INTRODUCTION
The Round Table (RT), a pro-imperial movement founded in 1909–10, made a distinctive contribution to the development of the academic field of International Relations (IR) in early twentieth-century Britain.Footnote 1 A classicist and distinguished British liberal internationalist, Alfred Zimmern (1879–1957) exemplified such a link. In the interwar period Zimmern held two prominent IR chairs, first at the University College of Wales, Aberystwyth, and then at Oxford.Footnote 2 He drew inspiration for this emerging academic discipline from his own ideological work on behalf of the RT. In 1931 he declared that one of the prime aims of IR was to foster a deeper appreciation of “manifold and glowing diversity” in culture—of “the infinite shades of spiritual pigmentation”—all integrated in “the community of nations.”Footnote 3 This notion of international spiritual variety derived from his conceptualization of a British Commonwealth during the 1910s. A federal Commonwealth that he theorized, as one of the leading RT architects, was characterized by the coexistence of culturally and spiritually distinct nations.
Jeanne Morefield argues that during the 1910s, Zimmern explored a way of justifying the continuance of the British imperial system in “an era of nascent post-colonial revolt.” He sought to undercut arguments for political self-determination and dissociated the nation from state sovereignty by conceiving the former as an essentially “natural and spiritual” entity.Footnote 4 Likewise, Mark Mazower explains that Zimmern's advocacy of “global harmony in a world of national sentiments” (rather than of nation states) served as an apology for the maintenance of Britain's global empire amid the rise of colonial nationalism.Footnote 5 However, these accounts overlook Zimmern's major motivation for conceptualizing depoliticized nationalities and promoting the harmony between such entities. Due largely to his identification with the Jewish minority, Zimmern had a profound aversion to visions of politics based on race. He deplored racially discriminatory arguments, including the ideology of “Anglo-Saxonism” that prevailed in the English-speaking countries of his time. In theorizing a British Commonwealth, he strove to replace “race” with “nation” as the basic ontological category of world ordering. The idea of cultural Zionism, shaped by Ahad Ha’am (Asher Ginsberg), played a critical role in this project.Footnote 6 To Zimmern, Ahad Ha’am's concept of non-statist Jewish nationhood was a useful device for achieving two purposes at the same time: it enabled him to postulate a multinational Commonwealth as an alternative to a racialized empire and to reject at the same time colonial demands for self-determination. In this essay I argue that besides the reconfiguration of the British Empire, early twentieth-century racial conflict provided an impetus for Zimmern to conceive a global Commonwealth composed of various nations.
Noam Pianko has recently highlighted the Jewish and Zionist foundations of Zimmern's vision of global commonwealth. He argues that Ahad Ha’am's scheme for a culturally unified Jewish nation without homeland sovereignty brought “a dramatic transformation” to Zimmern's evolving conception of depoliticized nationalities.Footnote 7 This essay builds on Pianko's claims. I demonstrate that Zimmern's project for harmonizing diverse nationalities was grounded in Ahad Ha’am's theory of “competitive imitation,” a concept aimed at maintaining a Jewish national identity amid dominant non-Jewish national groups. Morefield ascribes Zimmern's separation of nationality from state sovereignty to the influence of British Hegelianism, a strand of philosophical idealism developed at Oxford in the late nineteenth century.Footnote 8 This interpretation is plausible given Zimmern's completion of the Oxford Literae Humaniores, a classical studies curriculum in which idealist philosophies, such as crafted by T. H. Green, were deeply embedded. However, Zimmern scarcely mentioned the work of the British idealists in his theorization of non-statist nationalism while he was clear about his debt to Ahad Ha’am. I claim that the influences of Ahad Ha’am's cultural Zionism and British Hegelianism were compatible because both advocated the organic unification of a nation based on “spiritual” bonds. Still, Ahad Ha’am's scheme had a more immediate and direct impact on Zimmern's conception of nationality, whereas British idealism remained only a background force.
This essay deviates from Pianko in three respects. First, it pays greater attention to the ways in which Zimmern tackled racial questions. I argue that drawing on cultural Zionism, Zimmern proposed a global order based not on racial hierarchy but on the equality between depoliticized nations. This has relevance for IR history. As a group of scholars argue, early twentieth-century IR formed primarily a policy science aimed at resolving difficulties arising from empire-building and colonial administration. At the centre of this academic field was its own profound commitment to the production of a racial stratification.Footnote 9 Zimmern was a towering figure in the promotion of IR between the world wars. Yet his denial of political ontology to race indicates that he cannot be identified with the early IR's complicity in racism.
Second, the essay investigates the intellectual interaction between Zimmern and Horace Kallen—an influential American Jewish thinker—more closely. Kallen and Zimmern built a lifelong friendship during the latter's visit to the United States in 1911–12 and sympathized with each other's parallel projects for protecting the cultures of national minorities.Footnote 10 The essay demonstrates that Kallen's concept of American cultural pluralism informed Zimmern's view of the British Empire as a global commonwealth for unifying diverse nationalities. Finally, I analyse Zimmern's writings not only of the 1910s but also of the 1920s. Pianko overlooks the continuation of Zimmern's multinationalist scheme by claiming that his break with the Zionist movement around 1921 “eroded his developing synthesis of Zionism and [British] internationalism.”Footnote 11 I show that, on the contrary, Zimmern's Zionist-inspired global vision continued to characterize his seminal 1926 work, The Third British Empire, as well as his proposal for international intellectual cooperation, a League of Nations cultural project with which he was closely involved during the late 1920s.Footnote 12
The essay begins by analysing Zimmern's views on race and nationality. The first two sections show that he postulated depoliticized nations, instead of races, as the basic ontological units constituting world order. The third section examines how he applied Ahad Ha’am's idea of cultural Zionism to conceptualize such units and their interactions. The fourth section highlights the impact of Kallen's thought on Zimmern, showing how their transatlantic exchange contributed to the latter's depiction of a British Commonwealth as multinational and multicultural. Finally, I trace the evolution of Zimmern's multinationalist arguments through the late 1920s.
