This timely volume documents the evolution of discourses related to the international in Europe since the eighteenth century, using the lens of conceptual history. By scrutinizing the varied and fluctuating uses of cosmopolitan, universal, international, world, ecumenical, and eventually, global vocabularies, the contributors challenge us to think about both the exact language and specific context of these usages. By highlighting the interconnectedness of international and national discourses, they remind us that ideas of borderless contact preceded the nation state while national priorities decisively shaped how international concepts were utilized both at home and abroad. A fresh contribution of the volume is the incorporation of Nordic perspectives (mainly Finland and Sweden) alongside French, British, German, or Dutch case studies, additionally illustrating the polyvocality of international(ist) discourses in Europe. Finally, this is a thematically rich volume, which follows the language of internationalism from intellectual and political elites to the labor and women's movements to the diverse economic, religious, sports, humanitarian, climate, and educational contexts of its articulation. In the end, those grappling with the interplay between international, transnational, and global frameworks in the last fifteen years emerge with a fuller understanding of the longer history of conceptual contestations related to activities, ideas, people, and organizations crossing (national) borders. In her Afterword, Glenda Sluga reminds us that a global approach utilizing indigenous sources would likely nuance our understanding of the international's chronology and definition even further.
The volume is structured both chronologically and thematically. For those who wish to have a big picture in mind, reading the Conclusion first would be helpful. Chapter 1 begins with the Enlightenment when ideas of cosmopolitanism positively bound intellectual elites through correspondence, academies, and publications; yet the shift to patriotic discourses starting in the 1760s challenged intellectual exclusivity and started to color the term negatively. This trend continued during the French Revolution when competing discourses introduced new vocabularies, as shown in chapter 2. While the French saw the revolution as universal, they singled out foreigners within and tried to impose their models of “humanity” abroad. The British opposed such claims to “universal domination” (47) and spoke about the “civilized world” (48) instead, while they insisted on the supremacy of “the law of nations,” or international law. In the age of Napoleon, the notion of cosmopolitanism also eroded in the Dutch Republic and the German contexts. Other ideas of the international existed as well. Chapter 3 reminds us that the term was coined by Jeremy Bentham in 1780 referring to legal issues between nations, while organizations such as the Freemasons or economic, bible, and relief societies already crossed borders. The nineteenth century expanded the use of the term international from the legal realm to political and civic life. Internationalism was first used in the 1840s, eventually acquiring antisocialist, anti-Semitic, and anti-Masonic overtones. By the turn of the century, a sense of “international turmoil” (78) dominated public discourse.
Following these big trends in the nineteenth century, chapter 4 engages the complex, multilayered socialist conceptualizations of internationalism. From Marx and Engels in the 1840s–1870s, to revolutionary and evolutionary socialists on the eve of the Great War, to the clash between Bolsheviks and Social Democrats between the world wars, to the Cold War period, competing ideas of international working class solidarity pitted the “living internationalism” (100) of western labor movements against Soviet “proletarian internationalism.” The literature on these issues is extensive, but the comparative approach in this chapter is admirable. Contestations also existed in other domains, notably the “feminist internationalism” discussed in chapter 5 where the analysis of journals, organizations, and activists acting as “Great Women” revealed tensions between moderate and radical groupings and ideas. In similar vein, chapter 6 reminds us of the peculiarities of “liberal internationalism” and “conservative internationalism” at the turn of the century as well as the competing scenarios on how to create a new international order after the Great War, from the Bolshevik Revolution to Wilsonian self-determination to the League of Nations. The chapter masterfully unpacks the various contexts, triangulating data from Britain, France, Germany, Sweden, and Finland to emphasize the unattainability of one dominant or even “official” internationalism.
