Internationalism

IDEATIONAL HISTORY

INSTITUTIONAL HISTORY

RELATED IDEAS

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Internationalism has a series of overlapping meanings, all of which revolve around an attempt to regulate political life at the global level in the hopes of constructing a more peaceful order. Its most common meaning is that of a political ideology that advocates greater cooperation among nation-states in the pursuit of peace through the creation of international law and institutions. It is closely associated with international organizations such as the League of Nations and the United Nations (UN), although it is not synonymous with these organizations.

Internationalism is also a U.S. foreign policy doctrine that advocates working through international organizations. Obviously related to the first definition of internationalism, this foreign policy idea is based upon the assumption that working through such organization is beneficial to U.S. national interests, and will additionally benefit the global community.

Internationalism is also a form of cooperation advocated by socialists that assumes the eventual disappearance of the nation-state. For some, this would come only through a revolutionary process; for others it would be a gradual reformation of the international system.

Each of these forms of internationalism is premised on the assumption that peace will result only from programmatic attempts at organizing international affairs. It is thus primarily a liberal ideology, although some suggest there can be a conservative version of it as well (Holbraad 2003). The overriding goal, however, is the promotion of peace through alignment of what might otherwise be conflicting interests.

IDEATIONAL HISTORY

As an idea, internationalism arose from the collapse of a European, Christian institutional order (Ishay 1995). As the Christian ethicopolitical order came under strain as a result of the rise of Protestantism, the Renaissance, and then the Enlightenment, political philosophers turned toward natural law as a means by which to construct a peaceful international system. An important part of this move was the recognition that allegiance to and obligations toward political communities are not necessarily wrong, but that such allegiances and obligations need to be modified by a larger set of rules and norms that might govern relations among those communities. One of the first attempts to construct such an order came from Hugo Grotius (1583–1645), a Dutch theologian and philosopher who helped create modern international law by linking older natural theories to an emerging Renaissance interest in the historical practice of political communities. Grotius’s famous The Rights of War and Peace (1625) proposed a theoretical foundation for governing war that reformulated the “just war” tradition and launched modern international law.

The nineteenth century saw the emergence of positivist international law, which kept the same internationalist agenda but turned to different sources for its justifications (Nardin 1998). International law became the primary focus of attempts to promote internationalism, with its insistence that states remain the central agents and its attempts to limit their ability to launch war (Koskenniemi 2002). Internationalism as a political project arose from these legal attempts to align an unwillingness to give up on the nation-state with a desire for peace.

Internationalism was also an important idea among philosophers. Immanuel Kant famously argued for methods by which the international community could avoid war (Ishay 1995). Kant’s proposal for a republican peace pact has been the foundation both of the democratic peace thesis and for internationalism. Kant argued that as more states became republics, their citizens would demand more cooperation (1795). This located internationalism within the nation, something that others sought to do during the Enlightenment and romantic periods.

A very different type of internationalism arose from the philosophy of Karl Marx. Marx’s argument that the decay of capitalism would result in the construction of communism was meant to apply not just to specific states but also to the human condition more broadly. Lenin took Marx’s ideas to a more specifically international level in his work on imperialism. These ideas were taken up by both revolutionary socialists, who argued that active attempts to overturn the nation-state and its bourgeois foundations were necessary, and reform-oriented socialists, who believed that cooperation through various international fora would lead to the collapse of the capitalist order.

INSTITUTIONAL HISTORY

These ideas, particularly those in the realm of international law, became more concrete at the end of the nineteenth and in the early twentieth centuries. Prior to and particularly after World War I, proponents of greater international institutional arrangements to ensure peace published a number of works (Navari 2000, Jones 2002). With the end of World War I, proposals for international institutions to moderate war came to fruition with the League of Nations. For some internationalists, the League was a concrete expression of their views, but for others it was too weak to create a truly internationalist sentiment. The failure of the United States to join the League and the abandonment of its tenets by Germany, Italy, and then Japan eviscerated it, and World War II finally forced the collapse of the League.

The end of World War II saw a resurgence of internationalism, particularly in the United States. Leading the way to the creation of a new international institution, the Americans agreed to host the newly created United Nations. Once again, some internationalists were enthusiastic about the new institution, but others found it wanting. The creation of the World Federalist League was an attempt to push the U.S. public, and the wider international community, toward greater forms of cooperation. Functionalists argued that as international affairs became more complex, there would be greater need for cooperation among nations.

