1. Embedded liberalism, culture and the making of the post-war world order

The framework for the post-war order is often framed in IR and IPE as a form of ‘embedded liberalism’. Coined by John Ruggie but inspired by the analysis of Karl Polanyi, embedded liberalism refers to the particular institutional framework and ‘social purpose’ which defined the post-war management of the global economy.Footnote ⁴ For Ruggie the construction of the post-war order was an attempt, following Polanyi, to ‘embed’ economic practices within society. This entailed a delicate compromise which sought both a certain form of economic openness alongside forms of domestic economic stability and macro-economic planning. ‘This was the essence’, notes Ruggie, ‘of the embedded liberalism compromise […] it would be multilateral in character [… but] its multilateralism would be predicated upon domestic interventionism.’Footnote ⁵ Embedded liberalism was, in these terms, a compromise on a number of levels – between capital and labour, between the domestic and the international, between laissez-faire and economic nationalism.

The notion of embedded liberalism has become enormously influential in IPE both among mainstream and critical perspectives.Footnote ⁶ This debate, however, has tended to frame ‘embedded liberalism’ as a question relating merely to the political-economic mechanisms designed to secure an embedded economy. By contrast, I want to argue in this article that embedded liberalism, and the contests out of which that idea was shaped, was not merely a question of economic or political-economic practice. Rather the possibilities for an embedded liberal order were debated in a wide array of settings.

Many commentators, for example, have equated the moment of embedded liberalism with the construction of a kind of Atlantic consensus underpinned by a particularly American conception of cultural hegemony. By the late 1940s the pursuit of embedded liberalism as the ‘social purpose’ of the post-war order was subsumed within a Cold War logic in which American political and cultural elites sought both to consolidate a kind of consensus among European allies and to project an image of America as a source of free enterprise and cultural advancement. At one level, this entailed the projection of American mass consumption abroad in the rapid expansion of American studios, publishers and cultural exporters and in the intensification of overseas public relations and information activities.Footnote ⁷

At a slightly different level, and in ways that were sometimes in tension with the consolidation and expansion of American cultural hegemony at a mass level, the cultural Cold War also involved a set of explicit strategies directed at European and ‘Atlantic’ elites. These entailed a complex campaign which sought to displace Paris and assert New York as the centre of Western artistic and cultural circles. As Greg Barnhisel has noted, ‘the US – primarily through the Central Intelligence Agency and the US Information Agency, and the cultural officers of the State Department – undertook an effort […] centered on the construction of an image of the US with an intellectual and cultural life equal to, and in dialogue with, Europe's’.Footnote ⁸

This attempt at forging a kind of Atlantic consensus was pursued in a number of post-war institutions. It was, for example, a campaign sought in and through the major American foundations.Footnote ⁹ It was key to the mandate of the Congress for Cultural Freedom (CCF). Established by liberal intellectuals in the early 1950s, and funded covertly by the CIA, the CCF organised conventions, academic projects and various publications designed to promote American-centred intellectual pursuits and to help consolidate anti-Soviet sentiment among Atlantic elites. In helping to do so, according to Scott-Smith the CCF operated ‘as the cultural-intellectual equivalent of the political economy of the Marshall Plan, its goals in the sphere of culture and ideas being complementary with the Economic Recovery Program's socio-economic and political aims.’Footnote ¹⁰

Similarly, the State Department also supported tours of American Jazz greats across Europe, mounted art exhibits of avant-garde artists and supported the translation and publication of important American books.Footnote ¹¹ Despite the diversity of genres, the initiatives shared an attempt to portray a benign, even culturally-rich, image of America.Footnote ¹² George Kennan, for example, argued in 1956 that the projection of America in international art exchanges, was indispensable to American Cold War objectives. ‘What we have to do’, he noted, ‘is to show the outside world both that we have a cultural life, and that we care something about it.’Footnote ¹³

Related to this process of cultural projection is the international ascendance of abstract expressionism (AE). Inextricably tied to the rise of both American hegemony and New York as a global cultural capital, AE became bound up in the new post-war cultural institutions especially the Museum of Modern Art (MOMA). AE, as evoked by Pollock, Chargill, Rothko and others, sought a new abstract aesthetic which in the State Department found a safe vehicle which might be used to promote American cultural achievement abroad.Footnote ¹⁴ As Guilbaut has noted, the reorganisation of world order and the emergence of AE as an international artistic vector are deeply implicated in each other. ‘The cultural history of the postwar period’, notes Guilbaut, ‘is the history of the reconstruction of American culture on new foundations laid by changes in the world economy’.Footnote ¹⁵ The kind of modernism embodied in AE enabled a certain kind of political ‘aloofness’ and individualism which corresponded well with the hegemonising pressures of American political and economic power:

The post-war order, organised around a conception of embedded liberalism, became, by the late 1940s, bound up in a particular cultural configuration that existed uneasily between America's geopolitical confrontation with the Soviet Union, attempts to project images of American cultural achievement, and the active exportation of an American-centred system of mass consumption. Although the Cold War is an important context for embedded liberalism, it does not imply the diversity of ways in which ‘culture’ was brought to bear on the conversations and contests over a reconstructed world order as they emerged in the interwar period. To develop a complex genealogy of embedded liberalism, and the ways in which embedded liberalism was implicated in questions of ‘cultural governance’, requires asking important questions not only about the eventual culture which came to dominate the post-war moment, but also the various attempts to insert culture in early discussions of a reconstructed world order throughout the interwar period: what were the diverse ways in which ‘culture’ was inserted into conceptions of embedded liberalism? How did cultural workers define the ways in which culture might be an active dimension of an embedded economy marked by forms of ‘social protection’?

Addressing these questions can, I argue, help place embedded liberalism in a more complicated critical context. As Joel Isaac has recently noted the existing literature on the post-war moment can be overly focused on Cold War requirements without addressing the complexity of continuities/discontinuities which link the post-war moment with the interwar period. He has persuasively suggested the importance of ‘linking postwar developments […] to tangible and persistent threads in political and cultural contestation.’Footnote ¹⁷ This entails a renewed ‘historiography [… which] will encompass a thick and diverse bundle of genealogies.’Footnote ¹⁸ It is, moreover, one chapter of these more complex ‘thick’ and ‘diverse’ genealogies of embedded liberalism that can be traced in the story of filmic internationalism; a story that highlights not only culture and the possibilities of the post-war order, but also the lingering imperial sensibilities that often accompanied those ambitions.

2. ‘The widening horizons of commerce’: embedded liberalism and filmic internationalism

One of the many surfaces of emergence for embedded liberalism was the social-realist documentary film movement. The documentary movement came to prominence by the 1930s as a network of artists and social scientists committed to the social use of film and to the pursuit of what Zoe Druick has referred to as ‘governmental realism’.Footnote ¹⁹ Influenced by realist cinema and art, American variants of social science and the emerging field of public relations, the film movement was dedicated to the use of film in documenting ‘actuality’ and in addressing and mobilising the forms of citizenship required of a new democratic order. This network formed around a core of filmmakers brought together by Grierson and Tallents including Paul Rotha, Stuart Legg, Basil Wright, Henry Watt, Alberto Cavalcanti and Humphrey Jennings.Footnote ²⁰ John Grierson, the iconoclastic centre of the movement, was particularly keen to promote a kind of social-realism not as a form of commercial film but of mass education and public relations entailing ‘explanations of the modern world and the conditioning of the public mind to citizenship within it.’Footnote ²¹

This movement, the coming of age of which is often marked by Grierson's own debut film Drifters in 1929, was characterised by both a fairly prolific production record as well as a notable institutional presence. In the 1920s, under the direction of Tallents and Grierson, the documentary movement operated an innovative film unit at the Empire Marketing Board (EMB); a unit that was eventually transferred in the 1930s to the General Post Office (GPO) in the UK. The GPO gained a measured degree of success including the production of significant films such as Night Mail.Footnote ²² Grierson also was a key figure in the development of the National Film Board of Canada and in key film ventures in Australia and other locations. This network was later installed in a range of early post-war experiments in filmic internationalism in the UN Department of Public Information, and at UNESCO where Grierson briefly served as Director of Mass Communications.

This attempt to mobilise realist film as a ‘public utility’ was, however, not merely a national but also an internationalist impulse.Footnote ²³ Between 1926 and 1946 the documentary film movement became increasingly preoccupied with the questions of a reconstructed world economic order. In addressing the actual problems of society Greison noted that the new film movements were inextricably linked to the ongoing global economic crises. Film, argued Grierson, could not be detached from ‘the problems of economic integration, either nationally or internationally [… film, only] at its peril can detach itself from the economic processes and what is happening in the world.’Footnote ²⁴

On the one hand, the enthusiasm for this kind of filmic internationalism was reflective of a broader optimism, sparked in the interwar period, for the international possibilities of the ‘new’ and emerging communication technologies. The 1920s, for example, witnessed an expansion of a cultural internationalist agenda which laid particular emphasis on processes of cultural exchange, intellectual cooperation and scientific/educational dialogue. At the core of this liberal agenda was a conviction that deepening cultural interaction would unleash processes of cooperation and mutual understanding. This interwar cultural agenda, notes Akira Iriye, orbited around ‘the idea that internationalism may best be fostered through cross-national cultural communication, understanding and cooperation.’Footnote ²⁵

