Internationalism in the Age of Nationalism

Introduction

Introduction In the steamy summer of 1948, a group of thirty-six teachers representing twenty-one countries—nearly half the number of internationally recognized sovereign states in the world at that time—met at Adelphi College on New York’s Long Island, a few miles from the United Nation’s own makeshift headquarters in an old munitions factory at Lake Success.1 They were guests of a UNESCO seminar on “world understanding,” tasked with discussing education programs that would promote interest in and knowledge of the workings of the UN and its specialized agencies. They also took it upon themselves to determine the proper progress of internationalism. Refusing to be defeated by the heat and humidity, or by the challenges of translation, the teachers talked, ate, and made the most of photo opportunities . They listened to lectures by UN personnel, toured Lake Success, met with Eleanor Roosevelt on the grounds of her home at Hyde Park, and Dwight Eisenhower, then president of Columbia University. In the cool of night, they entertained each other with “National Evenings,” celebrated independence days, exhibited national movies, listened to music, and performed folk dances. At the end of six weeks of seminars and socializing as an “international group,” they concluded that “adult” internationalism welcomed “the nation-state structure of mankind.”2 The seminar on “world understanding” was precisely the kind of internationally minded cultural event that Hans Morgenthau, the American political scientist and proclaimed founder of post‒World War II realist theory, disdained as irrelevant to a hard-headed pursuit of peace. A German-Jewish émigré from the Weimar Republic, Morgenthau was based at the University of Chicago in 1948 and had just published his seminal study Politics Among Nations, with its lively dismissal of the futile idealism of UNESCO’s educational programs. History had taught Morgenthau that “world understanding” 2 Introduction could never guarantee peace because of the unreliability of human nature and the complex interests of states.3 It is all the more surprising then to find that in Politics Among Nations Morgenthau postulated “the creation of an international community as foundation for a world state” and as “the first step toward the peaceful settlement of the international conflicts which might lead to war.”4 Into the 1950s, as the UN and UNESCO succumbed to the politics of the Cold War, in a succession of new editions of Politics Among Nations, Morgenthau anticipated “the obsolescence of the sovereign national state” and the transformation of “the existing international society of sovereign nations into a supranational community of individuals.”5 Although Morgenthau thought little of UNESCO’s cultural content, he presumed that its institutional existence had contributed to the “spreading web of international activities and agencies, in which and through which the interests and life of all the nations would be gradually integrated.” Internationalism has long been regarded as a story of ideologues and radicals—whether nineteenth-century pacifists driven by utopian dreams of a parliament of man or working-class revolutionaries urging the workers of the world to unite. This book recovers a distinctively twentieth-century internationalism that was imagined through the same dominant lens of realism as nationalism, often with a similar defensiveness about its realist and idealist imperatives, and that culminated in the League of Nations and United Nations as unprecedented experiments in what was sometimes termed “international government.” From the turn of the twentieth century, internationalism captured imaginations as “new” because its characteristics were the product of the social and political modernity of the times, including new international institutions, new international forms of sociability, and the importance of, as the UNESCO teachers would pronounce, “human beings with the right outlook.”6 Writers, intellectuals, and political activists, men and women, from across the liberal political spectrum, remarked on the sociological or objective character of an “era of internationalism,” and its réalité. The stimulant for this popular and intellectual interest in a new internationalism was not only the transnational spread of ideas and power of “public opinion” that accompanied mass literacy, but also the constant threat of war and the evidence of atrocities in the name of nationalism. In the circumstances, internationalism seemed to many the most likely path to a “permanent peace” and to the fulfillment of the democratic ambitions of men, women, and anticolonialists who had limited political representation in nation-states and empires. Throughout the twentieth century, the significance and meaning Introduction 3 attributed to internationalism emerged out of the same questions of modernity and democracy, and political idealism...