DISPLACING RACE
In early twentieth-century world politics, race occupied a prominent place. W. E. B. Du Bois declared at the 1900 Pan-African Congress in London that the problem of the twentieth century would be “the problem of the color-line,” namely “the relation of the darker to the lighter races of men in Asia and Africa, in America and the islands of the sea.”Footnote 13 As symbolized by the subsequent spread of the term “colour line,” the racial divisions of humanity—typically transcending the borders of nation states—emerged as the foundation of geopolitical alliances, as well as of the individual's personal identity.Footnote 14 In this current, Anglo-Saxon racial ideologies became influential in Britain and the United States. Based on a purported racial hierarchy with the Anglo-Saxons at its peak, a number of distinguished personalities in both countries, such as Cecil Rhodes, W. T. Stead and Andrew Carnegie, advocated the political unification of the English-speaking countries (Britain, the United States and the British settler colonies in Australia, New Zealand, Canada and southern Africa), the region that James Belich calls the “Anglo-world.”Footnote 15
Established by the acolytes of the ex-high commissioner for South Africa, Alfred Milner, the RT movement championed the creation of a federal Commonwealth composed of Britain and the overseas dominions around the world.Footnote 16 The movement also played a powerful role in propagating a racialized vision of the British Empire. Its key ideologue, Lionel Curtis, grounded the bonds of a transoceanic British Commonwealth in the historically mythicized superiority of the Anglo-Saxon political culture.Footnote 17 Acting as one of the major protagonists of the RT, Zimmern espoused the reorganization of the British Empire and agreed with Curtis that the “empire” needed to be redefined as “Commonwealth”—as, in Morefield's words, “a well-run civic community” wherein freedom and public duty could be “dialectically reconciled.”Footnote 18 However, Zimmern deviated from Curtis and his followers in rejecting the infusion of a racial hierarchy into a British Commonwealth. He envisaged this global British polity as a site not for the domination of any particular racial group, whether the Anglo-Saxons or, more collectively, the whites, but for harmony between various races. In a 1914 essay, “German Culture and the British Commonwealth,” he argued that “the problem of the colour-line” made “the development of the principle of the supernational Commonwealth the most pressing political need of our age.” It was only with “a common citizenship,” guaranteed in the Commonwealth, that “the union and collaboration of diverse races and peoples” could be achieved.Footnote 19
This advocacy of racial coexistence was followed by Zimmern's radical reformulation of the concepts of race and nationality. In a 1915 essay, “Nationality and Government”—one of the most important texts for analysing Zimmern's conception of depoliticized nationalities—he characterized “race” as a purely scientific category, one that was completely irrelevant to political debates about world order:
Race is an objective test, and no man can change his race any more than a leopard can change his spots. But this is not the same as to admit that there is such a thing as a Jewish or an Irish race. Race is an ethnological and anthropological term, and much confusion would be avoided if it were kept severely out of political discussions. The current scientific classification of race (homo Alpinus, homo Mediterraneus, etc.) has no bearing on questions of national or political consciousness, except to make it clear that political theories (like that of Houston Stewart Chamberlain) which base themselves on race differences are unscientific and worthless.Footnote 20
The postulation of race as an anthropological, apolitical entity was reaffirmed in “Nationalism and Internationalism” (1923), where Zimmern defied the conflation between race and nationality by arguing that “[n]one of the existing nations” corresponded to “the racial divisions and subdivisions of the anthropologists.” Races were inherently external to political order. The attempt “to enlist racial prejudice in the cause of nationalist intolerance”—those made by “anti-Semitic writers such as Houston Stewart Chamberlain in Germany and less doctrinaire and more frankly abusive writers in America”—sprang from “pure obscurantism.”Footnote 21
The repeated criticism of anti-Semite Aryan supremacist Houston Stewart Chamberlain indicates that Zimmern's apoliticization of race was closely linked with his Jewish identity.Footnote 22 Combating racially prejudicial visions, including anti-Semitism, he attempted to disqualify race as a constituent category of world ordering. Instead, he proposed “nation” as the basic ontological category of global order. In his view, because races were the purely anthropological divisions of humanity, their coexistence would naturally be achieved through the harmony between nations as politically meaningful ontological units.
DEPOLITICIZING NATIONALITY
In “Nationality and Government,” Zimmern depoliticized nation and nationality by sharply distinguishing the spheres of the state and national life. He conceived of nationality as a psychological and spiritual entity comprising its own distinctive space that was fundamentally independent of the state forming a political law-enforcing authority:
Nationality, like religion, is subjective; Statehood is objective. Nationality is psychological; Statehood is political. Nationality is a condition of mind; Statehood is a condition in law. Nationality is a spiritual possession; Statehood is an enforceable obligation. Nationality is a way of feeling, thinking and living; Statehood is a condition inseparable from all civilised ways of living.Footnote 23
These dichotomous characterizations stemmed from his postulation of nation and nationality as essentially culturally unified entities. He defined them as follows: “Nationality is a form of corporate consciousness of peculiar intensity, intimacy and dignity, related to a definite home-country. A nation is a body of people united by such a common consciousness.”Footnote 24 A crux of this definition lay in the association between nationality and “home country.” For Zimmern, a nationality (a “corporate consciousness uniting a nation”) emanated from the common possession of what he called “national spiritual heritage,” the cultural traditions of the nation that were originally created in its home country in the distant past.Footnote 25 Represented by “language,” “literature,” “drama,” “music” and “folklore,” these cultural traditions survived within the family and through teaching at school and university. They bound a nation by encompassing their inheritors with the sentiment of “warmth and concreteness”—“an atmosphere of precious memories, of vanished parents and friends, of old custom, of reverence [and] of home” as the links “between immemorial generations” constituting a nation.Footnote 26 Zimmern concluded that if “rightly regarded,” nationality was “not a political but an educational conception.” In essence, nationality was a collective spirit, inextricably associated with the individual's identity.Footnote 27 Since, for Zimmern, a nation was a body of people united by such a non-political spirit, it was also a depoliticized entity. He maintained that nation and state sovereignty were utterly incompatible. Nation was incongruous with the “theory of the Nation-State or of political nationalism.”Footnote 28
