Internationalist Discourse Research Articles

The Early Socio-ecological Dimensions of Tricontinental (1967–1971): A Sovereign Social Metabolism for the Third World

This article delves into the socio-ecological dimensions of OSPAAAL, the Cuban Third World solidarity institution, focusing particularly on the early years of its official organ: the magazine Tricontinental (1967–1971). Tricontinental’s articles and graphic works, even if not always in an explicit manner, addressed environmental concerns in a revolutionary way, anticipating debates that would later unfold on international institutional platforms. These concerns were primarily discussed in the context of the Third World’s quest for autonomous production, closely intertwined with the agrarian question and sovereign industrialization. Key aspects such as land access, distribution, and resource management were pivotal. The publication’s central emphasis on struggles for national liberation, especially within the guerrilla arena, played a crucial role in disseminating the anti-imperialist pursuit of a sovereign social metabolism across the Third World. Combining Cuban, Latin Americanist, and internationalist accents, Tricontinental also condemned the ecological impact of transnational corporations’ predatory resource extraction in the Third World, while exploring alternative and cooperative models. This article unveils the latent socio-environmental dimensions of its critique, illustrating how ecological concerns subtly underpinned its anti-imperialist and internationalist discourse.

Exploring Nuances in American Republican Discourse: A SFL-driven Basic Content Analysis of G. Bush and D. Trump as Case Studies

This exploratory study uses a Functional-Semantic approach to language with the aim to foreground the contrasting ideological, discursive, thematic and political discourse features that mark D. Trump and George Bush's nationalistic discourse. Using a Nvivo12-facilitated CDA-oriented Basic Content Analysis (BCA), I examine 5 purposively sampled public addresses delivered by George W. Bush and Donald Trump (5 for each case) during their respective presidencies. The key findings of this lexicometric analysis disclosed subtle variations and significant intertextual connections in these two nationalistic discourse genre chains. Both discourse makers deployed certain socio-cognitive elements consistent with their discursive purposes and addressee mental models. George Bush’s sample attests to a ‘conservative Jeffersonian internationalist discourse’ that is marked by a call for Americans to think of themselves as one people, whose members are equal, rather than being in conflict with an out-group America-internally. Indeed, Donald Trump's discourse subscribes to hardline Jacksonian stream, introducing an ideological and political nationalism, characterized by heightened polarization, conspiracy theories and group essentialization. This research has broader implications for political communication, informing discussions on how language shapes political ideologies and societies. The revealed intertextual links support previous research on the intertextuality and ideological encoding of nationalistic narratives in American political discourse.

A Practice Round for the Inner City: Circum-Caribbean Occupation, Crack Cocaine, and Religious Duty in Louis Farrakhan’s Nation of Islam

Throughout the mid-1980s, the Nation of Islam—via its newspaper the Final Call—condemned American expansion of empire in the circum-Caribbean. Domestically, articles focused on President Ronald Reagan’s War on Drugs, characterizing it as a farce justifying the imprisonment and genocide of Black people. These were not separate thought experiments, however. For the Nation of Islam, the same racist, imperialist justifications served as the basis of both occupations, one foreign and one domestic. American military action abroad was simply a precursor to subjugation of Black America with tanks, guns, and bombs. This article explores this intellectual and internationalist discourse and the real solutions that emerged from it through the Nation of Islam’s Dopebusters program, which fought drugs and violence in Black communities. I argue that these tactics were a religio-political response, combining Islam, Black nationalism, internationalism, and anti-imperial discourses to translate theory and rhetoric into community action.

Decolonization Struggles at the United Nations: The Question of Algeria, 1955-1961

AbstractAlthough national self-determination emerged as an international legal norm with the formation of the United Nations (UN) in 1945, its implementation continued to be resisted by European colonial powers for decades after. This raises the following question: how was European colonial rule challenged at the UN? This article contends that existing accounts of decolonization have not fully theorized the processes through which colonialism was contested at the UN. It fills this gap by demonstrating the critical role of argumentation, narrativization and discursive struggles through deploying the crucial “Question of Algeria” that was debated between 1955 and 1961. It demonstrates that the Algerian question yielded two opposing discourses—an anticolonial internationalist discourse and a metrocentric civilizational discourse—with both drawing on distinct ideas about human rights and development. The analysis explains the eventual triumph of the former as states increasingly rallied behind the Algerian cause.

A ‘Sound Investment’? British Cultural Diplomacy and Overseas Students: The British Council's Students Committee, 1935–1939

This article explores the UK government's first foray into cultural diplomacy by focusing on the activities of the British Council's Students Committee in the run-up to the Second World War. Students were placed at the heart of British cultural diplomacy, which drew on foreign models as well as the experience of intra-empire exchanges. While employing cultural internationalist discourse, the drive to attract more overseas students to the United Kingdom was intended to bring economic and political advantages to the host country. The British Council pursued its policy in cooperation with non-state actors but ultimately was guided by the Foreign Office, which led it to target key strategic regions, principally in Europe and the Mediterranean Basin.