The following analyses of trade, religious, sports, and humanitarian internationalisms continue to complicate the concept. Chapter 7 follows the evolution of the notion of world economy since liberal economists in the nineteenth century began debating how économie mondiale and Weltwirtschaft related to an older concept, political economy. After 1918, the League of Nations created an expert network to follow the world economy as a guarantee for peace, but in the aftermath of the Great Depression, the notion remained contested. From the 1980s, the preferred concept became global economy. Shifts are also evident in the religious realm, as the term ecumenical entered parliamentary debates about national unity. The masterful visualizations of chapter 8 vividly illustrate the evolving use of ecumenism in the British, Dutch, and Swedish contexts in the longue durée, mapping the changing concepts of Christendom through the multicultural and interfaith trends of today. Chapter 9 turns to the Olympic movement, explicitly envisioned as a form of internationalism, though Coubertin entertained the possibility of nurturing “good” nationalism while he detested utopian socialist internationalism. Following ambiguous attempts to reconcile these tensions during the Cold War, since the 1990s, an explicitly global orientation of the movement prevailed. Humanitarianism also shows contradictions, as is clear in chapter 11, which uses the framework of universalism, rather than internationalism, to analyze shifts in Red Cross discourses (an explicit link would have been helpful). The idea of universality in humanitarian aid was constantly challenged in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, through wars and diplomatic crises; in the 1960s, the Red Cross adopted universality as its fundamental principle, but the 1970s saw the emergency of rival organizations, notably its offshoot Médecins Sans Frontières. These new agents defied traditional ideas of humanitarian neutrality and pursued alternative ideas of universalism, even as the concept itself remained hegemonic in humanitarian discourses.
A key theme throughout the volume is the interrelationship between the international and the national, a topic critical to the exploration of European unity in chapter 10. Whether concerning the notion of “European integration” or “European identity,” intellectuals and politicians never dropped the national, but simply saw its complementarity with a European framework. The multiplicity of concepts is staggering: from European “civilization” or “commonwealth” to “federation” or “United States of Europe” to “heritage” or “culture,” postwar debates are rich in British, Dutch, and Swedish parliamentary contexts. These official views are supplemented by the analysis of “oppositional internationalisms,” focused on Finnish, Swedish, and West German youth movements of the 1960s, in chapter 12. Here, while the tension between liberal and radical discourses is clear, it is necessary to articulate how exactly the smaller Nordic counties acted as “discursive innovators” (271) or what the meaning of “Third World internationalism” was (280). Chapter 13 then analyzes climate debates, charting a notable shift in the discourses of international cooperation from the historical responsibility of developed industrial nations in the 1990s to environmental safely as a universal human right requiring common action in the 2000s to the focus on justice and fairness since 2015. While language varied between political parties and countries, “climate justice” has emerged as a powerful discursive counterweight to “climate nationalism.” The national is proving to be an enduring factor of how international cooperation in higher education is being debated as well, as is clear in chapter 14. Analyzing Finnish and Hungarian “discourse cycles” (301) in the context of legislative reforms, the authors demonstrate the endurance of the national framework despite increasing globalization and transnational cooperation since the 1990s. Here, context is key: since the 2010s, in Finland, international educational cooperation continued being articulated as an important factor for strengthening the nation, while in Hungary, the vocabulary of academic freedom, European community, and international values steadily eroded and eventually vanished.
For those new to conceptual history, this is a good introduction to how concepts and contexts inform each other, though here the focus is more on the former. For those skeptical of digital humanities approaches, the interplay between quantitative (Ngram and discourse data) and qualitative methodologies demonstrates the promise of digital history. This reviewer thought that an elaboration on the various methodologies available to conceptual history in the Introduction would have benefited readers new to this field; alternatively, asking all contributors to explain their preferred methodologies in a dedicated section of each chapter accomplishes the same. Finally, the examples from smaller European states are refreshing, though audiences might wonder whether there is a specific Nordic conception of internationalism and how it adds to our understanding of the concept's evolution in Europe in general. The final two points are some of the many challenges associated with edited volumes, but notably this excellent book has given us a comprehensive, empirically novel, and intellectually stimulating intervention on the many discourses of the international and internationalism that would be helpful to anyone who wishes to delve further in the specific contexts and languages.
