Glenda Sluga

Internationalism in the Age of Nationalism

Nationalism and internationalism are twinned liberal ideologies which became embedded throughout the twentieth century - their realistic and idealistic ventures are inspired by similar stories of freedom and peace, their histories entwined.

UNESCO and the (One) World of Julian Huxley

In that curiously utopian moment bracketed by the end of the Second World War and the onset of the Cold War, cosmopolitanism made its debut on the new international stage of the United Nations in its literal translation as ‘World Citizenship’ (from the Greek cosmos or world, and polites, or citizen). At the UN special agency, the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization or Unesco, world citizenship was celebrated as the adjunct of an anti-chauvinist raison d’etre and as a cultural manifestation of the Enlightenment premise that humanity was evolving socially, politically, technologically, and even psychologically, towards a ‘World Community’. Although the international legitimacy of the language of world citizenship, like the idealism invested in the United Nations itself, was short-lived, from at least 1945 to 1950 a cosmopolitan view of the future of internationalism dominated intellectual and political visions of an anticipated new world order circulating around the creation of Unesco. This essay examines the almost forgotten and historically-specific features of the cosmopolitan language of internationalism spoken from the organization. I argue that for all Unesco’s weakness as an international institution, its short-lived venture with the language of cosmopolitanism offers an important entree into the intellectual history of that idea and its changing political and social significance. From an historical perspective, the Unesco experience of cosmopolitan internationalism suggests the political relevance for the twentieth century of the longue duree history of cosmopolitanism, that is as both a form of cultural identification and as a utopian world-scale political ideal. As importantly, it is indicative of the ways in which late nineteenth-century conceptions of race and empire remained uneasily at the heart of cosmopolitanism and internationalism.

The nation, psychology, and international politics, 1870-1919

Introduction Science and the New National World Order, 1919 The Principle of Nationality, 1919-1914 Psychology, Race, and the Nation Question, 1914-1870 The Gendered Self and Political Nations, 1914-1870 Gender and the Apogee of Nationalism, 1914-1919 Epilogue, 1919- Index

The Risiera di San Sabba: Fascism, anti‐Fascism and Italian nationalism

Abstract This essay examines the postwar debates surrounding the Risiera di San Sabba, the site of a Nazi death‐camp near Trieste, and explores the deeper conflicts and contradictions in the formation of an Italian national identity in the period since the Second World War.

Turning International: Foundations of Modern International Thought and New Paradigms for Intellectual History

Summary This essay provides an overview of the disciplinary and analytical significance of David Armitages Foundations of Modern International Thought in the context of the new international history, and the so-called ‘international turn’. It then goes on to discuss the significance of the absence of women in this new sub-field of intellectual history.

Bodies, Souls and Sovereignty The Austro-Hungarian empire and the legitimacy of nations

Since the end of the First World War, the history of Austria-Hungarys demise has been the subject of considerable historiographical controversy. Historians have been concerned to show either the inevitability or impropriety of the dismemberment of the Habsburg empire. This article traces the shifting imaginative representations of Austria-Hungary prior to and during the First World War with the intention of understanding the changing status of cultural diversity in liberal conceptions of the model political state in this same period, and the prevalence of foundationalist assumptions about the naturalness of national identification, and the unnatural and repressive nature of multinational states like the former Austria-Hungary. My specific focus is the influence of psychological conceptions of racial and national difference in the constitution of early 20th-century liberal imaginaries of the nation and the normative state.

On the Historical Significance of the Presence, and Absence, of Women at the Congress of Vienna, 1814–1815

The Congress of Vienna, which ran from September 1814 to June 1815 and was to settle the terms of a post-Napoleonic world order, lies at the heart of a historical narrative of the modern transformation of European politics, as the threshold of new forms of international political cooperation and coordination undertaken in the interests of peace, and sometimes referred to as the “Concert of Europe”.2 On this view, the Congress was the moment when the foreign ministers of Britain, Austria, Prussia and Russia elaborated a system of shared diplomatic procedures and norms of international political conferencing and invoked ideals of a distinctively European and Christian civilisation, joined in their ambitions for peace. As significantly, even if rarely noticed, the Congress of Vienna coincided with changing norms of gender relations, specifically in practices of international politics and diplomacy. In the 1960s, the Austrian historian of the Congress of Vienna Hilde Spiel noted “Never before – or after – have a group of statesmen and politicians, assembled solely and exclusively to deal with matters of commonweal interest, labored so extensively and decisively under the influence of women – not in Munster, nor in Rastatt, not in Versailles, nor yet in San Francisco”.3 Yet political histories of the Congress have continued to ignore these women, or pushed them to the margins of more historical and popular accountings of “the Congress that danced”, where they appear as whores or mistresses, the double agents of imperial and national conspirators. To be sure, these historical depictions resonate the ambiguities that surrounded women’s presence even in 1814, including the view of women’s intervention in matters of international politics as characteristic of outdated untransparent diplomatic practices. In this essay I want to

Cold War casualties: Ethnicity, gender, and the writing of history

Abstract Issues of gender and ethnicity have either been ignored in histories of the “Iron Curtain” or they have been peripheral to military, diplomatic, and masculine concerns. By focusing on the so-called problem of Trieste in the immediate postwar period, I argue that representations of gender and ethnicity were central to the way in which official negotiations took place. The boundaries that were being drawn by 1945 to distinguish the West from the East, democracy from communism, Italian from “Slav,” and civilization from barbarism, in this region were strongly gendered, as were the forms of social order encouraged by the Allied Military Government, which governed Trieste from 1945 to 1954, to bring about the postwar social and cultural normalization of Trieste.

Nationalism, the First World War, and sites of international memory

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to restore the history of internationalism to our understanding of the legacy of the First World War, and the role of universities in that past. It begins by emphasising the war’s twin legacy, namely, the twin principles of the peace: national self-determination and the League of Nations. Design/methodology/approach It focuses on the intersecting significance and meaning attributed to the related terms patriotism and humanity, nationalism and internationalism, during the war and after. A key focus is the memorialization of Edith Cavell, and the role of men and women in supporting a League of Nations. Findings The author finds that contrary to conventional historical opinion, internationalism was as significant as nationalism during the war and after, thanks to the influence and ideas of men and women connected through university networks. Research limitations/implications The author’s argument is based on an examination of British imperial sources in particular. Originality/value The implications of this argument are that historians need to recover the international past in histories of nationalism.

The Human Story of Development: Alva Myrdal at the UN, 1949–1955

When the Swedish feminist and political activist Alva Myrdal arrived in New York in February of 1949 to take up her unique position as principal or “top-ranking” director of the United Nations Department of Social Welfare, the word “development” was relatively unfamiliar as a synonym for the modernizing impulse that would redefine the relationship between empires and colonies in the second half of the twentieth century. Instead, Myrdal’s arrival coincided with the testing of an international mission oriented around technical assistance or TA, only belatedly assimilated into the larger concept of development. Against this background, her international career offers historians a critical nexus for probing “the competing visions of modernity” that shaped international development in the early years of the UN. During Myrdal’s seven years as an executive in the UN and the United Nations Education, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) bureaucracies,1 she was intent on a technical-assistance vision of development that addressed social and economic injustice and, more particularly, the status of women. International and even intergovernmental organizations such as the UN and UNESCO, she believed, could work towards these ends by putting the “social” into the international in a way that elevated the “human”.2