From converts to cooperation: Protestant internationalism, US missionaries and Indian Christians and ‘Professional’ social work between Boston and Bombay (c. 1920–1950)

AbstractThe 1920s and 30s were a high phase of liberal missionary internationalism driven especially by American-led visions of the Social Gospel. As the missionary consensus shifted from proselytization to social concerns, the indigenization of missions and the role of the ‘younger churches’ outside of Europe and North America was brought into focus. This article shows how Protestant internationalism pursued a ‘Christian Sociology’ in dialogue with the field’s academic and professional form.Through the case study of settlement sociology and social work schemes by the American Marathi Mission (AMM) in Bombay, the article highlights the intricacies of applying internationalist visions in the field and asks how they were contested and shaped by local conditions and processes. Challenging a simplistic ‘secularization’ narrative, the article then argues that it was the liberal, anti-imperialist drive of the missionary discourse that eventually facilitated an American ‘professional imperialism’ in the development of secular social work in India. Adding local dynamics to the analysis of an internationalist discourse benefits the understanding of both Protestant internationalism and the genesis of Indian social work and shows the value of an integrated global micro-historical approach.

Petitioning for Palestine: refugee appeals to international authorities

ABSTRACT In the second half of the twentieth century, stateless Palestinian refugees regularly submitted petitions to international authorities, particularly the UN. In these petitions, the refugees demanded their rights and invoked the UN’s liberal internationalist discourse to assert the justice of their cause. This article explores what these petitions reveal about contentious politics among the Palestinian grassroots in the refugee camps. In so doing, it recasts Palestinian refugee camp communities as actors consciously engaged with international politics, and key drivers in internationalising the ‘Question of Palestine’. By unpacking the petitions’ internationalist aspects, the article also situates Palestinian refugee history within the broader context of post-war global governance. Finally, the analysis presented here challenges the state-centrism of existing historiography on petitioning, which examines the practice largely in relation to the growth of the state. By contrast, the case study of Palestinian petitioning shows that the practice can also be important in a setting of statelessness. This article therefore makes a series of contributions to understanding not only Palestinian political history, but also the practice of petitioning and the dynamics of post-war internationalism.

Ernst Jäckh and the National Internationalism of Interwar Germany

In interwar Germany, internationalism and nationalism coexisted in a public sphere that often transcended national borders. This seeming contradiction helps explain the mindset of an era, which simultaneously recognized interconnectedness while privileging national identity. Historians’ interest in internationalism has primarily focused on liberal and cooperative actors and on some selected examples demonstrating the dark sides of internationalism. Fewer historians, however, have analyzed the ambiguities and contradictions of liberal internationalism and the perseverance of the national as a frame of reference in internationalist discourses. Ernst Jäckh, best known as the founder of the Deutsche Hochschule für Politik, perhaps best represented this collision of values while simultaneously being one of the biggest proponents of such a view. Jäckh's internationalism permeated all his endeavors and served the goal of reintegrating Germany in the international community.

“Lighting a dark continent”: Imaginaries of energy transition in Senegal

Electrification is increasingly proposed as a solution to the problem of Africa’s development. International organizations hope to light ‘a dark continent’, converting solar panels and global investment into jobs and thereby aiding Africa’s emergence into the global economy. Such straightforward expectations, however, are at odds with longstanding research in Science and Technology Studies (STS) and on-the-ground realities. This article examines the proposed energy transition in Senegal, drawing on over eight months of ethnographic observation at three sites: an energy conference in Dakar; the National Ecovillage Agency (ANEV), a body implementing the national energy project; and an energy development NGO designing alternative solutions for Africa’s poor. Using the STS concept of sociotechnical imaginaries, this article highlights two visions of the transition: an internationalist discourse in which technologies like solar panels, supported by foreign aid, are expected to transform society; and a locally embedded approach in which social conditions determine desirable futures, assisted by technology. The former is shown to create dependence on the universalist imaginaries of the industrial world, while the latter is reduced to a scramble for development projects and funding. Africa’s emergence, I argue, requires greater attentiveness to social and political institution building than to kW-hours and foreign dollars.