Importantly, though, Zimmern argued that the individual's embrace of national cultural traditions did not demand actual residency in the home country of the nation. It only required two psychological commitments. The embrace of national culture was, first, conditioned on remaining aware of one's own ethnic “roots,” traceable through one's familial line.Footnote 29 Second, it required maintaining a spiritual connection with the homeland of one's affiliated nation. “Every nation has a home,” Zimmern asserted, “though some nations, such as the Jews, the Irish, the Norwegians and the Poles, live for the greater part in exile.” “If the Jews ceased to feel a peculiar affection for Palestine or the Irish for Ireland they would both cease to be nations.”Footnote 30 In “Nationalism and Internationalism” Zimmern re-emphasized the second condition (spiritual allegiance to home country), arguing that “membership in a nation, participation in its common life and consciousness,” did not necessarily involve “residence within” its homeland, “or contact with it by visits or economic ties.”Footnote 31 For Zimmern a nation could survive no matter how widely its members were scattered. A nationality, stemming from adherence to national culture, depended only on psychological commitments. Moreover, a national consciousness would transcend “the barriers and ignore the qualifications fixed by political authority for the world of statehood.”Footnote 32
In sum, Zimmern's nation had three distinct characteristics. First, it was a depoliticized entity bound by a trans-statist national consciousness arising from the embrace of national cultural traditions. Second, Zimmern regarded the nation as a deterritorialized body. Its existence was not affected by sovereign and territorial boundaries. The essential conditions for gaining a national consciousness were solely psychological issues. Third, as a corollary, Zimmern's nation was individualistic in nature. Theoretically, the survival of a nation did not demand its members to live together in geographical proximity as long as they cherished its cultural traditions. Recent commentators on Zimmern's thought, as well as contemporary reviewers of Nationality and Government (1918), have discerned his attempt to depoliticize the nation and nationality. For example, Frank Trentmann points out that due to the dissociation of nation from state institutions, citizenship for Zimmern “could claim allegiance irrespective of national background.”Footnote 33 However, the deterritorialized and individualistic character that Zimmern attributed to the nation has rarely been recognized.Footnote 34
With this concept of depoliticized nation, Zimmern sought to undermine arguments congruous with colonial self-determination. He envisaged a “composite” Commonwealth, an empire “compacted of many nationalities united together by a common citizenship and a common law.”Footnote 35 Along with liberal historian Ramsey Muir's championing of colonial self-determination, Zimmern identified J. S. Mill's national-government thesis, formulated in Considerations on Representative Government (1861), as particularly inimical to his vision of multinational Commonwealth.Footnote 36 In chapter 16 of Considerations, Mill maintained that the realization of “free institutions” depended on the coincidence between “the boundaries of governments” and “those of nationalities.”Footnote 37 To Zimmern's mind, Mill's thesis, functioning as “a gospel” for liberal self-determination claimants, was a mere “anachronism.” It was “fundamentally wrong” in swimming against the modern progressive current in which “the Nation-State,” at present, simply represented “an outworn stage in the political evolution of mankind.”Footnote 38 Zimmern turned to British liberal Catholic Lord Acton, a critic of Mill's national-government thesis, for inspiration. While attacking the modern liberal theory of the nation state, Acton advocated the creation of an organic empire that incorporated “various distinct nationalities without oppressing them.”Footnote 39 Zimmern deemed Acton's theory of multinational empire a forerunner of his own “composite” Commonwealth. He proclaimed that despite some differences, a British Commonwealth could be an “expression . . . of Lord Acton's great principle of the State as a living body which lives through the organic union and free activity of its several national members.”Footnote 40
Zimmern's project of multinational Commonwealth also stemmed from his opposition to the perceived politicization of Kultur (culture) in imperial Germany. To his mind, World War I stood for “a war of ideas, a conflict between two different and irreconcilable conceptions of government, society, and progress.”Footnote 41 In this ideological warfare, Zimmern confronted Germany's “alliance” between “culture” and state authority. He arraigned Germany's enforcement of national homogenization on subjected peoples through the infliction of the single authorized “culture”—the “Prussianist,” statist cultural policy supported, in his view, by Treitschke, Nietzsche and philologist Ulrich von Wilamowitz-Moellendorff.Footnote 42 Opposing this statist policy, Zimmern regarded the British Commonwealth as a bulwark against the uniformalization of national cultures. He argued that the Commonwealth, under its scheme of “World-Law,” had a responsibility to ensure cultural (if not political) autonomy for various constituent nationalities, as well as such colonial peoples as the Indians and Egyptians.Footnote 43
Zimmern's aims in theorizing depoliticized nations were not limited to the preservation of the British Empire or resistance to the German doctrine of politicized “culture.” For him, the concept of depoliticized nation was also a device for defying prevalent racial visions that stigmatized certain minorities. Instead of racial order, Zimmern advanced global order based on the equality between nations, championing the “mutual tolerance, understanding and co-operation” among culturally integrated national groups.Footnote 44 This internationalist vision involved a deviation from the common tendency among fellow British liberal imperialists to conflate culture with race.Footnote 45 In Zimmern's scheme, the concept of culture was severed from race through the latter's apoliticization and attributed to nations and the alternative world order that they comprised.
However, a qualification needs to be added. While advocating internationalist order freed from races, Zimmern did not completely abstain from combining race and nation. As mentioned above, for Zimmern gaining a national consciousness demanded sustained awareness of one's own ethnic origins, embedded in one's familial lineage. To represent this ancestral element, he sometimes used the term “race.” In “True and False Nationalism” (1915) he argued that, besides a homeland, “the element of common race is perhaps the most important factor” behind the emergence of a nationality.Footnote 46 To implicate nation in familial descent (couched as “race”) suggests that, for Zimmern, the boundaries of a nation were delineated not simply by the cherishing of national culture, but by common blood. This kinship condition for national membership was an underlying, though not conspicuous, component of Zimmern's internationalist vision. The same condition also reflected his own Jewish identity, which underpinned his engagement with Zionism.