Alongside this renewed cultural internationalism was an enthusiasm among social scientists regarding the international possibilities inherent in the new communication technologies. Film advocates conceived of a world moving beyond national boundaries in which culture was no longer contained within national spaces. ‘We have’, notes Grierson simply, ‘become more and more citizens of a community which we do not adequately see.’Footnote ²⁶ The backdrop for much of the emerging interest in film is a sense of an inevitable process of global integration and cohesion. Put succinctly by Robert Park, the Chicago sociologist who was influential among members of the documentary movement, the ‘forces which have brought about the exciting interpenetration of peoples are so vast and irresistible that the resulting changes assume the character of a cosmic process.’Footnote ²⁷

Moreover, film was conceived by its enthusiasts as a form uniquely suited to (and constitutive of) these ‘irresistible’ forces of global interpenetration. As a technology premised on visuality and motion, film was conceived as a universally accessible medium. The new mass media of the interwar and early post-war periods were frequently framed as technologies that could dramatically alter the experience of time and space. ‘Sight and hearing’, wrote Charles Siepmann, ‘are now co-extensive with the globe.’Footnote ²⁸ Much of the early research on mass communication also invoked an argument that linked the advent of the mass media with the prospects for a more immediate, even intimate, mode of human interaction across space.Footnote ²⁹ For Park film had ‘brought the ends of the earth into an intimacy unimaginable a few years ago […] steadily bringing all of the peoples of the earth measurably within the limits of a common culture.’Footnote ³⁰

On the other hand, as the body of film writing from this period indicates, film activists also invoked a more detailed set of arguments regarding the particular ways in which film might help constitute a new internationalist order. Perhaps most important in these arguments was a line that figured film as a technology capable of cementing a link between the abstract world of international life and the intimate site of everyday experience. For Grierson film is a ‘living’ force capable of ‘stretching’ the space of everyday existence in ways that inevitably bring everyday actors into immediate contact with each other. For Grierson, film constitutes:

In this line of argument, film was a technology which could open spaces of internationalist practice by helping to constitute a mode of everyday self and citizenship in which distant objects could be experienced in an immediate form. Film could, in these terms, contribute to the possibilities of a meaningful form of ‘worldly being’ by rendering global space legible in the most intimate of settings. Put succinctly by Benjamin Cohen, an Assistant Secretary General of the UN, the movement for filmic internationalism sought ‘an international purpose […] to produce films that would show how in the daily life of every individual, even in some of the most ordinary pursuits, there is involved a certain amount of international cooperation.’Footnote ³²

These attempts at filmic internationalism are reflective in several ways of the broader social purpose of embedded liberalism. In ways that parallel the attempt to carve a political-economic order attuned to both international openness and domestic stability, the experiments in filmic internationalism sought a delicate balance between the particular and the universal. For Jean Benoit-Levy, the project of filmic internationalism was a reaction to the same problems which marked the broader discussions of post-war political-economic planning. ‘Before 1939’, Benoit-Levy laments, ‘the half-closed frontiers paralyzed trade but reacted even more unfavorably on intellectual exchanges. Peoples were thrown back on themselves […] Each country exulted in its own nationalism, its own social system’.Footnote ³³

Drawing upon the same intellectual currents and reacting to similar sets of pressures, those who advocated for filmic internationalism were, at the same time, inserting themselves into the debates about embedded liberalism; about how a reconstructed world order could be both open and yet, at the same time, could remain deeply enmeshed within national social practices. As Best has noted, embedded liberalism entailed a complicated resolution of the universal and the particular that both sought out universal themes but rooted them in the integrity of particular spaces.Footnote ³⁴ The attempt at filmic internationalism sought a deeply internationalist cultural practice but one that was to be rooted, ultimately, in the dialogue between national traditions:

In this language, the project for a reconstructed world order, one that was both international and national at the same time, is the project central to the early documentary film movement. The founding of the documentary film movement and the web of conversations aimed at a reconstructed world economy are deeply bound into each other; conditions of emergence for the other. As Grierson notes, the founding moments of the documentary film movement are dominated by both stories about the global political and economic crises of the interwar period and the opportunity to contribute to a reconstructed international economic order. In his terms, the movement is inextricably bound into stories of (and hopes for) ‘the widening horizons of commerce, the complexities of manufacture, and the range of communications: indeed in all the steam and smoke, dazzle and speed, of the world at hand, and all the strange and sweep of affairs more distant.’Footnote ³⁶ It is in this language of the speed of ‘affairs more distant’ that the project of filmic internationalism borrowed from, and was fully within, the discursive matrix of embedded liberalism. This is a discursive matrix, however, that also relied upon a particular form of imperial governmentality.

