthusiastic analysis of the Chinese economy. The general message was that there were no more distant or uncovered places in the world; one could easily travel to any remote spot, meet its inhabitants, and discover their lifestyle and opinions. In consequence, for Willkie, the post-war world order should be drafted according to the interests of the world as a whole, not only of powerful states or empires. Political and economic freedom in China or the Middle East was no less important than American freedom. The increasing availability of air power rendered, for him, the space of politics more interconnected, closed, and therefore ‘global’.

Thinking about the global as a material and conceptual political space emphasises the complexity of this idea. The ‘spatial turn’ in historical research highlighted the importance of space, place, location, and spatiality as categories for understanding and analysing historical knowledge.¹¹ The study of international thought is concerned, explicitly and implicitly, with the category of space. Geographic space, its perceptions and representations, provides a fundamental and intriguing conceptual framework for understanding and analysing world politics. Put differently, political space is the theoretical conceptualisation of the geographic materiality of politics. Yet, as Harvey Starr suggests, scholars of International Relations usually ignore the notion of ‘space’, misinterpret it as deterministic, or dismiss it as irrelevant to their analysis.¹² Starr’s proposal to take the concept of ‘space’ more seriously applies also for historians of international thought. In this study, I argue that the category of political space offers a useful perspective on political thought, which is particularly appropriate to delineate and locate the meanings of world order and globalism. I employ this category to reflect on the mid-century perceptions of the physical geographic conditions of the world and their impact on political and social order.¹³ The notion of political space suggests that the interpretation of the relationship between politics and geography depends on perception: the global was not a mere objective description of the actual spherical geographic conditions of planet Earth. The political space created by the globalist ideology was anchored in observations about geography but shaped by a range of other philosophical, sociological, and political assumptions. This is not a unilinear relationship, but a mutual one: politics can influence the geographical conditions of the world, as well as be influenced by them.

The idea of political space provides a helpful connection between the concrete geopolitics of international relations and the abstract notion of order. It clarifies how various public intellectuals perceived the actual organisation and interaction of different political units in the world. My goal in using this concept is not to impose a rigid theory of political space on past thinkers, but rather to investigate how they characterised and theorised political space in their own writings. Examining the theoretical and material spatial dimension of political structures helps understand their internal functions and dispositions towards other units and towards the global space.

DRAWING THE CONTOURS OF GLOBALISM

Globalism meant different things to different people. The book explores aspects of the 1940s discourse of globalism through seven mid-century conversations about world order. Political commentators drew on various fields of knowledge to conceptualise the rise of the global space in world politics. Economics, philosophy of science, sociology, law, geopolitics, theology, political thought—each provided a distinct set of tools for shaping the global order. The multifaceted, flexible character of the idea of the global enhanced its appeal but also highlighted its weakness. There was no one ‘global’ ideology, no single definition of the ‘global’ political sphere. Yet three main themes can be discerned from mid-century attempts to conceptualise globalism.

First, globalism offered an alternative to empire. The global order embodied a growing acceptance of the decline of the imperial world order established by the European powers: France, Britain, and to a lesser extent the Netherlands.¹⁴ By 1945, the new empires in potentia, Germany, Italy, and Japan, were effectively defeated. After the war, some feared the rise of the United States and Soviet Russia as powerful empires controlling vast territories around the world. While the political experience of empire could not be expunged from the international public sphere, and indeed had significant ideological...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• List of Maps
• Chapter 1: Introduction: A New Global Order
• Chapter 2: Reimagining the State in a Global Space
• Chapter 3: Geopolitics and Regional Order
• Chapter 4: The End of Imperial Federalism?
• Chapter 5: Federal Democracy for Welfare
• Chapter 6: Writing a World Constitution: The Chicago Committee and the New World Order
• Chapter 7: Perceptions of Science and Global Order
• Chapter 8: Catholicism, Pluralism, and Global Democracy
• Chapter 9: Conclusion: The Genealogy of Globalism
• Acknowledgments
• Bibliography
• Index