Dreams of Peace and Freedom: Utopian Moments in the Twentieth Century (review)

In the year 2000, the New York Public Library presented a major exhibit titled Utopia: The Search for the Ideal Society in the Western World. The exhibit drew large crowds and was widely and favorably reviewed. That the exhibit was staged at all was at once surprising and reassuring. The word "utopia" has long had a negative connotation as, at best, the naive faith of dreamers oblivious to the practical affairs of ordinary, hardworking persons and, at worst, as the all-too-practical program of twentieth-century dictators willing to pursue their ideal state by any means.

A prolific historian of twentieth-century Europe now at Yale, Jay Winter challenges this blanket indictment of utopia. He offers several European moments, or "minor utopias," that constituted serious projects for partial transformation of the world rather than wholesale revolution or destruction. Rarely examined from the angle of utopianism, these are the Paris World's Fair of 1900 and, in the same year, the photographs commissioned by French banker Albert Kahn and the socialist Second International led by Frenchman Jean Jaurès; the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 and the League of Nations; the Paris exhibition of 1937 celebrating science, technology (especially electric lights), and art; French lawyer René Cassin's Universal Declaration of Human Rights of 1948; the French student revolt and the "Prague spring" of 1968 plus, in the same decade, Latin American liberation theology and communities; and the 1992 emergence of visions of global citizenship following the emergence of a powerful European Union through the Maastricht Treaty.

In each case, Winter reveals arguments and artifacts that demonstrate the appropriateness of the utopian label, yet without romanticizing the projects. For example, President Woodrow Wilson's 1919 vision of self-determination for all peoples as the royal road to peace was conspicuously at odds with his contempt for non-whites and non-Europeans. At the peace conference Wilson even refused to meet with W. E. B. DuBois and Chinese ambassador to the United States Wellington Koo to discuss pan-African and -Asian concerns. For the morally superior Wilson, racial hierarchy trumped universal rights. So much for the universality of his utopia.

Equally important, Winter strikingly connects these utopian enterprises with their decidedly nonutopian contexts. For instance, the Spanish Civil War coincided with the 1937 Paris exposition's celebration of technology and science—at variance with the mass bombing of the city of Guernica weeks earlier. That deliberate attack on civilians inspired Pablo Picasso's famous painting, first shown in the Spanish pavilion. Meanwhile the Tower of Peace dwarfed the highly nationalistic German, Italian, Soviet, and Japanese pavilions, along with the Palestinian one boasting of growing Jewish settlement. Similarly, the Declaration of Human Rights was shadowed by the liberation of the Nazi death camps. These contradictions do not surprise but rather intrigue Winter.

Technology is the subtext of Winter's minor utopias. His starting point is Kahn's project to photograph the entire world, to preserve the project in Paris as the Archive of the Planet, and, by demonstrating more kinship than differences among nations and cultures, somehow to avoid further war. Similarly, the 1900 Paris fair, among the grandest of all, promoted capitalism, imperialism, and consumption as other means toward permanent world peace. By contrast, Jaurès opposed that very world order and instead sought peace by appealing to workers' presumed commitment worldwide to an equal distribution of products and to control over industrialization.

In these early utopian moments Winter observes a genuine sense of globalization overlooked by those who associate it with only the past two decades. But he updates global citizenship to include "trans-national rights" (p. 190), women's rights, and environmental rights, such as the lawsuits against Union Carbide following the disaster in Bhopal, India, in 1984.

Curiously, Winter does not follow countless others in deeming the internet, the web, and other "high-tech" advances utopian. Yet our unprecedented ability to communicate quickly...