3. Film internationalism, orientalism, empire

Although the project of filmic internationalism needs to be situated in the context of the cultural configuration that eventually came to characterise the post-war – and Cold War – moment, it also needs to be placed in the context of its own governmentality. Emerging out of several lectures given by Foucault over the last decade of his life, governmentatlity is purposely focused on the ‘conduct of conduct’ or the diverse and heterogeneous sets of practices which seek to govern the conduct of self and other. Modes of analysis influenced by governmentality assess the diverse assemblages of knowledge and practice through which objects become governable. In these terms, a governmentality approach is concerned not with broad social forces or structural factors but the technical and mundane sets of practices which establish grids of conduct in which we govern ourselves.Footnote ³⁷

In his attempt to use documentary as a technique that might help ‘condition the public mind’, Grierson sought to configure film as a particular kind of governmentality. Grierson mapped film as a kind of governmental rationality in which the ‘conduct of conduct’ could be mobilised and through which the ‘requirements’ of citizenship could be made visible to everyday populations. Because, for Grierson, modern society entailed a level of unprecedented complexity, only modes of visual practice could ‘bring alive’ to everyday citizens the requirements of democratic citizenship. ‘I suggest’, Grierson noted, that the key to documentary realism lies ‘in the realm of the imaginative training for modern citizenship and not anywhere else.’Footnote ³⁸

But as several commentators have recently noted liberal forms of governmentality often invoke a deeply imperial set of claims. Although formally committed to the sanctity of self-governing individuals, liberal forms of governmentality have actually been deeply concerned also with specifying the lines that separate populations capable of liberal govnermentality and those somehow beyond the spaces and capacities of self-government. ‘Liberal political reason’, notes Barry Hindess, ‘has been as much concerned with paternalistic rule […] as with the government of autonomous individuals, as much concerned with the subject peoples of imperial possessions as with the free inhabitants of Western states.’Footnote ³⁹

As Wendy Brown notes, this concern with illiberalism has often resulted in a very particular way of understanding cultural agency. Cultural agency – the creative capacity to form cultural practices – is a defining feature of Western liberal conceptions of self. This conception figures non-Western bodies, by contrast, as objects of culture; as bodies unable to exist in ways beyond the unchanging bonds of culture and tradition. In her formulation, liberal subjects are said to be characterised by their capacities to exercise cultural agency. ‘Uncivilized’ populations, by contrast, are governed by culture; subsumed within unchanging forms of cultural tradition. ‘Liberal peoples’, notes Wendy Brown, ‘have culture […] “we” have culture, while culture has “them”, or we have culture while they are a culture.’Footnote ⁴⁰

Taken together, these assumptions regarding liberal citizenship and cultural agency have often facilitated forms of imperial governmentality. Imperial governmentality entails what Venn describes as a hybrid form of rule. This hybrid entails a delicate relationship between that Foucault referred to as ‘sovereignty’ and ‘pastoral’ power. This governmentality often manifests in forms of ‘tutelage’ which conceive of the imperial ‘other’ as a body in need of ‘enlightenment’ and ‘instruction’ and whose difference is often conceived as a threat or danger. ‘Imperial governmentality’, argues Venn, ‘is an hybrid form of sovereignty, converting pastoral power into “tutelage” as part of the “civilising mission” undertaken by Europe.’Footnote ⁴¹

Although it understood itself mainly in terms of liberal internationalism, the project for filmic internationalism also embodied, in these terms, a lingering set of imperial sensibilities. As a form of imperial governmentality, the style of filmic internationalism promoted by Grierson and his network espoused a mixture of attitudes toward the possibilities of film as a form of imperial or ‘civilizing’ tutelage. At one level, imperial practice was built into the formative moment of the documentary movement in the work of the EMB. The EMB was only a brief presence (from 1926 to 1933) but it initiated some path-breaking work at the intersection of publicity and documentary film.Footnote ⁴² Grierson, who was hired in 1927 and became the EMB's most successful film officer, conceived the EMB as a site where film could be associated with a progressive vector of world change. The EMB was, in Grierson's view, able to use film to promote empire not as a mode of abject territorial domination, but as an integrated and cooperative international economic space. According to Grierson, the impact of the EMB, through films such as Solid Sunshine, One Family and Industrial Britain:

This reworked notion of empire however – a notion that would, in fact, have much in common with the kind of world economy that would emerge in the post-war movement – was, in some ways, still filtered through a deep preoccupation with the ways in which film might relate to the non-Western world. Those who advocated for filmic internationalism, for example, did invest some faith in film as a technique which could reach – and tutor – the ‘subject peoples of imperial possessions’. Advocates of film were keenly interested in visuality as a way to reach what they conceived as ‘primitive’ populations. Because filmic visuality did not, according to its advocates, require ‘rational’ or literate capacities but relied instead on the ‘universal’ even ‘timeless’ appeal of visual images and motion, it was accessible to those populations who existed outside of the spaces of Western modernity. The power of film, for its practitioners, lies in the movement of images; a forceful mode of expression particularly suited to the ‘savage’ bodies unable to grasp subtle or literate cultural production. ‘For even a backward mind’, noted R. S. Lambert, ‘can grasp a picture, where it could not comprehend a newspaper article or remember a spoken message clearly.’Footnote ⁴⁴

In this conception film not only makes the external world visible to isolated populations but also, at the same time, renders that world in a language – visuality – which is readily accessible even to subject populations unable to exercise the kinds of cultural agency possessed by civilised bodies in the West. The conversations among film advocates in favour of a filmic internationalism are littered with an enthusiasm for film as a technique of visual practice able to establish direct links with even the ‘degraded’ selves of imperial territories; to move ‘them’ into the wider world beyond cultural stasis:

Many filmmakers who experimented with realist cinema in Africa in the 1920s and 1930s – to engage in what filmmaker Jens Bjerre referred to as ‘the primitive native life in “darkest Africa”’Footnote ⁴⁶ – began to share a (guarded) optimism regarding the possibilities of film. Benoit-Levy, for example, became enchanted with the international possibilities for film after travelling through the Atlas Mountains during which he screened European films among local populations. Although the films confronted ‘primitive’ populations with worlds with which they were unfamiliar, they were able to convey meaning through the use of movement and visual simplicity. In this vein, Benoit-Levy uncovers a certain possibility that film might be able to translate the modern world for those imperial subjects who, although distant from civilisation and modern life, are, nonetheless reachable through the visual beauty of sensitive filmic realism:

Invoking an orientalist language, advocates of filmic internationalism often were optimistic regarding the possibilities of film as a technique which could assist the project of imperial tutelage.

On the other hand, however, there were those among the emerging film movement who were more pessimistic that film might successfully operate as a kind of technology of imperial tutelage.Footnote ⁴⁸ Much of the early debate around the use of films in the British colonies, for example, centred on the limits of ‘primitive’ knowledge. According to some filmmakers, although it encodes a universal language of visuality, film cannot bridge the very wide divide that separates metropolitan and colonial subjects. ‘Films’, cautioned one British filmmaker, ‘usually assume a knowledge which the African does not possess and have an alien background, the effort to understand which will absorb much of the pupil's attention.’Footnote ⁴⁹

Similarly, Julian Huxley, an early advocate of Grierson's movement who would become the first Director of UNESCO, often noted that difference might pose an insurmountable obstacle. Although he was keen to use it ‘in all backward sectors […] to let in light on the world's dark areas’,Footnote ⁵⁰ he was pessimistic that film could overcome imperial difference. For Huxley, the ‘primitive’ cultures of the imperial world were so marked by strangeness, so different from the universal culture he sought to promote, that he feared an intractable cultural divide. ‘It will be impossible’, he noted, ‘for humanity to acquire a common outlook if large sections of it are the illiterate inhabitants of a mental world entirely different from that in which a fully educated man can have his being.’Footnote ⁵¹

Even those enthusiastic about the possibilities of film were often, at the same time, anxious about the effects of difference.Footnote ⁵² One danger that preoccupied the architects of filmic internationalism relates to the vast differences that filmic realism might make visible. Advocates of film often expressed concern about the ways in which difference – and not sameness – might come to dominate the visual language of a reconstructed world order. The Preparatory Commission to UNESCO, for example, both welcomed the transformative world film might bring, but worried it might make visible a world transversed by irredeemable diversity. By bringing disparate populations into immediate contact with each other, novel techniques of mass communication also, simultaneously, usher in a world of ‘alarming’ diversity:

Because it brings distant others into intimate contact with each other, filmic internationalism established a kind of danger associated with closeness. Even those in the West who welcomed the end of formal imperial relations and the newly intimate world of mass mediation, nonetheless expressed a certain hesitation regarding the closeness to difference that film enabled. ‘We shall have to’, noted John Cooper, ‘live closely with them.’Footnote ⁵⁴

To address and confront this danger a more intimate knowledge of the different others now situated in close proximity was required. For Cooper, closeness could only be possible if accompanied by a deep and intimate knowledge of others. The ‘cultural disciplines’ need not only bring others into ‘our’ world, but also, at the same time, need to allow ‘us’ a certain intimate knowledge of their difference. To moderate the danger of difference, the ‘cultural disciplines’, according to Cooper, needed to produce the intimate kinds of knowledge which would allow us to exist in a world marked by closeness to difference. Film, and the other mass ‘cultural disciplines’ are, for Cooper, key to the ways in which knowledge of the other might be amassed and diffused:

Although there is a range of dissonant perspectives in much of the film writing of the interwar period – ranging form optimism regarding tutelage, pessimism or outright anxiety about the forms of difference film might make visible – there is, nonetheless a shared language of imperial governmentality. Film is conceived as a force capable of reaching imperial subjects and bringing them into closer contact with the rest of the world. This contact, however, is, itself, framed as a source of danger in terms of a ‘close’ world in which difference needs to be contained and managed. These positions, whatever their differences, are linked by a shared imperial language which represents the non-Western ‘other’ as a body incapable of the kinds of cultural agency which characterise Western liberal citizenship. This is a framing, moreover, which raises questions about filmic internationalism (and embedded liberalism more broadly) as a set of gestures, that although enunciated in universal tones, are more accurately figured as provincial forms.

4. Embedded liberalism as a provincial ‘social purpose’

Although the body of film writing from the interwar period is littered with discussions which link the documentary film movement to a lingering imperial governmentality, proponents of the movement continued to foster an image of filmic internationalism as anti-imperial. Writing in 1942, and contemplating the coming post-war moment, Grierson explicitly linked film with the possibilities of a non-imperial future. For Grierson, film can usefully help to ‘deparochialize’ the imperial sensibilities which have often rendered the non-Western world invisible:

To place this self-image in critical context I want to provincialise the sense of universalism it so easy seeks to invoke. To do so, I draw on the concept of Provincialising Europe as developed by Dipesh Chakrabarty. For Chakrabarty, Western knowledge, what he refers to as ‘conceptual “Europe”’, often becomes a generalisable standard against which other forms of knowledge must conform or against which they must be measured. Although forms of Western knowledge emerge out of particular contexts, they often form an unspoken model for the ways of life and practice of non-Western others; a mark against which others and their own historical knowledge are assessed. For Charkrabary post-colonial knowledge orbits around ‘conceptual “Europe”, the metanarrative of political modernity, [which] works as a “silent referent” for […] societies all over the world […] there is always a structure of “first in Europe, then elsewhere”.’Footnote ⁵⁷

To disrupt this status of ‘Europe’ as a silent referent for postcolonial knowledge, Chakrabarty not only seeks to place Western knowledge in its particular, and often provincial, conditions of emergence but also to foreground the inseparability that links universal and particular claims. For Chakrabarty universal claims form an unavoidable dimension of writing history. These kinds of claims are also, however, bounded by the impossibility of their parochial origins; bound inescapably to the particularities of time, space and culture from where they emerge. This requires, notes Chakrabarty, ‘holding in perpetual tension conceptions of (political) modernity – which are universal – and historical differences on the ground.’Footnote ⁵⁸

Because ‘conceptual Europe’ forms the basis of the colonial project and of political modernity, there is a particular urgency associated with the need to provincialise the universals that lie at its core. This entails most importantly the need to contrast universal claims with the particularities from which they emerge; particularities that could never achieve a universal status in any real sense. The universal is a kind of ‘hyppereal’ claim that has both immense political and historical weight but which can never evade fully its own particularities. This:

One strategy which might help provincialise the universal claims of the film movement entails locating it alongside the other kinds of claims to film internationalism with which it emerged. Priya Jaikumar, for example, has recently argued for the need to move beyond the somewhat narrow analysis of ‘national cinema’. Jaikumar notes that the binary of national/colonial cinema does not adequately capture the political and cultural complexities of the ‘end of empire’. In the period from 1927 to the end of WWII, British and colonial cinemas were neither strictly isolated projects nor projects stitched together by simple or one-way lines of determination. Rather, imperial and colonial cinemas were enmeshed in deeply relational and uneven webs. ‘We must’, argues Jaikumar, ‘abandon the rubric of national cinemas […] The study of colonial cinemas […] has not adequately addressed the cultural registers of changing international […] politics during the early twentieth century.’Footnote ⁶⁰