“One and the Same the World Over”: The International Culture of Surgical Exchange in an Age of Globalization, 1870–1914

This paper examines the international exchange in surgery in the decades before World War I, a period of growing globalization in communication and transport. Focusing on Europe and North America, it looks first at the various means of exchange, especially surgical travel and the culture emerging around it and follows specific directions of exchange, from France and Britain, first to the German-speaking countries and finally to North America. Subsequently, the account turns to international organizations as an important means of exchange in this time period. The International Society of Surgery, in particular, provided a forum for a vivid internationalist discourse, which, however, stood in tension with simultaneous nationalist tendencies leading up to World War I. The paper finally discusses how the international exchange and communication at the time can be seen as an instance of modern surgeons claiming-and simultaneously trying to create-the global universality of surgical knowledge and practices, making sure that surgery is the same the world over.

Des pratiques transnationales pour une lutte internationale ? Les militants communistes allemands en exil à l'Ouest pendant la seconde guerre mondiale

During the Second World War, German Communist Party militants in exile in Belgium, France and Switzerland collaborated with their comrades from the communist parties of other nations. Can the practices they deployed in doing so be described as transnational? Answering this question presupposes a distinction between internationalist discourse and possibly transnational practices. An examination of several biographical trajectories and itineraries of exile shows that these practices were established via the training of cadres and the acquisition of common norms and references. It also reveals how this collaboration operated in practical terms, allowing communists of several different nationalities to work together in secret. German communist militants initially conceived of their engagement in internationalist terms. However, following the creation of Freies Deutschland organizations in 1943, they adopted the nation as the appropriate scale of mobilization. &#9632

Expansionism, Physical Education and Olympism: Common Interests of King Leopold II of Belgium, Cyrille Van Overbergh and Pierre de Coubertin (1894–1914)

In this article, we focus on the links and synergies between the Ecole mondiale of King Leopold II of Belgium, the Plans du Collège Léopold II of Pierre du Coubertin and the establishment of the Belgian Olympic Committee in 1906. A firm belief in the advantages of international cooperation undercut these three projects that were planned in Belgium. Always accompanying the internationalist discourse was the conviction that they should also strengthen Belgium's international position. Consequently, they focused strongly on physical education and sport, emphasising the great expansionist assets. All in all, however, the outcomes of the projects were less than expected. While the Belgian Olympic Committee had a difficult start, Coubertin's project only existed on paper, and the Ecole mondiale never rose above its foundations because of serious practical and political issues. Nonetheless, the expansionist discourse did facilitate the creation of the Higher Institute of Physical Education at the State University of Ghent in 1908.

The ‘Good State’ debate in international relations

The idea of the State as embodying moral virtue has a long, mostly inwardly focussed history. In international relations thought, sporadic Liberal explorations of the state as a ‘good international citizen’ have been vulnerable to Realist scepticism or dismissal. The Cold War's end saw a revival of Liberal enthusiasm for the Good State, but the translation of this into the foreign policies of key Western states generated new lines of critique focussing on the underlying universalism. Drawing upon aspects of much less-discussed Scandinavian internationalist discourse, the possibility of a more modest, open and thus sustainable understanding of the Good State is explored.

Imperial Legacies and Internationalist Discourses: British Involvement in the United Nations Freedom from Hunger Campaign, 1960–70

Between 1960 and 1965, the British public raised almost seven million pounds to support the Freedom from Hunger Campaign (FFHC), a United Nations Food and Agricultural Organization initiative that funded agricultural development projects across the underdeveloped world in an effort to ‘help the hungry to help themselves’. With the involvement of more than 100 countries and affiliated NGOs, the FFHC was by a considerable margin the largest humanitarian effort of its time, but it also forms part of a specifically British story about imperial benevolence and imperial decline. This article uses the British public's support for the campaign as a window onto the changing experience of British humanitarianism during an era of decolonisation. Did the British public's moral geography change as they lost their empire? Was there a role for the empire/commonwealth within the framework of an international campaign such as Freedom from Hunger? Which imperial legacies remained intact in the FFHC, which were adapted and which discarded?

Two decades of Czech foreign policy and hegemony of Internationalism

The aim of the article is to offer a theoretically grounded explanation of the long-term continuity of Czech foreign policy. Czech foreign policy displays long-term continuity and consensus at the level of policy, but, at the same time, exhibits deep ideological differences among political and societal elites at the level of politics. The article argues against the mainstream (neo)liberal and (neo)realist theories that explain foreign policy outcomes in pure rationalist and materialist terms. Instead, the text follows the line of the critical constructivist school of International Relations and borrows heavily from post-structuralism. Thus, the article takes into account the ideational background of Czech foreign policy and argues that these deeply seated differences at the level of politics, stemming from mutually contradictory normative, philosophical and political beliefs, are subsequently neutralized by what is called the “hegemonic internationalist discourse”. In this context, the article explores the origins, nature and consequences of the power of the hegemonic internationalist discourse.

