International Ideals Research Articles

"Profoundly Cosmopolitan of Heart and Spirit"?

Germany was a member of the League of Nations from 1926 to 1933. During that time, there were Germans employed at the Secretariat, and its Information Section, which had the greatest German presence, opened a small office to represent the League in Berlin. The League was founded on liberal internationalist ideals and its Covenant included a revolutionary article that opened all positions up to men and women equally. A biographical study of three German individuals associated with the Section and office reveals that ideological commitment to the League was not a given among all German employees, and gives insight into the interplay of gender, class and national – or international – identity. It also shows how the realities of who was employed in the Secretariat, and why, often hinged – despite the League’s ideological basis and the Covenant’s promise – on pragmatic and political considerations.

Sinophonic Detours in Colonial Burma

Abstract Following his 1925–1931 overland trek across southwestern China to colonial Burma, Ai Wu's 1935 Travels in the South (the author's canonical collection of autobiographical travelogue fiction) represents a Sinophonic detouring of the key literary impulses of the author's May Fourth forebears and his left-wing literary contemporaries, especially with its social realist expressions of gendered frontier primitivism, interethnic romantic desire, and international leftist solidarity. Ai Wu's southbound transborder itinerary and “street education”—marked by a repetition of trespasses and evictions—develop a “counterpoetics of trespass” blurring boundaries between social realist fiction and autobiographical travelogue while intertextually rerouting romantic primitivism in depictions of indigenous women through counterpoetically anemic prose. Initially taking his cue from Lu Xun, Ai Wu similarly inscribes his literary mission as one of national redemption but in a way that conforms to the leftist internationalist ideals of the League of Left-Wing Writers, which Ai Wu joined after he was forcibly repatriated to China by British colonial authorities in 1931. Ai Wu's Sinophone transborder counterpoetics activate latent self-reflections on the narrator's own male Han-centric exoticism toward indigenous Shan and Burman women and on his unfulfilled desire to forge meaningful relationships with them. Rather than assimilating or subordinating his depictions of these women into a projection of a Chinese leftist national cause, Ai Wu ultimately sublimates his romantic desires into an allegory for Burma's anticolonial resistance movement.

The Great Illusion: blueprints of collaboration between revolutions in Italy and Germany (1848)

AbstractIn April 1848, a proclamation of friendship to the Germans sent by the Provisional Government of Milan to the Fünfzigerausschuss (Committee of Fifty) in Frankfurt was rejected by the latter, creating widespread outrage in Italy. Concurrently, a parallel controversy over the possession of South Tyrol arose between the two revolutions. This article provides an exploratory analysis of these two episodes, examining the role they played in shaping relations between the two revolutions, and in influencing the image Italians had of the revolution in Germany. Shedding light on an episode until now overlooked by historiography, this article seeks to contribute to the salient debate on the peculiar relationship between internationalist ideals and nationalist claims during the 1848 revolution. It argues that the disillusioning impact on revolutionary audiences of specific ‘episodes of friction’, such as those examined in this article,was greater than the ‘natural convergence of goals’ of the various national revolutions in 1848.

'A Strong International Spirit': The Influence of Internationalism on the Women's Co-operative Guild.

This article explores the internationalism of the Women's Co-operative Guild (WCG) during the interwar years. Drawing on the records of the national and international Guild, alongside the minute books of a local branch based in Darlington, County Durham, it positions the WCG in the vibrant political culture in Britain during the 1920s and 1930s. Building on recent literature that has sought to examine the phenomenon of interwar internationalism, this article sheds light on an organization that represented the interests of working-class women. Internationalist in outlook, the association demonstrates how internationalist ideals played out on a day-to-day basis. The article demonstrates that the WCG played a unique and complementary role within both the British and international women's movements.

The Parthenon Marbles Revisited: A New Strategy for Greece?

