Modernity and National Identity in the United States and East Asia

Part III: Modernity and Identity in the Global Arena

Part III Modernity and Identity in the Global Arena If the late nineteenth century was a period of high nationalism, the early twentieth century saw the forces of nationalism encounter a rising tide of internationalism. Internationalism at this time took several forms. Globalization, for instance, had created worldwide economic and technological linkages and transportation and communication networks. From investment capital to manufactured consumer goods, the economic sphere was increasingly global in scope. In the intellectual realm, transatlantic ties among intellectuals and social reformers had created a nascent transnational community of ideas and social policies, while women’s rights activists in Europe and the United States formed what they hoped would be a truly international movement.1 A number of visionaries held up the example of the United States, where the national rivalries and divisions of Europe had supposedly been subsumed into a single new identity as Americans. They hoped that the increasing internationalization of capital and labor would render nations obsolete, resulting in something like “the United States of Europe and America, perhaps a United States of the world.”2 Another promising sign of a new international order was the emergence of transnational associations to promote common standards and encourage cooperation in scientific and technical fields. Organizations such as the Red Cross, the International Council of Women, and the International Peace Conferences at The Hague (1899 and 1907) gave hope, on the eve of World War I, that a new era of peace and global cooperation was at hand. Yet all these signs of internationalism and globalism were not incompatible with strong sentiments of nationalism and efforts to sharpen and modernize national identities. Anthony Hopkins, one of the leading scholars of globalization and global history, concurs: “The globalization of the nineteenth century was not only consistent with the existence of the nation-state but reinforced it too.” Globalized patterns of trade, investment, and manufacturing had not yet begun to create what late-twentieth-century pundits have called “the borderless world”; rather, such international activity served to strengthen the competitiveness and prosperity of individual nations.3 Moreover, nationalism and internationalism developed in a mutually reinforcing way. As Hopkins notes, “An expanding sense of nationality also helped shape the character of the global links.”4 Although many of the international organizations had as their mandate genuinely transnational concerns—labor, health, scientific advances, and the like—many more of them actually aimed to regulate behavior between and among nations. The Hague Conferences, for instance, did not aim to eliminate war (like the 1928 Kellogg-Briand Pact) but to establish a set of rules to govern the “civilized” conduct of war. Discussion over establishing an international court of arbitration centered on the question of how many judges should be selected from each of the major powers competing for influence. 135 (By contrast, staff officials of the present-day United Nations are considered—in theory, at least—to be citizens of the world, as symbolized by their UN passports.) International expositions and world’s fairs functioned to showcase differences among nations more than to foster any kind of global culture. Even international women’s organizations, which could promote a genuinely transnational sense of solidarity as women, could not shed their national identifications. One embodiment of this was the parade of nationalities in native costumes at international conventions. The Chinese delegates, though making use of internationalist affiliations for their own agenda, rarely traveled to participate in meetings, apparently recognizing that their presence would be little more than tokenism. Their internationalism served their own nationalist goals, and contributing to the international cause held little interest for them. And as Jane Addams, Emily Balch, and others discovered, when European women activists were forced to choose between their international identities as women and their national loyalties amid the stark passions of wartime, nationalism prevailed over internationalism. It is these same feminist internationalists who provide us with an intellectual path to understanding the symbiotic relationship between nationalism and internationalism , even as the European order teetered on the verge of war. Pragmatist philosopher George Herbert Mead argued that a highly developed “national mindedness ” was the prerequisite to internationalism; conversely, an internationalist mind-set would enable nations to see themselves as others saw them, thus refining a more advanced national identity.5 In short, nationalism and internationalism could be seen as two facets of one progressive outlook. 136 ...