Internationalism in the Age of Nationalism

2. Imagine Geneva, Between the Wars

C h a p t e r 2 Imagine Geneva, Between the Wars The history of internationalism has always involved forgetting. In the European summer of 1919, the British geologist Mrs. Ogilvie Gordon stood before the National Council of Women of Great Britain and Ireland and announced “a new era which the historian of the future will probably term the Era of Internationalism.”1 Gordon was echoing, intentionally or not, the prewar pronouncements of a new internationalism. Her attention, however, like that of her postwar contemporaries, was not on the past. She had in mind an international future recently inaugurated at the Paris Peace Conference, where victor governments, from President Woodrow Wilson’s America to Taishō-era Japan, had signed up to both the principle of nationality and the form of international governance that took shape as the League of Nations. Wilson’s informal adviser, Colonel House, reassured the president that commitment to a league had not only inaugurated a new world order but also turned the world upside down.2 House did not mention that the support of the great powers for a League of Nations was to a significant degree provoked by alarm at the success of the Bolshevik Revolution that already had taken place in Russia and its reinvigoration of Marxist-inspired internationalism. It was no coincidence that the new experiment in institutional internationalism embraced the language of “social justice.”3 But the significance of the “sentiments of justice and humanity ” in this new international order had as strong roots in the liberal inclinations and paradoxes of a distinctively twentieth-century internationalism.4 This explains why for John Hobson, the league’s template was too timid, and he soon gave up on his expectations of an international answer to the world’s social and economic injustices.5 Within a few years of the league’s creation, the American epidemiologist and feminist Alice Hamilton wrote to her sister 46 Chapter 2 complaining about the ways in which the limitations of the new league had betrayed the hopes of women. Hamilton was as annoyed by the unperturbed optimism of her close friend, the psychologist George Herbert Mead, who remained “a fanatical adherent of the League.” Mead, Hamilton mocked, was still convinced that “all the woes of Europe will be over when once we have joined it.”6 The absence of the United States from the League of Nations has long been at the heart of the historical accounting of the international organization ’s weakness and ultimate failure—after all the league was not able to prevent outbreaks of conflict in the 1920s and 1930s, or World War II.7 This chapter concentrates, instead, on the scope of postwar ambitions and disillusionment inspired by the league in the interwar period, as one way of correcting a historical tradition that has written international institutions out of the study of the twentieth century. As we will see, the league was crucial to the mechanics of nationalism as well as to the intellectual, political, and social history of twentieth-century democracy and modernity. In the early months of 1919, the disillusionment that became such a defining part of the league’s history seemed unimaginable, just as the inevitability with which the representatives of the great powers discussed the invention of a league was unprecedented. To begin with, the drafting of the League of Nations Covenant reignited earlier debates about the political nature of internationalism and its possibilities, and made their resolution all the more pressing and real. If there was to be a new representative international organization, should it be an alliance or a federation of nation-states? A dissoluble or indissoluble union? An exercise in sociability among nations or actual governance by an international body? Who should be included in this new international community? The spectrum of suggestions sent to the commission tasked with drafting the league’s covenant tells an important tale of the different and changing ways in which the new internationalism was imagined in the postwar, its complex relationship to the institutional and intellectual innovations of nationalism, and the influence of the league on the fate of those fatefully twinned ideologies . Recovering those international imaginaries requires taking stock of how our own memory of the league—as a failure, unable to prevent calamity or exploitation or war—has forgotten the longer history of internationalism and its points of deep institutional and intellectual connection to the history of nationalism. Imagine Geneva, Between the Wars 47 Drafting the League of Nations...