Cultural property disputes raise questions of ownership, possession, alleged destruction, and looting, and are confounded by legal vacuums, and idiosyncratic statutes of limitations. Should objects of cultural heritage of a specific nation that have been removed in the past be returned to their source nation? This article addresses the perennial such claim, the claim Greece addressed to the British Museum for the return of a collection of Marbles from the Parthenon and the Acropolis of Athens. This article identifies a trajectory towards a more effective outlook on cultural property disputes transcending the traditional ownership versus value debate reflected in the recent scholarship. I argue for a shift in the context of the discussion from one of legal title and ownership to one of negotiation, cooperation, and advancement of both nationalist and internationalist ideals. It adds a new and neglected approach to an old unresolved debate by suggesting two primary arguments: (1) an inalienability argument based on Margaret Radin’s theory of personhood; and, in the alternative, (2) a reassessment of the cultural nationalism/internationalism debate through a more modest integrated approach, and new negotiation strategy based on prior successful returns of cultural property objects. First, Margaret Radin’s theory of personhood gives the country of origin a normative argument based on the link between some forms of cultural property and personhood, against typical commensurate perceptions of property. Second, and in the alternative, when the notions of cultural nationalism and internationalism are not approached as mutually exclusive the two can flourish together under clarified objectives that do not mesh with each other's agendas but rather bolster one another. This article then examines successful return strategies under this new integrated cultural nationalism/internationalism approach using the Four Quadrant Negotiation Model. Ideas such as loan agreements, trading and exchange of cultural artifacts, touring collections, exclusive excavation agreements, joint trusteeship, fractional ownership, personnel education, and liability waivers all provide excellent starting points in a negotiation not on how Greece can get the Parthenon Marbles back but on how to form a partnership between Greece and the British Museum that will promote collaboration, international exchange of cultural heritage, as well as public access, and education.

The Formation of the Arab League and the United Nations, 1944–5

While the Great Powers were meeting in Washington at the Dumbarton Oaks Conference, representatives of the Arab states were meeting in Egypt to draft the Alexandria Protocol, the document that would lead to the establishment of the Arab League in March 1945. The idea of Arab Unity has a long history driven by intra-regional dynamics but the form that the League ultimately took of a regional organization rather than the political union many envisioned was largely a product of the wartime environment. The Arab states found both opportunity and potential threats in the Dumbarton Oaks proposals as they worked to develop their own postwar vision. Discussions of regional councils in the months preceding Dumbarton Oaks raised fears of a western-imposed regional order and served as the center of gravity that ultimately allowed them, for the moment, to overcome regional rivalries and join together in the Arab League. This case study contributes to the decolonization of diplomatic history by placing the Arab nationalist movement in its global context and demonstrates how the Arab states, for whom unity was viewed as a pathway to independence, appropriated wartime internationalist ideals in the later war years.

Science Without Frontiers: Cosmopolitanism and National Interests in the World of Learning, 1870–1940, by Robert Fox

The title of Robert Fox’s brief and deftly written book is not only a statement of its object of inquiry—scientific internationalism before and after the First World War—but also a declaration of the author’s optimistic adherence to ‘the goal of knowledge open to all’ (p. 111). The latter element is only explicit in the introduction and epilogue, but substantially informs the analysis in between: a tone of celebration pervades the first chapter’s account of the leading manifestations of an explosion of standardisation and co-operation around the turn of the twentieth century; one of melancholy emerges as the second and third chapters detail the ‘fractured world’ of scientific endeavour that emerged after 1918. The book’s main contentions are clearly set out and pursued consistently throughout. Internationalism in the sciences peaked in the decades prior to 1914, motivated by a combination of concerns over the proliferation and increasing specialisation of knowledge and publications, and commitments to the free exchange and easy availability of information (pp. 11–44). The outbreak of war abruptly curtailed internationalist ideals and mechanisms, and the repeated insistence on national distinctiveness over the following four years coupled with the victors’ refusal to be conciliatory after the Armistice represented a ‘watershed’ in science every bit as much as in other arenas (pp. 45–73). When, from the mid-1920s, there was ‘a concerted move to reestablish normal relations within the world of science’ (p. 74), residual notions of national difference remained, and were exacerbated under totalitarian regimes and a wider shift towards state-sponsored science during the 1930s (pp. 74–106). Despite these changes, vestiges of internationalist ideals remained and informed ventures such as UNESCO after the Second World War, as well as more recent Internet-based efforts to promote universally accessible knowledge (pp. 107–11).