Coupled with the creation of the United Nations, international law exploded in the post–World War II era. The International Law Commission, a body of international lawyers exploring important issues, pushed various issues forward on the international agenda, with some becoming treaties that led to new international organizations such as the International Criminal Court. As decolonization progressed the UN General Assembly soon grew beyond its few members and passed numerous nonbinding resolutions. After the end of the cold war the UN Security Council aggressively expanded its reach, producing not just binding resolutions but also more regulations to govern wider aspects of international life.

RELATED IDEAS

Internationalism needs to be kept separate from two related but distinct terms: cosmopolitanism and globalization. Cosmopolitanism finds its roots in antiquity, with Stoic philosophers from ancient Greece and Cicero in Rome arguing for the consideration of all persons as equal (Hayden 2006). If all were truly “citizens of the world,” war and strife for the purposes of empire or monarchical advancement were pointless. This sentiment resurfaced in various religious traditions, with Christianity and Islam both arguing for a broadly understood universal community, albeit one founded on their particular religious tenets. Cosmopolitan thinking intersected with internationalism during the Enlightenment, but internationalists such as Immanuel Kant and Jean-Jacques Rousseau did not see much point in abandoning the nation-state. Instead, they thought that republican forms of cooperation, in which states agreed to limit their sovereignty for purposes of greater cooperation, were preferable to the destruction of those states in the name of a larger international community.

Cosmopolitanism has been revived with globalization, a process by which the international economic and cultural sphere becomes more unified and interdependent. Especially among analytic philosophers interested in global justice, cosmopolitan ideas have great resonance. Again, though, internationalists find some of these proposals at odds with the current power structure of the international system, in which great powers would be loathe to abandon their position in a formally anarchic, but practically hierarchic system.

Internationalism differs from proposals for a world government, against which it was largely posited in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Worried that a world government would lead to an oppressive and unwieldy bureaucracy, internationalists hoped to keep the nation-state as a foundation, but to moderate its aggressive elements through various institutional arrangements.

Finally, within the American polity, internationalism reflects a support for a foreign policy orientation toward international institutions. Although some international economic institutions—for example, the World Trade Organization, the International Monetary Foundation, and the World Bank—are widely accepted by the U.S. foreign policy elite, the United Nations continues to generate strong debate. Neoconservatives and libertarians find the constraints imposed by the UN on the ability of the United States to run its own affairs unconscionable, whereas many Democrats and centrist Republicans find the UN and its promise of multilateralism the only real option in a world so interconnected and conflictual. Especially as U.S. power is stretched to its limits in places such as Iraq, the benefits of internationalism as a foreign policy strategy will become more influential. For those who believe in the values of the Enlightenment, such a move would be most welcome, returning the United States to its role as a leading proponent of Enlightenment theory and practice.

SEE ALSO Cosmopolitanism; Enlightenment; Globalization, Social and Economic Aspects of; Government, World; International Economic Order; International Monetary Fund; League of Nations; Lenin, Vladimir Ilitch; Libertarianism; Marx, Karl; Peace; Transnationalism; United Nations; World War II

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Grotius, Hugo. [1625] 2003. The Rights of War and Peace, ed. Richard Tuck, from the edition by Jean Barbeyrac. Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund.

Hayden, Patrick. 2006. Cosmopolitan Global Politics. Aldershot, U.K.: Ashgate.

Holbraad, Carsten. 2003. Internationalism and Nationalism in European Political Thought. New York: Palgrave.

Ishay, Michelene. 1995. Internationalism and Its Betrayal. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Jones, Dorothy. 2002. Toward a Just World: The Critical Years in the Search for International Justice. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Kant, Immanuel. [1795] 1991. Perpetual Peace: A Philosophical Sketch. In Political Writings, ed. Hans Reiss, trans. H. B. Nisbett. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.

Koskenniemi, Martii. 2002. The Gentle Civilizer of Nations: The Rise and Fall of International Law, 1870–1960. Cambridge, U.K.: Cambridge University Press.

