Cultural Internationalism and World Order (review)

As the nineteenth century became the twentieth and the very real dangers of mutually hostile nationalisms became more evident, aware and thinking people throughout the developed world gradually came to accept the idea that a new spirit of international cooperation might well be formed by better communication and understanding among nations.

In the view of the noted historian Akira Iriye, cultural internationalism, per se, came into its own after the end of the cataclysmic Great War of 1914-18. This titanic upheaval, which overthrew three great European empires and redrew the map of Europe, was a watershed in many ways. There had been international cooperation among the thinking and influential beforehand—about such matters as lighthouses, telegraphs, and the standardization of silver coinage throughout Europe, for example—but nothing on the scale that came into existence in the 1920s and early 1930s.

Not only intellectuals but also statesmen realized that one possible way of forging a stable and lasting peace was to encourage international exchange and cooperation. In Cultural Internationalism and World Order Iriye attempts to show just how widespread and dedicated a following the concept rapidly gained, not merely among pacifists, Quakers, and Esperantists, but also among many who had endured the travail and bloodshed of Europe at war. Not only Europe, one might add; the war had also involved men and women in, and from, China, Japan, Africa, and Melanesia.

In the post-1918 era, an array of sustained, if ill-coordinated, efforts fostered cooperation. These ranged from the creation of yet more international languages—Volapuk, the first, was a child of the nineteenth century—to international student exchange programs (which were occasionally used unscrupulously for espionage and irredentist propaganda), international lecture circuits (such as that of the British Council, contemptuously castigated by a contemporary as "a form of outdoor relief for upper-class Oxbridge homosexuals"), and a bewildering number of other cultural activities.

Iriye scrupulously notes the tensions this movement, if one can so call it, encountered with regard to the realpolitik of those turbulent days; the horses of instruction were earnest and industrious indeed, but the tigers of wrath had blood in their eyes and fire in their bellies. The Italian irredentist poet Gabriele D'Annunzio led a handful of enthusiasts to seize the port city of Fiume, now Rijeka. The newly independent Lithuanians pined bitterly for the restoration of Wilno (Vilna, Vilnius), their ancient capital then in Polish hands, and Magyars and Romanians snarled at one another over the forested crags and fair meadows of Transylvania.

As Winston Churchill later observed, the wars of peoples were more terrible than the wars of princes, and the 1920s and 1930s were decades of rampant nationalist hatreds. Even as frock-coated statesmen signed treaties and exchanged toasts at Paris, Spa, Genoa, Rapallo, Lausanne, Locarno, and Montreux, civilian populations were expelled from cities, towns, and villages in which their forebears had lived for centuries; Greece alone accepted a million ethnic refugees from Asia Minor between 1922 and 1924, while over half a million Turks were summarily expelled from the Balkans.

Iriye holds that the efforts of cultural internationalists can be appreciated only in the context of world politics; a lasting and stable world order cannot rely upon governments and the variable realities of power politics. A sane world order depends on the open exchange of culture among peoples in pursuing common intellectual and cultural interests, whether or not governments are the prime movers.

The chapter on the separation of culture from internationalism is particularly intriguing in the light of current controversies about Ienaga Saburo and his struggle against sanitized school texts in Japan. As late as 1935 French and German teachers were meeting to continue their discussions of textbook revision as a joint enterprise—in vain, as events proved, for the siren songs of rival nationalisms and martial euphoria were immeasurably stronger than the small clear voice of reason...