Introduction: Historical geographies of internationalism, 1900–1950

This introduction to a special issue on historical geographies of internationalism begins by situating the essays that follow in relation to the on-going refugee crisis in Europe and beyond. This crisis has revealed, once again, both the challenges and the potential of internationalism as a form of political consciousness and the international as a scale of political action. Recent work has sought to re-conceptualise internationalism as the most urgent scale at which governance, political activity and resistance must operate when confronting the larger environmental, economic, and strategic challenges of the twenty-first century. Although geographers have only made a modest contribution to this work, we argue that they have a significant role to play. The essays in this special issue suggest several ways in which a geographical perspective can contribute to rethinking the international: by examining spaces and sites not previously considered in internationalist histories; by considering the relationship between the abstractions of internationalism and the geographical and historical specificities of its performance; and by analysing the interlocking of internationalism with other political projects. We identify, towards the end of this essay, seven ways that internationalism might be reconsidered geographically in future research through; its spatialities and temporalities; the role of newly independent states; science and research; identity politics; and with reference to its performative and visual dimensions.     

Taking sides: cosmopolitanism,internationalism and ‘complex solidarity’ in the work of Fred Halliday

Fred Halliday's life and work were intimately associated with the theory and practice of internationalism. In his later writings, the notion of ‘complex solidarity’ emerges as a key component of Halliday's worldview. This article explores the conceptual interconnections between different historical expressions of internationalism, cosmopolitanism and solidarity. It considers the intricate relationship between these categories and their place in our understanding of international affairs, emphasizing the divergence between liberal and revolutionary conceptions of internationalism and cosmopolitanism. The article discusses diverse understandings of ‘solidarity’ in International Relations, arguing that beyond the cosmopolitan and communitarian approaches, there exist other ‘Grotian’ and ‘republican’ ideas of solidarity. Halliday drew on these to present his own defence of universal human rights and solidarity, arguably developing a distinctive brand of republican internationalism. The latter part of the article gives content to ‘complex solidarity’ by suggesting it is built on three inter‐related components: a methodological internationalism, an egalitarian reciprocity and a critique of global capitalism. Overall, these guiding features of complex solidarity deliver a unique rendition of internationalism which reflect Halliday's eclectic combination of radical liberalism with a residual historical materialism.     

War veterans as transnational actors: politics,alliances and networks in the interwar period

Historians have often considered the international veterans’ organizations which came into being after World War I as proof of the pacifist, internationalist orientation of the majority of the Great War ex-combatants. However, veterans active in these organizations were often inspired by specifically national and partisan objectives that belie any simplistic equation between altruistic transnational activism, international cooperation and pacifism. Conceiving of war veterans as transnational actors, this article explores the origins and decline of the veterans’ transnational sphere in the interwar period. It singles out four shades of competing veterans’ internationalism and describes the crucial differences that separated actors such as Henri Barbusse, René Cassin, Henri Pichot and Carlo Delcroix, among others. The article argues that both the veterans’ organizations and their protagonists, while reaching out across national borders, remained embedded in specific constellations of personal trajectories, political partisanship, nation-state interests and inter-state alliances. Their political and social activities also tried to reshape, and were subjected to, existing or emerging spatial configurations such as Great Power alliances and wider internationalist projects. Thus, the article shows that there was no homogeneous transnational sphere in international veteran politics; it was rather the competition between different internationalist practices and projects which shaped veterans’ transnational activities.     

Stages of War,Stages of Man: Quincy Wright and the Liberal Internationalist Study of War

American legal scholar Quincy Wright's 1942 A Study of War was a milestone in the study of warfare, and a monumental text in the history of liberal internationalism and the social sciences. Yet, it was quickly forgotten, and neglected ever since. This paper seeks to recover Study by elucidating its historical significance, and placing it within the intellectual and institutional contexts of its time. Study, I argue, encapsulated both an interwar liberal internationalist conceptualisation of warfare as well as a pre-Realist social scientific approach to war in international relations. Through the 1,500 page Study Wright attempted to take the emergent discipline of international relations in new directions by developing a multidisciplinary and multidimensional historical, theoretical and empirical approach to warfare. He incorporated sociological and anthropological approaches and developed themes found more broadly in existing Anglo-American studies of war. Study's multidimensional approach was framed by liberal internationalist concerns and concepts, and yet also reflected the development of the social sciences in the interwar period. Study points to the more realist direction liberal internationalism may have turned to if it had not succumbed to the power-political realist conceptualisations international relations which would ascend in the 1940s.     