‘Our Bantustans are Better than Yours’: Botswana, The United States, and Human Rights in the 1970s

ABSTRACTMany historians have upheld the 1970s as the ‘breakthrough’ decade for human rights. Botswana was a notable beneficiary of the efflorescence of these principles, especially as human rights gained greater prominence in the foreign policy of the United States (US). From 1966 to 1980, the government of Seretse Khama upheld one of the strongest human rights records of any African state, using it to acquire vital economic aid and psychological encouragement from the West. This study of US–Botswana relations is significant for showing the capacity of an underdeveloped and vulnerable state, surrounded by white minority regimes, to use internationalist ideals to improve its prospects for greater security and prosperity. The research also reveals the limits of Botswana's approach, particularly when the US could not align its strategic interests in Africa with its professed value for human rights. Botswana was therefore exceptional in perceiving its geopolitical priorities as closely tied to its integrity as a self-proclaimed model for non-racial democracy in Southern Africa. The article helps to show how the 1970s human rights movement was not just a Western one or an American one, but a truly transnational one, with unique, though often underappreciated, contributions from those in Africa.

British Musical Modernism: The Manchester Group and Their Contemporaries by Philip Rupprecht

British Musical Modernism: The Group and Their Contemporaries. By Philip Rupprecht. (Music Since 1900.) Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. [xiv, 492 p. ISBN 9780521844482 (hardcover), $135; ISBN 9781316308141 (e-book), $108.] Music examples, illustrations, facsimiles, notes, bibliography, index.The first concert of the Institute for Contemporary Arts (ICA) on 9 January 1956 serves as Rupprecht's mise-en-scene for the volume, as it introduces the New Music Group in their first professional performance in London: Alexander Goehr, Peter Maxwell Davies, and Harrison Birtwistle (as clarinetist), alongside their younger colleagues Elgar Howarth (trumpet), and John Dow (cellist). The date represents a marker by which Rupprecht records the trajectory of progressive British music, signifying a decidedly new series of artistic and musical achievements in Great Britain that were taken up with the Continental European avant-garde.The opening two chapters of the book offer a rich historical framework in which to contextualize British musical modernism in the twentieth century, occupying a position between the vast musics concerned with midcentury nationalism and the musical avant-garde of the 1950s, while exposing the reader to themes and trends emerging in the interwar period leading up to the early years of the Cold War. With a keen eye to midcentury programming and critical reception, Rupprecht explores fluctuating trends in concert halls and a mercurial canon of works and composers whose reputations were not the least bit settled in the period from the 1950s to the 1970s.In defining modernism with relation to perceived traditions of nationalism in the context of a time-lag between the Continent and the British Isles, Rupprecht looks to Elisabeth Lutyens's twelve-tone Wittgenstein Motet (l953). In his consideration of national identity (here, Britishness), Rupprecht grounds his argument in the rhetorical theories of cultural critic Homi Bhabha, whose writings assert that there is a perpetual conversation between the past (and people's concept of pastness) and the security of a communal future. Rupprecht reveals the themes central to Bhabha's notions of the inherent tensions of national identity in Birtwistle's Down by the Greenwood Side (1969).Rupprecht addresses the internationalist ideals that attracted the Group-among an array of British composers-to the Darmstadt Summer Course and the artistic creations thus produced. Rupprecht tackles the quandary of the term abstraction in the depiction of modernist art and its conscription into contemporaneous portrayals of art music. Rupprecht's attention to William Glock's appointment as Controller of Music at the BBC is exceptional, crafting a welcome historico-narrative lens through which to observe the period and its response to serious music, offering a wealth of examples that will inspire the reader to start a further study and listening handlist.Goehr, Davies, and Birtwistle are central to the focus of the third chapter, in which Rupprecht extends his examination beyond the cultural phenomena of the group itself to a close reading of their music and its communicative breadth (not just analyses of its construction). Rupprecht describes the early accomplishments of the avant-garde in repertoirecentric discussions of technique, international musical responses, and formal structure in Goehr's Sonata in One Movement, op. 2 (1953-55) and The Deluge (1957-58), Davies's Five Pieces for Piano, op. 2 (1956), and Birtwistle's Refrains and Choruses (1957), among other examples.The fourth chapter looks to the twelvetone compositions of contemporaries Thea Musgrave, Nicholas Maw, Gordon Crosse, and Richard Rodney Bennett, and renders a closer reading of their works in light of their own unique reactions to European modernism. While this Manchester generation adhered to serialism, their aesthetic voices illustrated four entirely disparate approaches. …