Echoing Jaikumar, it is important to note that, from its outset, the documentary film movement was enabled through and out of an international network of film practice and reception.Footnote ⁶¹ The formative moments of the British movement, for example, are deeply influenced by Soviet realist filmmaking. Grierson's breakthrough Drifters is directly influenced by Sergei Eisenstein and by the montage approach innovated by Eisenstain and his colleagues in the 1920s. Notably, Drifters and Battleship Potemkin were premiered simultaneously at the Film Society in London in late 1929.Footnote ⁶² Similarly Vsevolod Pudovkin, a contemporary of Eisenstein, remained an important part of the international networks. Although he remained in the Soviet Union until his death in 1953, he circulated among British and European filmmakers in the 1920s and joined a call in the 1940s for a kind of cosmopolitan ‘global film’.Footnote ⁶³ For Pudovkin, the ‘global film’ was a ‘plea for a truly international film which will leap all language, ethnic, and social barriers between the peoples of the earth “to answer the universal desire for unity that has arisen among all the peoples of the world”.’Footnote ⁶⁴

In addition, the British realist documentary movement was not the only attempt at constructing an internationalist film practice. Indian and Soviet filmmaking, for example, both asserted a kind of internationalist objective and sought out markets and spheres of influence beyond their domestic realm. In addition, these ‘other’ cinemas were also deeply entwined in international film practices. According to Jaikumar, in the 1930s, the decade in which the realist cinema of the Anglo-American world was claiming a certain international status, Indian cinema was increasingly becoming international in its own practice. This was, notes Jaikumar, ‘a decade of innovation and experimentation as filmmakers explored local content, learned from European and US film-production techniques […] the autonomy that Indian films sought to claim […] was not absent of a cultural interface with multiple contexts but in fact dependent on it.’Footnote ⁶⁵ In these various ways, and despite its universal self-image, the social-realist documentary film movement did not develop in isolation from ‘other’ attempts at film internationalism. Rather, it always, even from its inception, existed alongside and was deeply enabled by (sometimes uneasily) a diverse range of international film practices.

Perhaps the most important way in which the social-realist film movement might be provincialised, however, is by foregrounding the relationship between it and a particular conception of social change. In John Ruggie's initial formulation, he noted that embedded liberalism, like all international regimes, was constituted as a social institution. Ruggie argued for a conception of embedded liberalism not merely as a set of material arrangements, but as a project organised around a coherent normative framework or underlying ‘social metaphor’. ‘We know international regimes’, noted Ruggie, ‘not simply by some descriptive inventory […] but by their generative grammar, the underlying principles of order and meaning that shape the manner of their formation.’Footnote ⁶⁶

The ‘social purpose’ most closely associated with embedded liberalism – and one that is central to the ‘generative grammar’ of filmic internationalism as well – is the notion of social security. As Janine Brodie has noted, the 1930s and 1940s witnessed a novel reformulation of the relationship between state, citizen and security.Footnote ⁶⁷ This entailed a reworked conception of citizenship in which risk was placed not directly on individuals but was diffused across the social body. Most centrally inscribed in techniques of social insurance, ‘risk’ was managed not in individual terms but in terms of a social whole. As Nikolas Rose suggests, the ‘state’ became implicated in promoting this social form of government. ‘Through mechanisms of social insurance […] and […] tax regimes, interest rates and other techniques of “demand management” […] the state assumed responsibility for the management of a whole variety of risks […] in the name of society.’Footnote ⁶⁸

All of the major proposals for filmic internationalism embodied and promoted this type of ‘social purpose’ associated with social security. Mass communication, for Huxley, for example, was a practice precisely concerned with situating individuals within society. Individuals, notes Huxley, ‘are meaningless except in relation to the community (though the community transcends the nation both in time and space), and can only achieve fullest self-development [… in relation to] other selves.’Footnote ⁶⁹

Grierson was more explicit about his attempts to use film as a technology of social governmentality.Footnote ⁷⁰ By the 1920s he became a fierce advocate for the notion of social citizenship and for the related repertoire of practices including cooperation and economic planning. Film, for Grierson, was a social force capable of making visible the requirements of this new social citizenship. ‘Sleeping or walking’, argued Grierson, ‘we are concerned each day in an inter-dependency […] We have […] not yet given ourselves the new kind of imagination or the new conception of citizenship which makes it tolerable […] This, of course, places a great burden and a great creative responsibility […] It is a question of the images that direct men's vision and determine their loyalties.’Footnote ⁷¹

