Glenda Sluga. Internationalism in the Age of Nationalism.

Abstract

Internationalism, as social scientists might say, is under-defined. This is especially evident when one considers the phenomenon of nationalism, with which internationalism is often paired. The theoretical and empirical scholarship on nationalism is massive. Yet despite what Glenda Sluga aptly calls the “international turn in history” in recent years, the scholarship on internationalism remains rudimentary by comparison. For this reason alone, Internationalism in the Age of Nationalism is welcome. In the book, which is more an extended essay than a monograph, Sluga explores the nature of twentieth-century internationalism. Her basic argument is that internationalism and nationalism were “entangled.” “[T]he history of internationalism,” she writes, “maps profoundly onto the genealogy of nations and nationalism,” and “in the twentieth century the international and national shadowed each other as the object or method of political ambitions” (p. 157). Scholars, accordingly, need to write internationalism back into the history of the last century, a history, Sluga notes, that is dominated by “narratives of nationalism” (p. 3). In very general terms, there is not much to be said about this argument. Few scholars nowadays are likely to disagree that internationalism and nationalism are interconnected or that an exclusive focus on nationalism and the nation-state is insufficient. More intriguing is the way in which Sluga defines internationalism.