Studying the International,Serving the Nation: The Origins of International Relations (IR) Scholarship in Germany, 1912–33

This paper examines the dynamics of internationalist and nationalist political thought in the formation of International Relations (IR) scholarship in Germany during the early twentieth century. It argues that while liberal internationalism played a significant role in shaping the discipline, IR scholars were often devout nationalists and worked for their government rather than for international peace. German institutions for the study of IR, like their Anglo-American counterparts, were founded in the aftermath of the First World War. Celebrated during the 1920s as ‘bulwarks of democracy’, they were nationalised by the Nazi government, lost their academic profile and since then have been largely forgotten. This paper explains the origins of IR research at the Institut für Auswärtige Politik, based in Hamburg and directed by Albrecht Mendelssohn Bartholdy, as well as at the Deutsche Hochschule für Politik, led by Ernst Jäckh in Berlin. Formally inaugurated in 1923 and 1920 respectively, both institutions drew on pre-war intellectual traditions as well as wartime networks. In light of recent re-appraisals of inter-war IR scholarship in other countries, the German case offers new and important insights into the complex intellectual traditions of what has traditionally been oversimplified as a first ‘great debate’ between ‘idealists’ and ‘realists’.     

Gender and Welfare Reform in Post‐ Revolutionary Mexico

This article discusses the impact a gender and woman's history conference had on the development of my own research and writing. ‘Las Olvidadas’ was a conference held at Yale in the Spring of 2001, and was the first in a series of Mexican women's and gender history conferences organised. My own research, on the gendered nature of the welfare state in Mexico, explores how class and race intersected with gender to produce a welfare system that, while particular to Mexico, also nevertheless had much in common with other Latin American countries. These conferences shaped both my views of gender, but also the importance of the transnational to historical research.     

Feminism,Pacifism and Political Violence in Europe and China in the Era of the World Wars

This article examines international collaboration between Western and Chinese feminists in the interwar decades. Focusing on the 1927–28 ‘mission to Asia’ sponsored by the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), the article shows that, contrary to what existing historiography would lead us to suspect, neither feminist Orientalism nor colonial nationalism stood as a serious impediment to the formation of a truly international feminist alliance. Instead, European and Chinese women's varying experiences and memories of international conflict, and their varying understandings of the relationship between feminism, pacifism, militarism and political violence, defined the limits of global feminist collaboration in the late 1920s. The WILPF delegates, like many European women in the 1920s, were living in the shadow of the First World War, a conflict they condemned as futile and barbaric; their Chinese ‘sisters’ were living in the midst of a battle to determine the political future of their nation. For both sets of women, the question of women's emancipation was fundamentally entwined with broader national and international struggles. This article incorporates reports, personal letters and diaries of WILPF delegates as well as articles, speeches and letters by Chinese women to offer new insights into one of the earliest efforts to build a truly international women's movement and draw our attention to the centrality of warfare in defining the limits of global feminist collaboration in the twentieth century.     

The apostle of internationalism: Stephen Duggan and the geopolitics of international education

Stephen Duggan, the educator and director of the Institute of International Education (IIE) between 1919 and 1946, has been described as an ‘apostle of internationalism’. Duggan's work as the director of a new international agency in the co-ordination of educational exchange sought to position the United States of America as the centre of international education. Duggan's writings during this period reflect the articulation of a geographical vocabulary which positioned the United States as a steward of an ‘international’ space of education despite Duggan's continual disparagement of cultural imperialism. This paper explores the geographies of Duggan's discursive rendering of American responsibilities for the security of ‘the international’, the potential for America to act as a beacon of educational exchanges, and as the ‘rational’ space to counteract threats to an imagined American educational hegemony. This outline was shot through with the anxiety of alternative internationalisms and the possibility for education to be used in opposition to the ‘virtuous’ international education proposed by Duggan and his contemporaries. An exploration of Duggan's writing provides a backdrop to the development of international educational agencies in the interwar period as critical technologies of an American geopolitical power.     

