Contending Internationalisms: Times, Spaces, Frames

Abstract

This chapter engages with recent work on the histories and geographies of “internationalism,” tracing the story back to the early nineteenth century. While the internationalism of nations—of governing the world through a state-created framework—forms an important development of the older Westphalian order mentioned in Chapter 1, this chapter also draws attention to other outlooks and practices, including what Mark Mazower (Governing the world: The history of an idea, 1815 to the present. The Penguin Press, New York, 2012) calls diverse “brotherhoods” around free market ideals, evangelical moralism, anti-slavery campaigns, legal codification, and scientific knowledge as well as to what geographers have similarly charted as the heterogeneity of subaltern movements that challenge hegemonic forms of power and oppression (Featherstone, in Solidarity: Hidden histories and geographies of internationalism. Zed Books, London, New York, 2012; Political Geography, 49: 7–16, 2015; Ferretti, in Political Geography, 63: 10–19, 2018). Resisting the periodization of time, the chapter suggests that both Westphalian and post-Westphalian (or perhaps counter-Westphalian) forms of internationalism have long co-shaped global politics—and are therefore likely to do so in the future as cities gain even more clout. This ultimately requires us to reframe global political narratives that erase non-state spatialities and forms of agency, whether past, present, or future (Herod in Social Science History 27: 501–523, 2004).