Liberal internationalist discourse and the use of force: Blair, Bush and beyond

This article analyses the liberal internationalist discourses that drew together the foreign policies of Tony Blair and George W. Bush. While it is clear that the two former leaders maintained a deep and abiding commitment to the spread of freedom and democracy to all corners of the world, very little work has been carried out to explain how these shared values related to their exercise of an aggressive foreign policy and, perhaps more importantly, what this can tell us about some of the most persistent undercurrents of liberal foreign policy practice. This article begins by illustrating the ‘liberalisms’ of both Blair and Bush before examining the place of globalisation, humanitarianism and democracy in their respective foreign policy doctrines. It then briefly examines whether these themes may continue under the Obama presidency. Finally, the international and domestic consequences of this form of liberal internationalism are raised. The article concludes with the claim that a failure to recognise and understand the inevitable violence generated in pursuit of unquestioned liberal values will lead those who follow Bush and Blair toward the same excessive use of force that has characterised the war on terror.

Commentary: Re-Orienting Asian American History through Transnational and International Scales

While transnational frameworks have been a defining characteristic of Asian American history for a long time, the essays in this forum suggest new interventions in the meanings of transnational, trans-Pacific, and international. These interventions reflect internationalist discourses in the historical discipline as a whole while illustrating the fact that no common roadmap exists for pursuing this goal. The essayists also offer some solutions to the marginalization of the field within U.S. history. By decentering the nation-state—but not rejecting it outright—the range of significant themes explored in these essays places Asian American history at the cutting edge of the transnational history that is currently reshaping national histories.

Agent Butterfly

Women on the Verge: Japanese Women, Western Dreams. By Karen Kelsky. Durham. N.C.: Duke University Press, 2001. 294 pages. $18.95 (paper). For over a century, the trope of Madame Butterfly has served as apotent signifier of the power relations between the United States and Asia as symbolized by the relationship between a white American man and a Japanese woman. In the last few decades, the convergence of postcolonial studies and feminist studies has produced a fine body of scholarship on the gendered and sexualized nature of Western hegemony as exemplified by Madame Butterfly. These works examine the discourse of Orientalism that consolidates the Western power in part by feminizing the Orient; 1 the material practices of sexuality that affirm and enhance the military, political, and socioeconomic imperatives of the Western powers in Asia; 2 and the roles of white women and Western feminism in the gendered dynamics of East-West relations. 3 Conspicuously missing from many of these accounts is the voice of Asian women such as Madame Butterfly herself. While some recent scholarship has made important inquiries into the meanings of Western Orientalism for the racialized and gendered identities of Asian American women and men, 4 the problem of language and the divide between American studies and Asian studies have severely limited Americanists' examination of how the discourses and practices of American empire have shaped the lives and subjectivities of Asian women. Karen Kelsky's fascinating and [End Page 131] provocative study, Women on the Verge, provides a powerful antidote to the U.S./West-centered approach to the study of Orientalism, globalization, and transnationalism. By studying Japanese women who actively "defect" to the "realm of the foreign," Kelsky shifts the focus of eroticized relationships between the United States and Japan to the latter, and sees Japanese women as active agents, rather than passive victims, of such relationships. The subjects of Kelsky's study are Japanese women who turn to the "foreign"—in the form of travel, study, and/or work abroad, and often culminating in their relationships with white men—as a means to resist Japan's gender norms and social structures. These women are admittedly not "representative" of contemporary Japanese women as a whole: they are highly educated, urban, single, professional women between the ages of twenty and forty-five, with a significant level of English-language skills and experience abroad. Yet, the women's search for alternative life courses abroad are not an elite phenomenon but rather firmly grounded in the middle class. The figures Kelsky introduces—for instance, nearly 140,000 women (nearly 70 percent of all Japanese studying abroad) study abroad each year; in 1999, about 70 percent of Japanese applicants for the associate expert training program offered by the U.N. were female—show both the popularity and highly gendered nature of such transnational explorations by the Japanese. These women typically adopt a discourse of "internationalism" that constructs the West—often made synonymous with the United States as well as with "whiteness"—as the site of emancipation where they can form a subjectivity detached from the Japanese nation-state. By scrutinizing how these narratives of "internationalism" work, Kelsky examines both the transgressive potential of the women's desire for the West and its limitations as a source of social change both in Japan and globally. This internationalist discourse rests on constructed binaries: between the "oppressive" Japan and the "liberatory" West, between the "feudalistic" Japanese men and the "internationalized" Japanese women. Whereas existing scholarship has tended to attribute such constructs to the West's ideological and material power over the East—and Kelsky never loses sight of Western, especially American, hegemony in Japan—what distinguishes Kelsky's work is that she locates the authorship of these narratives in Japanese women themselves. Her analysis adamantly posits "internationalist" Japanese women as active agents—not only of the Japanese longing for the West in general but [End Page 132] also of the eroticized desire for the white man—even when the women themselves deny or reject such agency...