Nardin, Terry. 1998. Legal Positivism as a Theory of International Society. In International Society: Diverse Ethical Perspectives, ed. David Mapel and Terry Nardin, 17–35. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

Navari, Cornelia. 2000. Internationalism and the State in the 20th Century. London: Routledge.

Anthony F. Lang Jr.

Internationalism. Internationalism emerged early in the twentieth century to challenge isolationism as a proper American approach to international affairs. In the balance between them lay competing perceptions of the role of external conditions in the country's remarkable security and well‐being.

For some Americans, the country's favored position rested on elements of international stability whose permanence required the nation's attention. At the turn of the twentieth century, writers such as Alfred T. Mahan, supported by members of the eastern Anglo‐Saxon elite, argued that the rise of potentially expansionist Germany and Japan demanded closer ties to Britain. Other internationalists discovered the surest guarantee of universal peace, and with it the perpetuation of a world that served U.S. interests admirably, not in superior force but in the international acceptance of non‐power devices, such as arbitration and conciliation, for the settlement of international disputes. For such legalists as William Howard Taft and Elihu Root, the final guarantee of world peace lay in a world court that would command the absolute confidence of the entire world. American internationalism scored its initial triumph in response to the horrors of the Great War of 1914. Pressed by President Woodrow Wilson, the Versailles Conference in 1919 adopted the American program for institutionalized peace in the form of the League of Nations and the World Court.

If the Senate's rejection of the Treaty of Versailles marked a powerful resurgence of American isolationism, it did not quell the determination of the country's internationalists to fulfill Wilson's admonition that the United States actively pursue the cause of peace. In the vanguard of the country's postwar internationalism were academics and students of international law, such as the University of Chicago's Quincy Wright and Columbia's James T. Shotwell. Members of the eastern establishment of international bankers and lawyers entered the internationalist ranks through membership in the recently founded New York Council on Foreign Relations. Internationalists comprised largely the country's pro‐League forces, who predicted endless triumphs for peace from a League of Nations morally enhanced by American membership.

In practice, the internationalists, no less than the isolationists, ignored the persistent role of power in affairs among nations. For them the goal of universal peace, rendered essential by the recent experience of war, was sufficiently overwhelming to eliminate the problem of means. Internationalists denied that the United States need be concerned with any specific configuration of political or military power in Europe or Asia. Whereas isolationism insisted that the United States had no external interests that merited resorts to force, internationalism declared that American interests existed wherever governments challenged peace or human rights. It presumed, however, that the universal acceptance of the principle that change, to be legitimate, needed also to be peaceful would control undesirable international behavior. Every program fostered by American internationalists during the 1920s—membership in the League of Nations and the World Court, the employment of arbitration conventions, the resort to consultation in the event of crises, collective security, naval disarmament, or the outlawry of war as embodied in the Kellogg‐Briand Peace Pact of 1928—denied the requirement of any precise definition of ends and means in external policy, and anchored the effectiveness of any moral condemnation of aggressors to the power of an aroused world opinion.

Consigned by adverse opinion to failure on the League issue, internationalists seized World Court membership as the alternative approach to effective international cooperation. Eventually the court battle comprised the most determined internationalist counterattack of the decade. When in May 1922 the court officially opened, a noted American authority on international law, John Bassett Moore, was among its eleven judges. Under internationalist pressure, President Warren G. Harding, in February 1923, submitted the question of court membership to the Senate. To satisfy congressional isolationists, Harding recommended four reservations that would absolve the United States of all commitments to the League but would retain for the country all powers on the court enjoyed by members of the League. Isolationists killed the measure as an overcommitment of American power and prestige.

Not until December 1925, when the issue of membership had won the support of peace groups, women's clubs, pro‐League forces, countless mass meetings, and much of the press, did the Senate agree to act. It approved membership, 76–17, in early 1926. But Senator Claude A. Swanson of Virginia introduced a fifth reservation that denied the court the right to render an advisory opinion on any question touching the interests of the United States. That reservation the court rejected; by the end of 1926, U.S. membership in the court had become a dead issue. Yet such membership would have entailed no commitment for the United States beyond paying its share of the court's expenses. Internationalists agreed that neither the League nor the World Court had confronted any major challenges, nor had either institution demonstrated any capacity to restrain a major power.