JEWISHNESS AND THE USE OF CULTURAL ZIONISM
Zimmern was born to a family of German Jewish descent living in Surbiton, Surrey. His grandparents had immigrated to England from Frankfurt, Germany, in the wake of the revolution of 1848.Footnote 47 Although of Jewish heritage, Zimmern neither grew up a practising Jew, nor actively learnt Judaic customs as an adult. His father, Adolph Zimmern, sought to assimilate into English culture by converting to Christianity and was admitted a member of the Church of England.Footnote 48 Adolph raised his son, Alfred, within the Protestant principles of his wife, Matilda Sophia Eckhard, who was of Huguenot ancestry. According to Paul Rich, because of this familial environment Alfred Zimmern adopted the Christian faith as a young student at Oxford (though William Temple's letter of 1917 indicates Zimmern's scepticism).Footnote 49 During the 1910s Zimmern constantly worked for British governmental bodies, including the Foreign Office. In this course, he identified himself as a British public intellectual involved in the governance of empire and the world.Footnote 50
However, Zimmern did not completely assimilate into the English milieu. He once told historian Arnold Toynbee that he embraced a certain level of Jewish consciousness. Due to this subtle Jewish identity, he had felt “a certain detachment” from English people in his youth.Footnote 51 When theorizing depoliticized nationalities during World War I, Zimmern also divulged his Jewish consciousness and ascribed this sensibility to “blood and cultural traditions” inherited from his paternal line:
I learnt to value Nationality, not from reading Mazzini's essays nor from sympathising with European Nationalist movements . . . but from realising, as I grew to manhood, that I was not an Englishman, and from my sense of the debt I owe to the heritage with which I am connected by blood and tradition . . . to have discovered that I was not an Englishman in the deeper side of my nature and that yet my opinions on public affairs corresponded with those of my fellow-citizens, and that my working life would be spent in England—this carried me beyond the facile philosophy held by the ordinary Englishman, that citizenship and nationality are co-extensive terms.Footnote 52
Zimmern retained dual identities. On the one hand, he was a public intellectual with allegiance to the British government. Yet on the other, he deemed himself a Jewish descendant internalizing Jewish cultural legacies. It was this Jewish sensibility that impelled his commitment to Zionism. As will be seen below, Zimmern visited Palestine in 1919. In an address following this travel, he avowed that although he was “not an orthodox Jew, or an orthodox Christian,” he embodied “Jewish national characteristics,” such as “the Talmud habit of mind, the Messianic outlook, and the capacity to appreciate Jewish humour.” It was these cultural attributes that made him a “Zionist.”Footnote 53
Zimmern began to study Zionism at turn-of-the-century Oxford. One of the catalysts was his close friendship with Leon Simon and Harry Sacher, two future eminent British Zionists and colleagues at the university.Footnote 54 Encouraged by Sacher, Zimmern attended the 1905 Seventh Zionist Congress held in Basle, Switzerland, in the capacity of a journalist for the New York City-based magazine Outlook.Footnote 55 It was at this congress that Zimmern first encountered Ahad Ha’am's work on cultural Zionism, which the British internationalist recalled in later years had influenced him “in steadily increasing measure, ever since.”Footnote 56 Following the congress, Zimmern published an article in Outlook to introduce Ahad Ha’am as “one of the most penetrating political thinkers” of the contemporary period.Footnote 57 In particular, he commended Ahad Ha’am's essay “Imitation and Assimilation” for presenting to Diaspora Jews a way to cultivate “a true Jewish patriotism.”Footnote 58
During the 1910s Zimmern was involved in the Zionist movement in Britain and America. He became acquainted with a number of its leading architects, including Chaim Weizmann, Felix Frankfurter and Louis Brandeis. Kallen acted as a mediator between Zimmern and Zionist leaders based in the United States.Footnote 59 During the Great War Zimmern aspired to the emancipation of Palestine from the Ottoman Empire and the creation of a Jewish community under the protection of the British government. In March 1917, when the British Army began to advance on Palestine, Zimmern wrote to his correspondent, American intellectual Walter Lippmann, with excitement:
I am hoping very much that a British protectorate will be established there and that the Zionist dream of making Palestine a real home land for the Jews will be fulfilled. The fact of having a Jewish community solidly established there will act as a mediating influence between the East and West, the Semite and the Aryan . . . India and Europe . . . I hope American Jews will appreciate the full importance of the vistas opened out (I am sure Brandeis does) and if things go as we expect the summer may see us in Jerusalem.Footnote 60
Zimmern's wish to visit Palestine was finally realized in June 1919, when Brandeis invited Zimmern to accompany him on a trip to the Land of Israel. A leading Progressive serving at the US Supreme Court, Brandeis was a devotee of Zimmern's work on Hellenic civilization, The Greek Commonwealth (1911).Footnote 61 He found in Zimmern's account of Pericles’ Athens a model political society for a Jewish Palestine, a just and democratic polity distinguished by patriotic citizenship as well as a robust concern for social welfare.Footnote 62 Zimmern, too, hoped for the cultivation of the spirit of civic republicanism as depicted in his own study of classical Athens. As noted above, following the travel to Canaan, he gave an address at the London office of the British Zionist Organization. At its beginning, he admitted that his trip had “enormously strengthened” his Zionist faith.Footnote 63 He then asserted the vital importance of modernizing the educational system in Palestine so that Jews in the land could develop the moral capacity to sacrifice private interest for the common good of their community. A university and publicly funded schools, he argued, as well as a civil association for adult learning, modelled on the Workers’ Educational Association in Britain, were “training grounds in political responsibility” for Palestinian Jews to become patriotic and dutiful citizens.Footnote 64
Yet Zimmern's support for Zionism did not indicate an ambition for creating an independent Jewish state in Palestine. Though equivocal in this respect, he appears to have espoused not a self-determining Jewish nation state, but a form of semi-autonomous Jewish community that could coexist with Arabs under a British mandate. His championing of the 1917 Balfour Declaration testifies to his non-statist approach to a Jewish Palestine. In “The Passing of Nationality” (1917) Zimmern advocated the declaration on two grounds. He defended it for stipulating the establishment of a “national home” in Palestine instead of a state.Footnote 65 He also championed it for proclaiming tolerance towards “existing non-Jewish communities” in the land. Highlighting this point, he exalted it even as “epoch-making, not only for the Jews but for the world.” By Zimmern's lights, the declaration prefigured his own ideal polity, a “supernational” Commonwealth on a global scale that upheld the coexistence between “a large number of national individualities.”Footnote 66 Moreover, for Zimmern these aspects of the Balfour Declaration reflected the cultural Zionism proselytized by Ahad Ha’am, “the great Jewish philosopher of nationalism.”Footnote 67