PHOTOGRAPHIC DIPLOMACY IN THE POSTWAR WORLD: UNESCO AND THE CONCEPTION OF PHOTOGRAPHY AS A UNIVERSAL LANGUAGE, 1946–1956

In the postwar decade, UNESCO aimed to create an international public sphere to secure peace. The organization made extensive use of photographs to do so, including the photographic archive of works of art and photojournalism from the ruined cities of Europe. However, photography was not simply a transparent medium for communicating internationalist ideals; it was a formative influence in shaping UNESCO's effort to build “peace in the minds of men”. This essay analyses the conception of photography as a universal language articulated in UNESCO-sponsored forums, the use of photography in UNESCO publications concerning human rights and educational reconstruction, and the internationalist ideals of world culture and world citizenship relevant to UNESCO's early work. Analysis reveals that UNESCO's use of photography was less the valuable deployment of a universal language suited to an internationalist agenda than it was the universalizing of certain cultural values in pursuit of the organization's utopian vision.

The Imperial War Relief Fund and the All British Appeal: Commonwealth, Conflict and Conservatism within the British Humanitarian Movement, 1920–25

This article explores the intersection of internationalist and imperial humanitarian ideals in the aftermath of the First World War via a case study of a hitherto overlooked humanitarian organisation—the Imperial War Relief Fund. In an era of increased international collaboration between humanitarian organisations, the Imperial War Relief Fund instead promoted an imperial approach, seeking to unite the ‘efforts of the dominions and mother country’ for the relief of Europeans suffering the effects of the First World War. The Fund was enthusiastically supported in Britain by a number of leading conservative public figures, who hoped that an empire-wide humanitarian campaign might guard against imperial disintegration and reverse Britain's perceived loss of prestige in the postwar order. Despite its initial successes, the Imperial Fund was subsequently usurped by British humanitarian organisations which were more internationalist in their outlook and rhetoric, most significantly the Save the Children Fund. This did not represent, however, a straightforward displacement of imperial co-ordination in favour of more internationally focused humanitarian action. Rather, the Save the Children Fund was able to draw support away from the Imperial Fund only by echoing its imperial rhetoric. This article argues, therefore, that, while the Imperial Fund was a relatively short-lived venture, its lasting legacy was to ensure that the British humanitarian movement was a space in which notions of Britain's imperial status, and its concomitant duties, would survive within an humanitarian landscape in which internationalist ideals were increasingly prevalent.

‘Every Citizen of Empire Implored to Save the Children!’Empire, internationalism and the Save the Children Fund in inter-war Britain

In the immediate aftermath of the First Word War, internationalist ideals became increasingly important in British politics, popular culture and society. However, this new vogue for internationalism did not mean that imperial sentiments were waning, rather imperial celebrations such as Empire Day and the 1924 Empire Exhibition became increasingly prominent. This article explores the tensions and intersections between internationalist and imperialist world views in the activities and publications of the Save the Children Fund (S.C.F.), Britain's most successful international charity in the inter-war years. It argues that, despite its radical, internationalist agenda, the S.C.F. was involved in a process of reimagining the British empire as a peaceable, moral force, which exemplified the co-operative spirit of internationalism. In this vein, the S.C.F. promoted a vision of imperial international responsibility, arguing that it was the duty of the united British empire to extend its care to the children of all nations. In instances where the fund's imperial language sat uneasily with its more radical membership, a discourse of ‘humanity’ and universal responsibility was mobilized to overcome tensions. However, embedded within this discourse of humanity remained a hierarchical imagining of a ‘world civilization’, of which the British, both through their empire and their support for internationalist principles, were the champions and exemplars.