Despite its limited prospects, the internationalist faith in such institutions continued into the following decade. However, its central assumption that world opinion was the ultimate arbiter in world affairs denied its adherents any answer to the troubling aggressions of the 1930s. As late as 1939, internationalists looked to the League as the world's primary hope for peace. In their general unconcern for military preparedness, they had done little in previous years to provide the League with either the sanctions or the means required for effective collective security. But internationalism, as embodied in the ideals of the League of Nations, failed not only in its unwillingness to provide a defense against aggression and violence but also in its refusal to seek some accommodation with change as the only long‐term alternative to war. Any system of collective security would seek order rather than change.

For the British historian Edward Hallett Carr, in his noted book The Twenty Years' Crisis (1939), collective security, like American internationalism, expressed the concern of status quo powers to prevent unwanted change in the international system. Thus peace became the vested interest of the predominant powers. With no single country strong enough to exercise a pax Romana or a pax Britannica, slogans such as “collective security” and “resistance to aggression” proclaimed the identity of interest between the dominant, satisfied group of nations and the world as a whole in the maintenance of peace. Throughout the interwar years American internationalism, despite its persistent effort to engage the United States in world affairs, remained essentially an effort to sustain the status quo without accepting the price, either in military preparations or in concessions, that international peace demanded.

The attack on Pearl Harbor destroyed the illusion that the United States could have the world of its choice without cost. That event not only diminished the power of isolationism in Congress and the nation but also reinvented American internationalism. The realization that war had come unexpectedly and over vast distances recommended, at least to the country's military leaders, that the United States never again entrust its peace to world opinion or the oceans. Rather, its continuing interest in international stability required a military structure of sufficient magnitude to discourage aggression everywhere. The wartime decisions designed to engage the nation heavily in the post‐war world included commitments to the United Nations, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank, and other postwar international institutions. These decisions to assure postwar peace and stability received the support of an overwhelming national consensus. Internationalism emerged from the war firmly in the saddle.

What ultimately converted internationalism into an unprecedented body of worldwide economic and security commitments was the assumption that Soviet expansionism, rendered global and unlimited by the Kremlin's alleged control of international communism, endangered American and world security. Such fears led to a system of global military containment, including NATO and eventually treaties of alliance with dozens of countries throughout the world. More limited, yet more pervading, internationalists embraced the Marshall Plan to rebuild the economies of Europe. Acting through inter national agencies of trade and monetary stabilization, the plan contributed heavily to the world's unprecedented prosperity. Through forty years of Cold War, the USSR, as a perceived global danger, enabled the United States, with its abundance of economic and military power, to maintain a worldwide influence without precedent in modern history.

After 1990, the passing of the Cold War, in denying the United States its special role as the world's self‐appointed defender against communism, again compelled the country to redefine the meaning of its internationalism. Internationalists quickly detected new foreign challenges in the form of resurgent nationalism, ethnic strife, border disputes, economic chaos, and civil war. Confronting them in their demands for national action, moderates cited the potentially heavy costs of involvement in the world's domestic turmoil, especially when contrasted to the minimal U.S. interests at risk. Internationalism, as the past had demonstrated, was never an absolute good in itself; its utility hinged on its success in advancing the interests of the nation and its citizens.
[See also Isolationism.]

Bibliography

Edward Hallett Carr , The Twenty Years' Crisis, 1939.
Akira Iriye , From Nationalism to Internationalism: United States Foreign Policy to 1914, 1977.
Michael S. Sherry , Preparing for the Next War: American Plans for Postwar Defense, 1941–45, 1977.
Norman A. Graebner , America as a World Power: A Realist Appraisal from Wilson to Reagan, 1984.
Robert D. Schulzinger , The Wise Men of Foreign Affairs: The History of the Council on Foreign Relations, 1984.
Lloyd E. Ambrosius , Wilson's Statecraft: Theory and Practice of Liberal Internationalism During World War I, 1991.
Jeremy Aynsley , Nationalism and Internationalism, 1993.
Kjell Goldmann , The Logic of Internationalism: Coercion and Accommodation, 1994.