A Jewish intellectual from a town near Kiev, Ahad Ha’am rose to the forefront of the Zionist movement as a prominent critic at a branch of the Russian Zionist association (Hibbat Zion) in Odessa, a centre of the Modern Hebrew renaissance in Eastern Europe at the turn of the century.Footnote 68 As opposed to Theodor Herzl, who envisioned a secular liberal state of Jews with little grounding in Judaism, Ahad Ha’am postulated Judaic customs, as well as the common language and historical consciousness of Jewry, as the foundations of a future Hebrew state in Palestine. Relying on the potency of Jewish cultural traditions, Ahad Ha’am argued that a revitalized Hebrew culture could constitute a spiritual cornerstone for the national unification of all Jewry around the globe. He also claimed that this renewed culture could function as a bulwark for the Diaspora to maintain Jewish national identity against the pressures of assimilation in their countries of residence.Footnote 69
Ahad Ha’am wrote “Imitation and Assimilation” to show how Jews in exile could continue to identify with Jewish nationality against assimilative pressures.Footnote 70 He theorized two distinct consequences produced by the contact between national communities of different scales: “self-effacing imitation” and “competitive imitation.” Self-effacing imitation was an act to duplicate the culture of a dominant foreign nation. It represented the way towards assimilation. This type of imitation, Ahad Ha’am argued, undermined a “national or communal self-consciousness.” It gradually waned “until at last the community reache[d] an unnatural condition,” which was “neither life nor death.”Footnote 71 In contrast, competitive imitation was the means to “reveal its own spirit or personality” through the incorporation of some parts of the culture of a surrounding national society. Through competitive imitation, a minority group altered its original impress and carried itself “beyond the limits laid down by the predecessors.” Ahad Ha’am defined this self-transformative process as “internationalization.”Footnote 72 He also insisted that competitive imitation did not damage the national spirit embodied in an imitating community. Rather, it promoted “a strengthening” of the community's “national self-consciousness” through the renovation of its culture, the reinvigoration that accompanied the internalization of cultural attributes of other national groups.Footnote 73
Ahad Ha’am was convinced of the capacity of the Diaspora to develop Jewish national spirit through competitive imitation.Footnote 74 However, he was simultaneously worried about a paradoxical effect of this imitation. While the constant internalization of foreign cultural attributes was vital to the development of Jewish national spirit, it also involved the possibility of Diaspora communities failing to recognize each other as belonging to the same Jewish nation. This alienation might occur because competitive imitation inevitably entailed the proportional diminution of shared cultural foundations as the Diaspora amassed other nationalities’ cultural traits in their discrete milieux. To prevent estrangement among Jewry in exile, Ahad Ha’am highlighted the need to create a cultural centre in Palestine, “the basis,” in Steven Zipperstein's words, “for a rich and variegated modern national Jewish culture.”Footnote 75 Ahad Ha’am argued that such a cultural centre in the homeland would provide Diaspora communities with common cultural grounds and thereby underpin the national integration of all Jewry around the world. He insisted that while “[e]ach section will develop its own individuality along lines determined by imitation of its own surroundings,” the Palestinian cultural centre, “which will possess a strong attraction for all of them,” can thus stop Diaspora communities from alienating each other.Footnote 76
Accordingly, Ahad Ha’am aspired to the creation of cultural and educational institutions—including a library, museum, literary society, publishing house and academy (for theology as well as the sciences)—at the core of a Jewish community in the Land of Israel.Footnote 77 With these cultural institutions as a centripetal pull for dispersed Jews, competitive imitation would foster the middle ground between the menace of self-erasing assimilation on the one hand, and the loss of overarching national unity on the other. Steering this middle course, each Diaspora community would develop its distinct Jewish spirit through acculturation to neighbouring nationalities. For Ahad Ha’am, the cultural centre in Palestine did not have to be a self-determining state. The creation of an independent Jewish state would only be the climax of the complete revitalization of the spirit of Hebraism both in the homeland and throughout the Diaspora.Footnote 78 His non-statist Zionism also led him to advocate the peaceful coexistence of Jews with Palestinian Arabs. Recognizing Canaan as an object of rival but equally valid claims by the two peoples, Ahad Ha’am proposed in 1920 a binational Jewish–Arab confederation to succeed the British Mandate.Footnote 79
In early 1914 Zimmern personally met Ahad Ha’am, who lived in London at the time. This long-awaited opportunity made him feel a certain distance from the East European Jewish mentor. In a letter Zimmern wrote to Kallen after the meeting, he praised Ahad Ha’am as “the real Jewish intellectual” and reported that he had been at home with this mentor.Footnote 80 Nevertheless, he then confessed that he had been at variance with Ahad Ha’am on Judaism. As mentioned above, Zimmern was detached from Judaic customs. He told Kallen his concern that his Jewish secularism might have given a negative impression to his mentor: “I fear I was the Oxford man to him.”Footnote 81
Despite this difference, Ahad Ha’am's scheme of cultural Zionism continued to attract the British internationalist. In the aftermath of World War I, when Zimmern wrote a foreword to Leon Simon's book on Hebraism and Zionism, he described himself as a “grateful disciple” of Ahad Ha’am.Footnote 82 Zimmern's penchant for cultural Zionism was also famous among Jewish intellectuals around him. At the 1919 address, Samuel Landman, a well-known British Zionist, introduced him by stating that “most of us” knew that “Professor Zimmern ha[d] been interested in a Jewish Palestine” in relation to the programme “of Achad Haam.”Footnote 83 Brandeis also viewed Zimmern as a pupil of the East European cultural Zionist.Footnote 84