In film Grierson identified what he conceived as an instrument capable of locating citizens within the fabric of the social body. Because it necessarily establishes a mode of encounter between self and others, film was constitutive of society itself. In his ambitious vision, film was an expansive technology capable of enlarging citizenship beyond mere local concerns. Film, for Grierson, could mobilise citizens and ‘the far reaches of his social self, however local it may immediately appear. He understands how common to all the world are his problems […] He has in the film the seeing eye of his active and creative citizenship.’Footnote ⁷² Grierson framed film as the practice capable of constituting the ‘visual order’ necessary to provoke the ‘deep alterations’ in the categories of citizenship and engagement that the new ‘social’ world required:

Although it is presented as both a progressive and universal force, the social clearly emerges out of a very particular time and place. The ‘social’, especially as it was pursued in the project of filmic internationalism, claims a certain universal status it has no validity in claiming. Although it emerges out of a very particular set of conditions – a constellation of Western political and social forces that coalesced in response to the economic and political crises of the 1930s; a progressive set of voices concerned with the insecurities of laissez-faire capitalism; a network of political thinkers in the Anglo-American world influenced by notions of ‘society’ as an integrated body – the social is represented by film advocates as a universalisable good. In this concern filmic internationalism orbits around a claim about the possibilities that a very provincial concern – the notion of social security/citizenship – might be universalised as a natural category for the rest of the world.

Grierson is perhaps the most explicit in this attempt to use film as a technique designed to universalise the social. Grierson sought film not as a way to record timeless differences but as a practice that could bring into visibility new modes of citizenship. This entailed a fixation with making visible not ‘traditional’ modes of practice but the new modes of social citizenship which, in his words, were dominating ‘our metropolitan community’. This is a line of force which connects film to progressive and rapid change in which both ‘metropolitan’ and ‘other’ worlds embrace the new planned and cooperative practice of social citizenship. ‘We have struck out, against every temptation’, notes Grierson, ‘against the attraction of romance […] to the here and now of our society. We have sought not the residuum of the ancient beauties, but the beginnings of new ones in the somewhat unlikely milieu of the chaotic present […] We have indeed found our field of observation […] in the clash of forces inside our metropolitan community.’Footnote ⁷⁴

Attempting to translate the ‘field of observation’ preoccupying the metropolitan centre into terms legible to the ‘primitive’ world, Grierson asserts a rationality in which film makes visible not ‘ancient’ residual differences but a common ‘social’ future. This rationality still invokes a notion of historical and colonial difference, but seeks to close that difference by marking out, and helping to constitute, the universal space of a new social economy. This is most resonant in Grierson's critique of the films of Robert Flaherty. A pioneer of documentary, Flaherty was most noted for a series of films which made visible the timeless ways of life of what he conceived as primitive populations. Beginning with his treatment of Inuit life in Nanook of the North (1922), Flaherty made a series of films which documented non-Western populations as exotic, primitive and unchanging. Although Grierson respected Flaherty's immense influence, and worked with him on Industrial Britain (1931) he departed from Flaherty's preoccupation with themes of timelessness and unchanging primitivism. Grierson, in contrast, was interested not in an image of timeless primitivism but in dynamic change in which ‘primitive’ populations became engaged with the processes of social change that were transforming the ‘metropolitan’ world:

In this effort to enroll ‘primitive’ populations into ‘our global concern’, Grierson announces an attempt to constitute a universal practice from a particularistic set of commitments. The question of ‘otherness’ is reimagined by foregrounding a set of issues which are ‘too close to our own problems.’ This announcement is an attempt to connect ‘us’ and ‘them’ by making universal the issues of ‘social’ change – a planned economy, an integrated world order – so clearly central to the particular preoccupations of Grierson and the network which cohered around him. In doing so, Grierson seeks to enfold difference into the emerging space of a universalising planned economy and the modes of science, self and citizenship associated with that economy. On one hand, this formulation traces out a universal conceit – the imagined tracks of a force inexorably creeping to even the most ‘primitive’ corners of the world. On the other hand, however, this is an attempt to universalise (and impose) a provincial form of knowledge and practice clearly reflective of the preoccupations and priorities of a very particular network of cultural workers and bureaucrats which circulated through the Anglo-American world; a provincialism indicated by Grierson's own use of the possessive pronoun – in ‘our global concern’. It is in the shadow of this provincialism, moreover, that we might begin to develop more multiple and more ‘localized’ versions of the stories we tell in IPE about embedded liberalism.