Norman A. Graebner

Cosmopolitanism

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Cosmopolitanism is a term derived from the Greek word kosmopolite (“citizen of the world”). It emerged as a philosophical and ultimately cultural worldview during the Hellenistic period, when thinkers traced the conceptual evolution of the people’s mentalité from that of the citizen of the city-state to that of the citizen of the entire ecumene (or extended Hellenic world). After a long eclipse, the concept reemerged in the writings of Kant, where the future evolution of the world into a cosmopolitan society was originally contemplated. Adam Smith should also receive credit, however, for his endorsement of free trade as a cosmopolitan stance. In the nineteenth century, the word gained a negative connotation through its juxtaposition with the popular idea of nationalism, a trend that reached its peak in the word’s employment as a derogatory term by the Nazis.

Although cosmopolitanism reemerged as a potentially powerful concept in the late 1990s, it is important to note that the concept continues to lack a universally shared definition. It has been applied to philosophical and normative orientations as well as to political and cultural attributes, and its employment in the discourse of different disciplines is far from uniform. Moreover, cosmopolitanism has been related both to efforts to construct forms of transnational solidarity, and to the various urban cultures of past and present metropolitan centers. Perhaps the most important contributions to the literature on cosmopolitanism can be found in the writings of Ulrich Beck, and in work inquiring into the possibility of cosmopolitanism providing the foundation for a future European identity.

Generally speaking, contributors to the growing literature on cosmopolitanism interpret the term in a threefold manner. Some authors advocate “thin” cosmopolitanism, whereby cosmopolitanism is conceived as a form of detachment from local ties, whereas others argue in favor of “rooted” or context-specific or vernacular cosmopolitanism, whereby cosmopolitanism is conceived as congruent with locality. Finally, some suggest the existence of “glocalized” cosmopolitanism, whereby global detachment and local attachment coexist in a symbiotic relationship. Thus, depending upon the particular definition employed, specific groups of people can be conceived either as carriers of cosmopolitanism or as excluded from it altogether. For example, immigrant groups have been viewed as carriers of vernacular cosmopolitanism, but they are almost by definition excluded from some versions of “thin” cosmopolitanism.

In contrast to the growing body of theoretical work on cosmopolitanism, there is to date only a limited amount of empirical research in the literature. Ultimately, only empirical research will be in a position to determine which one of the different theoretical strands of cosmopolitanism might be the most promising one for sociology. Such work might also help to evaluate whether the world is indeed experiencing a trend toward cosmopolitanism, and might identify which attributes are observable among the public and the extent to which these are related to other trends—such as the growth of transnational connections or a revived sense of religiosity.

SEE ALSO Cooperation; Globalization, Anthropological Aspects of; Globalization, Social and Economic Aspects of; Internationalism; Trade; Trust

BIBLIOGRAPHY

Beck, Ulrich. 2005. Cosmopolitan Vision. Oxford, U.K.: Polity.

Cheah, Pheng, and Bruce Robbins, eds.1998. Cosmopolitics: Thinking and Feeling beyond the Nation. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Robertson, Roland, and David Inglis. 2004. The Global Animus : In the Tracks of World Consciousness. Globalizations (1) 1: 38–49.

Roudometof, Victor. 2005. Transnationalism, Cosmopolitanism, and Glocalization. Current Sociology 53 (1): 113–135.

Rumford, Chris, ed. 2007. Cosmopolitanism and Europe. Liverpool, U.K.: Liverpool University Press.

Szerszynski, Bronislaw, and John Urry. 2002. Cultures of Cosmopolitanism. Sociological Review 50 (4): 461–481.

Theory, Culture, and Society 19 (1-2). 2002. (Special issue on cosmopolitanism.)

Vertovec, Steven, and Robin Cohen, eds. 2002. Conceiving Cosmopolitanism: Theory, Context, and Practice. Oxford, U.K.: Oxford University Press.

Victor Roudometof

in·ter·na·tion·al·ism / ˌintərˈnashənlˌizəm/ • n. 1. the state or process of being international: the internationalism of popular music. ∎  the advocacy of cooperation and understanding between nations. 2. (Internationalism) the principles of any of the four Internationals. DERIVATIVES: in·ter·na·tion·al·ist n.

internationalism n. the advocacy of cooperation and understanding between nations.
internationalist n.