Internationalism, Environmental Necessity, and National Interest: Marine Science and Other Sciences

In 1902, eight northern European nations formed the International Council for the Exploration of the Sea (ICES). A turn-of-the-century international movement created opportunities, funding, and political support for marine science. This paper uses ICES as a lens for examining international cooperation, and shows how its sponsors benefited from the intersection of internationalist ideals, national interest, and the characteristics of the marine environment. Marine science is then compared to other field sciences to explore how these three factors promoted internationalism in science more generally.

Troubled Philosopher: John Dewey and the Struggle for World Peace (review)

BOOK REVIEWS 129 says in his nine-line epilogue, knowledge will be increased if there ever is the time of the end. Until then "whoever persists in the pursuit of first principles appears fated to run to and fro merely" (p. 274). The material presented in the book is most interesting in terms of the theme. We are first shown how Newton's philosophy emerges in large part from the millenarianism of Joseph Mede and Ralph Cudworth, and how the contentions of Newton and his followers express some of this conviction of the immediacy of the end of history. Next, the study of Bentham and the Mills portrays their secular form of millenarianism that will bring about the redemption of the human race. As the Utilitarian movement faded out, that of the Oxford Hegelians presented a new way to save mankind. And, as we know, this was followed by the work of G. E. Moore, Russell, and Whitehead, each seeking a new basis for solving the problems of understanding the world. Quinn shows us how, in each case, these great movements failed to achieve their goals, and faded away. Russell, the most optimistic of twentieth-century thinkers, ended up saying that "'all human knowledge is uncertain, inexact, partial." The scholarship in the study of these movements is quite thorough, although it is limited tO only published sources (and there must be a good deal of manuscript material that would be relevant, such as Russell's papers.) The sources are given at the back of the book but are not often connected with specific quotations or statements. Instead, they contain the material that appears over a few pages. This may not be helpful if one wants to look up a single point and ten books are given as references. Is the book convincing? The four vignettes point up the sad story of how philosophical confidence fails to bring about a major change for the better in human knowledge or affairs. If we generalize from the four English cases to most of the modern movements in philosophy in Europe and America, and see in them this same feature--that they are millenarian or Messianic and that their expectations have not been fulfilled--then what have we learned? One thing is that modern philosophies have in part taken over the role of earlier Jewish and Christian theologies. Insofar as they have assumed such a role, they seem to have gone through the fate of most Messianic and millenarian theories, namely, that they have been unable to bring about the realization of their expectations. In the theological cases, it is presumably because only God knows when the end of days will occur, and only God can make it occur. The failure of the philosophical cases may need an explanation rooted in human and physical nature, and such an explanation may not rule out the possibility of some future philosophical movement being justified in its confidence. Quinn's book is very stimulating, informative, and provocative. Seeing the course of philosophical movements as moral dramas may help in providing another, important perspective, and it may lead to our having somewhat less confidence in these movements as possible ways to truth. RICHARDH. POPKIN Washington University Charles F. Howlett. Troubled Philosopher: John Dewey and the Struggle for World Peace. New York: Kennikat Press. 1977. Pp. 180. $12.50. American liberalism's romance with American pragmatism early in this century probably suffered its greatest setback with John Dewey's well-publicized supp~rt of this country's aggressive involvement in World War I. Writers such as Randolph Bourne and Norman Thomas, otherwise sympathetic to Dewey's philosophical project, considered this either a perversion of the notion of social intelligence as an instrument of human progress or indicative of a fundamental flaw in the Deweyan notion of intelligence itself, and publicly castigated Dewey for his apparent lack of 130 HISTORY OF PHILOSOPHY insight. The dual facts that Dewey at the time thought the war in Europe would encourage the realization of his internationalist ideals, and that he later rejected war entirely as an instrument of social reconstruction, have not ameliorated the still widely held view that the native American philosophy...

The Stockholm Conference of 1917

In 1917, in the midst of war, the internationalist ideals of the old Second Socialist International came close to achieving an unparalleled diplomatic triumph of non-governmental initiative by bringing together responsible political leaders of the left from the countries of opposing belligerents to discuss peace terms with neutrals on neutral ground at Stockholm.