Competitive internationalisation or grassroots practises of internationalism? The changing international practises of German-language critical geography

International connections have always been essential in critical geography in Germany. This paper aims to examine the role of international connections in German critical geography as a step towards a history of critical geography in Germany. The paper suggests four periods of internationalisation: first, an internationalist phase from ca. 1920 to 1933, with the very first critical geographers in Germany who were highly connected and internationally oriented. Second, starting in the late 1960s, there was a phase of struggles within the national framework of the discipline, and in particular against a prevailing national focus of mainstream geography. Third, the late 1970s and the 1980s saw the emergence of an international orientation as a way to escape repression in German geography. People interested in critical approaches in geography left the country, finding inspiration or positions elsewhere, or sought out international contacts that challenged ‘mainstream’ geography. Finally, the paper will draw conclusions about the development of international connections in relation to national disciplinary control, the scales of struggles and (as a fourth phase) the current situation in German geography.     

Free Trade Empire to Commonwealth of Nations: India,Britain and Imperial Preference, 1903–1932

This article examines the dialogue between British tariff reformers and Indian nationalists over the application of imperial trade preference in India from Joseph Chamberlain's 1903 Birmingham address to the 1932 Imperial Economic Conference. For both groups, this issue was a focal point to assess India's constitutional status and national participation within an emerging British Commonwealth and international system after the First World War. Specifically, it marked a comprehensive challenge to the orthodoxy of free trade and liberal empire seen increasingly as a determent to reconciling national prosperity and imperial unity. It is argued that prominent tariff reformers’ well-studied criticism of an ‘unpatriotic’ cosmopolitan free trade made them also sympathetic to longstanding Indian grievances that this fiscal policy exacerbated economic exploitation and racial discrimination. After 1919, Indian nationalists, including ‘historical economists’, utilized metropolitan advocacy for imperial preference to demand fiscal and political autonomy from Britain and national, as well as racial, equality in collective imperial decision. At the 1932 conference in Ottawa, India's voluntary and negotiated acceptance of preferential trade with Britain, beside the white self-governing Dominions, helped transform the British Commonwealth into an egalitarian organization recognizable after 1947.     

Trans geographies,embodiment and experience

Queer geographers have long been interested in the interconnections between sexuality and space. With queer theorizing as its hallmark, queer geographical research has made substantial contributions to our understandings of genders, sexualities and embodiment and their constitution in, and production of, space and place. This article examines how trans scholarship intersects with several themes central to queer geographical research – subjectivity/performativity; experience/embodiment; and the historical, political and social constitution of what are now called ‘traditional’ LGBTQ or ‘queer’ urban spaces – and offers geographers interested in intersections between sexuality, gender and the body, alternative and challenging avenues of inquiry. This scholarship highlights, in part, the discontinuities and silences embedded in so-called LGBTQ and queer communities and spaces and points to the need to explore more particularly historical and political conceptualizations of the formations of subjectivities, identities and forms of embodiment in play in these spaces.     

“Security,mobility, and the body – Syrian insurgent groups’ infrastructures and their geopolitical contestations through/by/in legal institutions”