Zimmern's arguments about Palestine were not extensive. Still, those arguments displayed the influence of Ahad Ha’am, although, reflecting Zimmern's own Jewish secularism, they elided Judaism. He argued that establishing “national Jewish consciousness in the rising generation” relied on the vigorous promotion of education and culture in Palestine. This promotion would come through “libraries, a revival of the drama, philosophical societies or other things of that kind.” Mirroring his mentor's notion of a cultural centre, he also asserted that such enterprises in the homeland would “serve as a link between Jews in Palestine and Jews outside.”Footnote 85 Elsewhere Zimmern admitted that he was involved in “Zionism and making Palestine a real homeland” because he aimed to “deepen and dignify” a common national identity among globally scattered Jews rather than establish a sovereign state in Canaan.Footnote 86
The influence of Ahad Ha’am's scheme was not limited to how he envisaged a Jewish Palestine. Zimmern regarded it as a template for conceptualizing depoliticized nations and an internationalist global order as an alternative to racial visions. As discussed above, for Zimmern a nation depended on the maintenance of spiritual allegiance to its home country, conceived as the cradle of its cultural traditions. This notion of home country as a spiritual centre drew on Ahad Ha’am's concept of Jewish homeland as the cultural locus of the global Jewish Diaspora. Though with some adjustments, Zimmern applied the cultural-Zionist concept to non-Jewish nations:Footnote 87
A nation, like an individual, cannot lead a normal and happy life unless it has a home of its own, unless there is some place where there is an intimate national atmosphere, where the fire, which is its soul, is kept burning at a central shrine. The modern world is a world of super-states, of constant movement and migration . . . so long as the members of [a nation] in exile know that the tradition is being maintained somewhere . . . and that they can always refresh their spirit at the fountain-head, the soul of the true nationalist is satisfied.Footnote 88
Morefield argues that Zimmern's idea of depoliticized nation stemmed from his indebtedness to British Hegelianism. Like Bernard Bosanquet, he conceived of the nation as a “spiritual” entity constituting, like the family, “a privileged site” in the dialectical development of Spirit.Footnote 89 For Zimmern the impact of British Hegelianism would be compatible with that of cultural Zionism. Both traditions grounded national unity in the internal revelation of spirit—in the case of Ahad Ha’am, the spirit embedded in renewed Hebrew culture. However, Zimmern's concept of home country as the spiritual hub of deterritorialized, global nationhood cannot be drawn from the tradition of British idealism. Ahad Ha’am's Zionist theory appears to have been a closer and more direct influence on his conception of nation and nationality.
His internationalist vision was also derived from Ahad Ha’am's arguments. Internationalist order was marked by the cooperation between depoliticized, culturally unified nations based on equality and mutual tolerance. This international association reflected Ahad Ha’am's idea of competitive imitation. Zimmern maintained that the cooperation between nations was characterized by the process of acculturation involving the “constant reinterpretation” of their own cultural legacies. Nations revitalized their consciousness through this reinterpretation, which demanded “an insight into the inner spiritual life” of each other. National groups practising “hideous mimicry” rather than acculturation were subjected to “decadence and the complete eclipse of personality.”Footnote 90 In “Nationalism and Internationalism” he reformulated such mutually enlivening cultural interaction as “true internationalism”:
internationalism, properly understood, is not contact between states; nor is it contact between super-nationalists and cosmopolitans who have torn themselves loose from affiliation with their nation . . . True internationalism is contact between nations in their highest and best and most distinctive representatives and manifestations. The true contact between the West European national triangle . . . must be a contact, so to speak, between Shakespeare, Molière and Goethe.Footnote 91
Zimmern's notion of internationalist order was thus grounded on the combination of the two apparently paradoxical practices of nations—developing their own spiritual autonomy while engaging and integrating with neighbouring national groups. Moreover, such national autonomy was subtly implicated in kinship. Mirroring the sources of his own Jewish identity (“blood” as well as cultural traditions), Zimmern suggested common descent as a parameter of national collectivity. In an important 1915 essay Kallen asserted that nobody could “change his grandfather.” “[A]round him in space” and “tremendously in him in quality” were “his ancestors, relatives and kin.” All of these constituted “his, literally, natio.”Footnote 92 Zimmern identified a “truth” in this argument of his friend’s.Footnote 93 For him the boundaries between nations were potentially fixed by the criterion of common ancestry even when they dynamically engaged with and culturally percolated through each other.
A TRANSATLANTIC RESONANCE
Besides commitment to the RT campaign, as well as to Acton's ideas, the exchange with Kallen helped Zimmern to consolidate his scheme of a British Commonwealth, particularly his notion of multinationalism as its basic character. Across the Atlantic, these two thinkers had much in common. In origin, both were of Jewish lineage associated with Germany.Footnote 94 Both advocated liberal socialist reforms to eliminate the perceived mischiefs of industrial capitalism. Both stressed the importance of adult education for individual labourers to cultivate public consciousness.Footnote 95 The dialogue between them belonged to an era when, in Daniel Rodgers's words, “the role of human agency” and “the socially constructed nature of market capitalism” were increasingly recognized on both sides of the Atlantic.Footnote 96
Kallen also adopted Ahad Ha’am's account of competitive imitation, although he deviated from Zimmern in aiming for the creation of a Jewish sovereign state in Palestine. With the idea of competitive imitation, he sought to devise a way for Jews in the United States to assert national identity while intermingling with encircling ethnonational groups to avoid alienation as permanent outsiders.Footnote 97 Moreover, Kallen applied the philosophical pluralism of William James—and its emphasis on the reality of many-ness—to champion the equal rights of Jewish people as one among many ethnonationalities comprising US civil society.Footnote 98 In the process, he made a case for the harmony of diverse ethnonational cultures and formulated the concept of American cultural pluralism—the concept often regarded as pioneering in defending minority rights.Footnote 99 It was this pluralist vision of the United States that impacted on Zimmern in conceiving the British Empire as multinational and multicultural in character.
