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Afterword The National in the Age of Internationalism Historians understand more than anyone else that there is no progress in history and no utopia in the past. But it is useful at times in trying to understand where we are, the world we live in, to come to some understanding of the world that we have lost. That world, I have been trying to argue, was one in which internationalism was an idea underwritten by an older story that imagined the march of humanity into ever-widening circles of association, nations as a historical pit stop on the way to somewhere else, and modernity and democracy as the engines and outcomes of this inevitable forward movement. It was the combination of those expectations in the context of a century darkened with threats of man-made destruction that, in the twentieth century, made the international as inexorable an imagined community as the nation. Despitepredictionsthatinthetwentiethcenturytheroleofnationalityasthe driver of modernity and progress would be overtaken by internationality—as if the formation of an international community were the next stage in the social and political evolution of humanity—the national and international remained entwined as ways of thinking about the self and society, about the borders (and point) of political communities and government, and about liberty and equality. The story of that entanglement has not always been easy to tell, partly because internationalism, regardless of its content, has been tainted as utopian in ways that nationalism, regardless of its content, has not. Bolstered by the political realism of the state, and the potency of state sovereignty , modern historical attention has attended to the unrelenting question “What is a nation?” and narrating national pasts to the neglect of internationalism . It did not help that when the history of internationalism was first broached, after World War I, like the history of pacifism and, later, human Afterword 151 rights, it tended to be written as a history of political idealism above and beyond the cynical practices of nation-states. In the 1950s, Theodore Ruyssen, who was by this time approaching ninety, put himself to the task of continuing the historical work begun by Christian Lange (Lange had only completed the first volume of his history of internationalism, which ended in the eighteenth century). The result was first La Societé internationale, which in effect concentrated on the conditions of internationality, described by Ruyssen as the “powerful movement” of his times that had brought nations into a common field of cultural, economic, and political life. This was followed with Les sources doctrinales de l’internationalisme, a complementary study of the intellectual origins of internationalism and its sources in “Western civilization.” Ruyssen projected a tradition of international thought backward through nineteenth-century international abolition, peace, and working-class movements to the ancient world, and then forward to the cultural politics of the new age. The propagator of internationalism’s mystique argued that this history proved that internationalism was an essentially Western phenomenon, by virtue of its modern manifestations, its basis in Christian universalist thought, and its practical spread through the expansive force of Christian missionaries and Western empires.1 Ruyssen’s version of the history of internationalism competed of course with that of Cassin—who went to great trouble to emphasize both the intrinsic Frenchness and Judaic attributes of human rights thinking—and Peng Chun-Chang—who attributed this “Western” tradition to the influence of Confucius. Ruyssen was also fighting against the disinterest of academic historians who ignored twentieth-century manifestations of internationalism on the grounds either that internationalism was irrelevant to the study of real (national) societies and even more powerful psychological (national) subjectivities, or that internationalism was a nineteenth century class-based political phenomenon that transformed into the international communist movement and antagonistic to liberal nationalism. With the end of the Cold War, however, the balance of historical interest tilted increasingly in favor of the plausibility of an international past, and an “international turn” in the historical profession. This turn began with the cultural history of nonnational experience explored through the methodology of transnationalism and examples drawn from the geography of empires or the movement across national borders. As international intervention once again dominated discussion of international politics, historians became attracted to the study of humanitarianism and human rights, and more belatedly to 152 Afterword international organizations as significant transnational sites. The new historical interest in the transnational and global has provided a congenial setting for historians, like myself, curious to understand the modern significance of the international as...

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