This expansive volume begins with a puzzling contradiction. Why is it that internationalism, so central to the ethos of leftist politics, has principally been studied in recent years via its non-leftist iterations? As Michele di Donato and Mathieu Fulla point out in their introduction, internationalism has been a central tenet of both the ideology and lived experience of communist and socialist individuals and organizations since the nineteenth century. Yet much of the academic work produced on the topic – particularly when focusing on the twentieth century – has taken liberal or social or cultural forms of internationalism as its principal subject.
As the editors note in their introduction, this is a historiographical gap that is, admittedly, not as gaping as it once was. Thanks to the advent of global and transnational history, “red” internationalism is being returned to its rightful place in the broader picture of modern global history. This volume seeks to build on these developments, providing an extensive array of interventions that reflect the enormity of this subject. The volume boasts fifteen individual chapters with topics spanning the full breadth and depth of twentieth-century leftism. Chapters on the travails of Ottoman Socialists sit alongside those exploring the ideas of anti-authoritarian feminists in Berlin; some explore the roles played by Norwegian social democrats, others, Nicaraguan Sandinistas.
The overarching aim of the volume is to embed this expansive array of subjects more deeply into wider narratives of twentieth-century history. By focusing on internationalism as a practice – following Talbot Imlay’s conceptualization – rather than a “theory or an abstract set of values”, the volume encompasses practices that range from the work of high-level international organizations to the insurgent politics of anti-colonial activists. Emphasizing “interactions and hybridizations”, rather than a singular narrative or theme, this is a volume that highlights both the depth and breadth of leftist internationalisms during the twentieth century. Its range is both a strength and a challenge, naturally encompassing a disparate array of narratives and practices. As the editors note in the introduction, leftist internationalism in the twentieth century undertook “multiple trajectories” that “defy any idea of orderly progress or linear historical evolution”.
To make sense of this, at times, bewildering history, the book is divided into three parts. Although not described as such, these sections are imagined as layers through which leftist internationalisms were practiced. This provides a useful heuristic for thinking through the various forms that such internationalisms took, their limitations, and the broader themes that emerge from our study of them. Each layer articulates a plane of action through which various internationalisms were practiced: rather than viewing internationalism as a single entity consisting of various components, this method allows us to imagine multiple distinct and sometimes discrete, sometimes entangled iterations of a broader whole. It is a helpful vantage point from which the oftentimes messy entanglements of national, transnational, and local politics can be unpicked.
The first section focuses on what might best be described as the conventional frames through which internationalisms have been articulated and practiced: political parties, states, and the international system. It is organized chronologically. Kostis Karpozilos’s article explores the Socialist Workers’ Federation of Salonica as it navigated the collapse of the Ottoman Empire. Eirik Wig Sundvall and Nik Brandal’s contribution explores social democratic internationalism in mid-century Europe through the figure of Bjarne Braatoy, a Norwegian socialist who sought to bridge leftist politics between Europe and the United States. Yutaka Kanda’s chapter also looks at social democratic internationalism via an exploration of relations between Asian and European socialist parties in the post-war period. Silvio Pons’s contribution explores the Italian Communist Party (PCI)'s engagement with decolonization, while Arianna Lissoni, writing on the South African activist Yusuf M. Dadoo, looks at the politics of exile, internationalism, and decolonization during the Cold War. The final chapter, by Mathieu Fulla, explores the failed attempt by socialist elites to challenge the slide into neoliberalism in the 1980s, articulating in its place a “Eurokeynesianism” in response to the ascendancy of monetarism during that period.
The second part of the volume deals with what is perhaps the most innovative and interesting “layer”, exploring interactions between internationalisms. It is here that the volume’s choice of exploring internationalisms in the plural is at its most interesting, but also potentially most challenging. Opening the section, Adeline Blaszkiewicz’s article looks at the various intellectual traditions that competed for influence with the nascent International Labour Organization of the interwar years. Michel Christian’s contribution explores the ways that Warsaw Pact delegates worked within UN institutions during the Cold War, a topic that remains underexplored despite the wave of literature that has emerged in the past two decades with the aim of “globalizing” histories of state socialism. In his chapter, Mateo Jarquín weighs the internationalist agenda at the core of the Sandinista movement against the other regional and global internationalist agendas that framed the Nicaraguan state’s global engagement. Michele di Donato’s chapter is another that takes social democratic internationalism as its subject, exploring how the Socialist International attempted to articulate a distinctly social democratic approach to human rights. Finally, Jocelyn Olcott looks at the UN Decade for Women (1975–1985), showing how individuals and civil society organizations based in the Global South advanced a transnational feminist politics, fostering connections to feminists in the Global North.
The third and final section takes us closer to the ground zero of internationalist practices by looking at local and grassroots activism. This is more familiar ground for social historians and historians of activism, but the case studies presented here still manage to provide several enlightening and sometimes surprising interventions. Phillip Deery’s chapter takes the various international campaigns waged to save the lives of Ethel and Julius Rosenberg as its subject. These Rosenberg committees were, as Deery shows, globally diverse and ecumenical in their politics as opposed to the monolithic, Soviet-led “front” organizations that they were often depicted as at the time. In her article, Celine Vaz explores networks of leftist town planning professionals in Southern Europe during the latter half of the century, which she describes as a “golden age” of left-wing town planning in the region. Andrew S. Tompkins’s chapter focuses on the “varieties of internationalism” exhibited by ecological activist movements in France and West Germany during the 1970s. In this article, we see the volume’s broader contribution in miniature, with Tompkins arguing that this case study points to the existence of “multiple internationalisms” within the region. Finally, Emeline Fourment’s chapter uses ethnographic research to explore the transnational networks of feminist activists in Montreal and Berlin, emphasizing the importance of both informal networks and the United States in facilitating transnational connections.
This volume is an important stepping stone towards a fuller understanding of leftist internationalisms in the twentieth century. It has many strengths. Primary among them is the way it redirects our focus away from the Soviet Union. It is safe to say that one of the key reasons leftist internationalisms have received less attention than they deserve is precisely because of an undue focus on Soviet influence. In traditional narratives, Stalinism precluded the practice of genuine internationalism, reducing anything bearing that name to the unwitting pushing of Soviet foreign policy aims. While no volume on this topic could avoid mentioning the world’s first socialist state, there are two key shifts here that allow us to escape the straitjacket of narratives of “Soviet frontism”. Firstly, the volume returns social democratic internationalism to the foreground of the story of European socialism in the twentieth century. This was a story that transcended simple Cold War binaries (or ternaries, if we include the postcolonial world), and one that must be read in conjunction with the story of Marxist–Leninist internationalism. Secondly, many of the chapters challenge the idea of Soviet hegemony, showing that leftists across the globe were independent actors capable of formulating their own doctrines.
There are further themes that will be familiar to those studying internationalism. There is the messiness of the practice, creating as it does entanglement, misunderstanding, and often failure. This latter concept is ever-present here, which is unsurprising from the vantage point of the first quarter of the twenty-first century. One helpful corrective to a simplistic success–failure binary comes via the editors’ deployment of the concept of hybridization: by thinking of internationalism in the multiple, as representing many movements across space and time that were not static but constantly shifting, embedded in their own national contexts but intertwined with broader transnational flows, we can better measure their impact.