Kallen's fame derived not only from his contribution to American Zionism, but also from his criticism of the notion of melting pot in the 1910s. The term melting pot was first popularized by London-based Jewish dramatist Israel Zangwill. In 1908 Zangwill wrote a play, The Melting Pot, in which the hero proclaims that “America is God's Crucible, the great Melting Pot where all the races of Europe are melting and reforming!” The “real American . . . will be the fusion of all races, the coming superman.”Footnote 100 But the meaning of the melting pot shifted during the next two decades, changing from a crucible gladly accepting numerous kinds of ethnonationality to a cauldron which aimed at incinerating the impurities of immigrants and compelling conformity to the Anglo-Saxon cultural norms and racial purity.Footnote 101 With a Jewish and German background, Kallen clearly perceived this tide—the intensifying pressures of assimilation to the Anglo-Saxon cultural traits in the name of Americanization. In a prominent essay, “Democracy versus the Melting-Pot,” published in The Nation magazine in 1915, he asserted that “[m]ore and more public emphasis has been placed upon the unity of the English and American stock—the common interests of the ‘Anglo-Saxon’ nation, and of ‘Anglo-Saxon’ civilization.” European immigrants are forced to become “a new ‘American race’” by acceding to “the political, literary, and social tradition . . . of the contemporary American of British ancestry.”Footnote 102 Kallen rejected equating the combination of melting pot and Anglo-Saxonization with Americanization and sought to redefine what “America” stood for. He argued that the essence of “America” lay not in a particular ethnonational culture, such as of the Anglo-Saxons, but in legal, economic and political “institutions” that served as background conditions for “the rise of the cultural consciousness” of various ethnonationalities—like the “Irishman, German, Scandinavian, Jew, Pole, or Bohemian.” “Americanization,” that is, to enjoy American citizenship, did not “repress” but “liberate” one's nationality.Footnote 103
Kallen upheld the thriving of diverse ethnonational cultures within American institutions in the terms habitually used by Zimmern, maintaining that the United States had to evolve into “a great republic consisting of a federation or commonwealth of nationalities.”Footnote 104 He also argued that this American republic/commonwealth was a site for the “dissimilation,” as well as the integration, between constituent ethnonationalities through the process of international acculturation.Footnote 105 He compared American multi-ethnoculturalism, involving growing differentiation and congruence at once, to music:
“American civilization” may come to mean the perfection of the coöperative harmonies of “European civilization,” the waste, the squalor, and the distress of Europe being eliminated—a multiplicity in a unity, an orchestration of mankind . . . each ethnic group is the natural instrument, its spirit and culture are its theme and melody, and the harmony and dissonances and discords of them all make the symphony of civilization, with this difference.Footnote 106
After World War I, when Kallen included “Democracy versus the Melting-Pot” in a book Culture and Democracy in the United States (1924), he depicted this organic unity of multiple ethnonationalities as “cultural pluralism.”Footnote 107 In his thought, such a pluralist ideal was analogous to the objective of Zionism. He considered Zionism a project for restoring Jewish people to the European family of nations. The plural coexistence of ethnonationalities, including Jews, in the United States paralleled European “internationalism,” namely “a democratic and coöperative federation of nationalities” in the Old World, to which the Jewish nation stood a party.Footnote 108
Zimmern endorsed Kallen's argument against the concept of melting pot. Zimmern's letter suggests that during his visit to the United States in 1912, Kallen already perceived the growing fusion of the Anglo-Saxon culture and the concept in question. The British traveller wrote to Kallen that “I am grateful to you” for indicating “the absurdity of the melting pot idea.”Footnote 109 In his “Seven Months in America” itinerary, published in the Sociological Review in July 1912, Zimmern challenged the notion of melting pot, maintaining that it appeared to be functioning as an ideological tool for “Anglo-Saxon Americans” to demand assimilation to the “American nation” of their kind.Footnote 110 He developed this challenge in “True and False Nationalism” (1915). Drawing on Kallen's “Democracy versus the Melting-Pot” article, he declared it totally unreasonable to postulate that “the immigrant” needed to shed “his whole ancestral inheritance and fling himself into the melting-pot to emerge into a clean white American soul of the brand” approved by British ancestry. Echoing Kallen's redefinition of “America,” Zimmern also argued that “to become good Americans” did not mean accepting the cultural traits of the Anglo-Saxon race, but “appealing to Nationality” inscribed in oneself. A good American indicated a hyphenated American, such as a Polish-American or a Croatian-American, who embodied both “citizenship and nationality.”Footnote 111 Notably, Zimmern showed a critical attitude towards the black–white racial division in the United States, specifying “the Negro” as “one nationality” incarnating a venerable culture alongside European nationalities including “the German, the Norwegian, the Italian [and] the Polish.”Footnote 112
His concept of a British Commonwealth paralleled such a pluralist notion of America, shaped under the influence of Kallen. In 1914 Kallen informed Zimmern of his embryonic idea of cultural pluralism. In response, Zimmern wrote to him, “I begin to realize that I have been very unjust to America.” “I should never have expected it to be a Nation.” It has to be recognized as “a congeries of Nations inside a great Commonwealth, similar in scope and ideals to the British—not the United Kingdom, but the great Commonwealth which we call an Empire.”Footnote 113 Likewise, he proclaimed in “Education, Social and National” (1914) that “the United States with its negroes, its Asiatics, its Slavs, its Italians, its Jews, its Dutch, Irish, and Scandinavians, its Huguenots, Cavaliers, and Puritans, inextricably intermixed and knit together by the bonds, not of nationality but of Statehood,” forms the “epitome” of a British Commonwealth.Footnote 114 While Zimmern did not theorize an overarching federal government for the British Empire (as did Curtis), he conceived a system of common imperial citizenship under which the development of the cultures of multiple constituent nations could be guaranteed.Footnote 115 In particular, he stipulated “freedom of worship” as important part of imperial citizenship, safeguarded by the governments of the United Kingdom and the dominions in cooperation. By this freedom he meant not simply the freedom of religious belief but freedom to express any cultural form of national consciousness—be it, to quote his examples, using regional dialects, wearing a kilt, keeping Saturday instead of Sunday or educating children in a traditional way.Footnote 116 Granting “the largest possible freedom of conduct and worship in these and similar directions” would foster the spiritual independence of nations, as well as the cultural amalgamation between them, within the British Empire in a similar way that Kallen envisaged the United States.Footnote 117 In Zimmern's scheme, the Anglo-world (in Belich's use) was structurally homogeneous, “the British and American Commonwealths” both being predicated on multinational harmony.Footnote 118 In a review of Kallen's Culture and Democracy in the United States, he commended his friend's fully fledged concept of American cultural pluralism for embodying the “philosophy of inter-racial, or rather inter-national cooperation” that also characterized the multicultural British empire.Footnote 119
BEYOND ZIONISM
In the early 1920s Zimmern distanced himself from the Zionist movement. According to Pianko, the main reason lay in the reduction of diversity inside Zionism. At the time Zionist theorists increasingly converged on the recognition of homeland sovereignty as the culmination of Jewish nationalism. Consequently Zimmern, who admitted the separation between sovereignty and nationalism, felt marginalized.Footnote 120 In addition, his marriage with Lucy Barbier—whom Weizmann disliked as an anti-Zionist—in 1921 may have been a factor in his retreat from Zionist activities.Footnote 121 However, this withdrawal did not mean that Zimmern relinquished his Zionist-coloured political ideas. Rather, his notion of internationalist order, influenced by cultural Zionism, continued to inform his view of the British Empire and international organization.