Political geographers have repeatedly demonstrated how the ‘global war on/of terror’ has led to repressive and unjust international and domestic policies. Nevertheless, little has been said about the multifold intertwinements between such ‘Western’ perceptions and their shaping of anti-terrorism efforts within. To this end, this paper draws on recent feminist understandings of scale, global/local processes, and geopolitics, suggesting how these might be combined with current European participations in Syria, and its legal prosecution as ‘state-endangering actions.’ By visiting the sites where issues on security, mobility, and their interrelated body actions have been negotiated, I deploy an intersectional and multi-scalar analysis of how a layered system of gender-rendered and racialized patterns intersects with/in Germany's legal institutions combating terrorism wherever it may occur as well as the way multifold and different modes of support and logistics have been carried out through the European Schengen Area to Syria. Combining both feminist geopolitics and the vibrant work of (feminist) geolegalities, I offer another way of redressing Hyndman's call (2019) for expanding the tent of feminist geopolitics by not reversing the former, but through refocusing on embodied and material power-geometries and (legally) interconnected sites of an Islam-rendered, Western state-defined ‘war on/of terrorism’ simultaneously.     

Between West and non-West: Latin American Contributions to International Thought

This article seeks to highlight the significant contribution of Latin American scholarship to the further promotion and understanding of more ‘global’ approaches to International Relations. It focuses on the immediate post-independence period and explores the internationalist perspective of Andres Bello, an enormously influential continental scholar, publicist, and political figure, whose work is little known outside South America. It argues that his contribution to International Relations broadly conceived, part of a wider regional contribution, cannot be neatly accommodated within either accounts of the expansion of international society or revisionist post-colonial thought. As such it is neither fully ‘Western’ nor ‘non-Western’. Analysing his contribution under three interrelated headings - international law, the problem of order and international co-operation - it argues that Bello's work needs to be examined on its own terms. Above all it provides an illustration of why we need to take more seriously Latin American thought as part of a wider movement to internationalise International Relations.     

On the history and geography of the International Conference of Historical Geographers

The latest meeting in the series of International Conferences of Historical Geographers was held in Kyoto in 2009. The series originated in a meeting of Canadian and British historical geographers held in Kingston, Ontario, in 1975. Four subsequent meetings held in Britain, Canada and the USA saw an increasingly international participation and the sixth meeting, held in 1986, was accorded the title of the Sixth International Conference of Historical Geographers. Eight further such conferences have been held since then, some in locations well beyond Britain and North America. This paper records the basic historical and geographical characteristics of all of the meetings between 1975 and 2009.     

Peripheral Players? German Colonial Interests,The Press,and the Spirit of Locarno

The Locarno Conference, held on 5–16 October 1925, represented the culmination of nearly two years of diplomatic communication between the foreign offices of Germany, Britain, and France. The conference was an attempt to normalize relations between the former Allied powers and Germany's new Weimar Republic and more tightly bind Germany's politics and economy to Western Europe. Colonial German lobbies hoped that the Locarno talks heralded the return of empire and an end to Germany's banishment from the work of the ‘civilizing mission’ and the humiliating experience of being a ‘postcolonial state in a still colonial world’. Public scrutiny from false press reports about the restoration of the German colonies emanating from Germany, France, Britain and its colonies and dominions, and even the United States complicated matters for Locarno delegates by forcing discussion of off-agenda topics. This article interrogates how the Colonial German lobby influenced the Locarno Conference through activity in the international public sphere, how they managed a partial victory in the wake of Locarno, and more importantly, the Colonial German lobby learned new and better strategies for playing properly to public opinion and international bureaucracies.     

From Imperialism to Internationalism: British Idealism and Human Rights

ABSTRACT

The article provides a historical account of the younger generation of British Idealists’ (1880–1930) approach to international relations and human rights. By focusing on pre-Great War and post-Great War periods, it reveals the shift that occurred in their approbation of T. H. Green's theory of rights. It shows that the Great War put an end to perceptions of the Empire as a plausible and sustainable international order for the younger generation of British Idealists, as it did for the significant majority of liberal British intellectuals. Their work, especially in the post-Great War period, reveals an attempt at translating Green's theory of rights into an internationalist human rights theory, which they saw as being indispensable to maintain a stable international order. As an alternative to contemporary attempts to locate Green's rights theory within the cosmopolitan–communitarian divide in human rights theories, this study draws attention to the younger generation of British Idealists’ long neglected internationalist approach to human rights as a middle way position.     

Europe at the crossroads of three worlds: alternative histories and connections of European solidarity with the Third World, 1950s–80s

Abstract

Over the past few years, there has been growing interdisciplinary interest in the history of European solidarity movements that mobilized on behalf of the ‘Third World’ in the wake of the post-war decolonization process. Focusing on European campaigns against the Vietnam War and Pinochet’s Chile, this article aims at positioning these international solidarity movements in the broader history of North–South and East–West exchanges and connections in Europe during the Cold War. It explores some key ideas, actors and alternative networks that have remained little studied in mainstream accounts and public memories, but which are key to understanding the development of transnational activism in Europe and its relevance to broader fields of research, such as the history of Communism, decolonization, human rights, the Cold War and European identity. It delves into the impact of East–West networks and the Communist ‘First World’ in the discovery of the Third World in Western Europe, analyses the role of Third World diplomacy in this process, and argues how East–West and North–South networks invested international solidarity campaigns on ‘global’ issues with ideas about Europe’s past and present. Together, these networks turned resistance against the Vietnam War, human-rights violations in Pinochet’s Chile, and other causes in the Third World into themes for détente and pan-European cooperation across the borders of the Iron Curtain, and made them a symbol to build a common identity between the decolonized world and Europe. What emerges from this analysis is both a critique of West-centred narratives, which are focused on anti-totalitarianism, as well as an invitation to take North–South and East–West contacts, as well as the role of European identities, more seriously in the international history of human rights and international solidarity.     

Forum: Cultural Geography and Cultural Studies

This forum discusses linkages between cultural geography and allied ‘cultural’ disciplines. A symposium on this topic – held at the 2005 conference of the Institute of Australian Geographers in Armidale – was triggered by the targeted inclusion of geography in a cross‐disciplinary network funded by the Australian Research Council. Although non‐geographers in the network have articulated strong interest in and an enthusiasm for geography, their knowledge of, and everyday participation in its disciplinary travails have been limited. Given this, the papers in the forum review geography's long and dynamic consideration of the relations between place and culture, and raise a set of key issues for geographers to consider: how we might interact with other disciplinary debates about the ‘cultural’, retain distinctiveness as the home of intellectual inquiry around issues of space and place, and leverage opportunities to forge more permanent connections to geographers working not in our traditional institutional settings, but in a range of research centres, schools and disciplinary homes.     

Can Asia lead? Power ambitions and global governance in the twenty‐first century

Is the much hyped ‘rise of Asia’ translating into global public good? The leading Asian powers, China, India and Japan, demand a greater share of the decision‐making and leadership of global institutions. Yet, they seem to have been more preoccupied with enhancing their national power and status than contributing to global governance, including the management of global challenges. This is partly explained by a realpolitik outlook and ideology, and the legacies of India's and China's historical identification with the ‘Third World’ bloc. Another key factor is the continuing regional legitimacy deficit of the Asian powers. This article suggests that the Asian powers should increase their participation in and contribution to regional cooperation as a stepping stone to a more meaningful contribution to global governance.     

A geography of repoliticisation: Popularising alternative housing models in Oslo

The question of the political has gained renewed relevance in recent years. New movements are challenging what has been called ‘the post-political consensus’ and have facilitated the repoliticisation of a wide range of social, political and cultural phenomena—both on the left and the right. One task for geographers is to understand this repoliticisation spatially. The housing sector is a prime example of how such a repoliticisation occurs. With an emerging global urban housing affordability crisis, housing is becoming an important arena for engaging in emancipatory democratic politics. In this paper, we use Oslo as a case to analyse how housing, which has long been governed through liberal consensus, is being repoliticised. We investigate Oslo's agenda of establishing a ‘third housing sector’ beyond the privatised model, and its role in popularising alternative models in housing. We focus on the mobilisation and rearticulation of the genealogy of failure of housing in Oslo and the alternative housing solutions brought together in the city. Discussing the emerging geographical referencescape of housing as a distinctly spatial process of politicisation we show how arguments and positions gain legitimacy by situating references to other situations and places in a multiplicity of local and foreign arenas.