The Third British Empire (1926) is a work based on his lecture series at Columbia University in 1925.Footnote 122 This book is best known for its idealization of a British Commonwealth as a model for international organizations, including the League of Nations.Footnote 123 But it can also be regarded as the culmination of the antiracist argument he had been making since the early 1910s. Expanding on the apoliticization of race in “Nationality and Government” (1915), Zimmern maintained that differences in skin colour were only “a secondary quality,” features covered simply by anthropological study. Racial ideologies, such as white supremacism, were a “survival of barbarism” in laying “so much stress on a mere external symbol.”Footnote 124 He insisted that a British Commonwealth was a place for the coexistence of different races, “a coloured empire” which endorsed the principle of racial equality.Footnote 125 The Commonwealth was thus not “an Anglo-centric Empire” based on the spread and inculcation of Anglo-Saxon cultural values as “universal” standards—a scheme embodied, by Zimmern's lights, in the Rhodes Scholarships.Footnote 126 He criticized such a scheme as “cultural imperialism.”Footnote 127 Likewise, the British Empire was not “a white empire” in which the whites vainly clung to dominance in an age of eastern revolt opened up by Japan's victory over a major white country, Russia, at the beginning of the century.Footnote 128
Restating his belief, Zimmern depicted the British Commonwealth not as a racial but as a “multi-national Empire” enabling harmony between diverse nations, including (though not exhaustively) the English, Scottish, Jews, Irish, Dutch, Germans, French-Canadians and Indians.Footnote 129 The Commonwealth guaranteed these nations not political but “cultural self-determination” in order to promote their “cross-fertilization” under equal partnership.Footnote 130 Cultural internationalism would structure the global British Empire in place of racial hierarchy. However, this does not mean that Zimmern was completely detached from discriminatory categorization. He suggested that peoples in tropical Africa, such as Nigeria, and the “Pacific Islanders” were culturally inferior and could not stand as spiritually independent nations. Despite having indicated the American Negro as a nationality, he thus signified such colonial natives under British rule—including blacks—as unfit for the internationalist order composed of more “advanced cultures.”Footnote 131 Instead of racial discrimination, Zimmern appears to have espoused another discriminatory space based on purported inequality in the level of cultural development. In championing a mandate for peoples of “backward” culture in the colonial world, his imperial scheme embodied what John M. Hobson calls “paternalist Eurocentric institutionalism.”Footnote 132
In the late 1920s Zimmern was committed to the League project of international intellectual cooperation, which, according to Akira Iriye, created a sense of borderless community made up of scholars and cultural elites around the world.Footnote 133 Learning and Leadership (1928) was Zimmern's manifesto, written when he was serving as deputy-director of the Institute for Intellectual Cooperation in Paris, a predecessor of the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO).Footnote 134 The aim he set for this League project was grounded in his notion of acculturation among nations. He argued that intellectual cooperation sought to cultivate “the international mind,” a distinctive moral personality necessary to shaping “educated public opinion” on world politics. Attaining this moral personality demanded the deep appreciation of “the meaning and value” of one's own “nationality.” Without this absorption, “no political opinion is of value.” Reaching the international mind, then, required constant interaction with people of different national backgrounds to comprehend the cultural attributes—“home,” “traditions” and “institutions”—of other nations.Footnote 135 Such a mind, embodying the power to grasp different national characters and “spirits” represented in cultural practices, was a qualification for “world citizenship”—the title ascribed to those who could shape world public opinion as the basis of a more democratic League.Footnote 136 As a corollary, Zimmern depicted intellectual cooperation as a practice opposite to “cosmopolitanism” or “dérachiné,” the terms he used interchangeably as pejorative labels for one's conditions aloof from one's proper national culture.Footnote 137 In accordance with this blueprint, Zimmern directed the League-associated Geneva School of International Studies during the interwar period to foster educational and cultural contact between promising young leaders from various national groups around the globe. Like many of his colleagues, his approach to intellectual cooperation was elitist and reflected Henri Bergson's 1922 declaration that “solidarity and harmony among people” could be achieved “more easily within the high intellectual spheres.” A democratic world would be facilitated “from this point forward.”Footnote 138
CONCLUSION
Zimmern's British imperial project was based on a transnational fusion of ideas. His account of empire incorporated Ahad Ha’am's cultural Zionism, as well as Kallen's notion of American ethnocultural pluralism. The racial conflict of the time provided a vital context for Zimmern's conception of a multinational Commonwealth. Against prevalent schemes for a global racial hierarchy, he theorized depoliticized nations as the fundamental units of world order and structured a British Commonwealth on the symbiotic cultural interaction between such national entities. During the interwar years, Zimmern played an influential role in fostering IR study in Britain as well as continental Europe.Footnote 139 The course of Zimmern's intellectual career symbolized IR's origins in imperialism and colonial governance. However, his attempt to expel race from visions of global order suggests that he was detached from the racist commitment of early IR.
