Transnationalism, internationalism

The travel of Marcel Willard for the MOPR in Soviet Union in 1934.

Après un premier voyage à titre personnel en 1933, l’avocat Marcel Willard, auréolé du prestige lié à son action en faveur de la libération de Dimitrov, effectue un deuxième séjour en URSS durant l’été et l’automne 1934. Il est alors invité par le MOPR (Association internationale d’entraide aux révolutionnaires). Ce voyage qui conforte ses convictions communistes est aussi pour lui une manière d’agir en faveur de la solidarité internationale, en Finlande tout d’abord, puis en URSS. Il devient en effet un propagandiste du MOPR au sein de l’Union soviétique, préparant aussi son retour en France. Enfin, ce voyage, assez typique de ceux des intellectuels philosoviétiques de l’époque, est pour lui l’occasion de mettre en place un réseau de contacts soviétiques et antifascistes, renforçant ainsi les réseaux de solidarité internationale au service du Komintern et de l’URSS.

CONFERENCE "The Church-State relations in the European Colonial Empires (18th-20th centuries)"
5, 6 and 7 October 2017 , Leuven University

This paper focuses on the ways in which interrelated forms of political and religious – catholic and protestant – internationalisms involved with European colonial empires since the late nineteenth-century, until the decade after the Paris Peace Conference. Taking the Berlin and the Brussels Conferences (1884-1885 and 1889-1890) as starting points, this paper will evaluate the consolidation of religious internationalisms – that is, the ideas and the activities of transnational and supranational religious organizations that engaged with international issues –  and assess the ways in which they interacted with types of political internationalism and participated actively in the debates about the modi operandi of the European colonial empires. Religious internationalisms played a vigorous role in the internationalisation (and trans-nationalisation) of imperial and colonial affairs.
In order to demonstrate how and why, this paper will explore these issues in three pivotal historical moments and processes. First, the debates over the new imperialism in the 1880s, namely on issues such as the role of missions in imperial projects or the question of slavery and its proclaimed abolition. Second, the two international scandals of the 1900s, the Congo humanitarian atrocities and the slave cacao case in São Tomé and Principe. Third, the debates over slavery and colonial labour at the League of Nations and at the International Labour Organization in the 1920s, where actors such as the International Missionary Council or the Union Catholique d’Études Internationales were particularly active, including in the tentative conditioning of international norms about missionary work in colonial situations. In this period, intense efforts to accommodate missionary strategies to international arrangements also occurred, both at the Protestant and the Catholic quarters. In the first case, with the creation of the abovementioned International Missionary Council; in the second, with the new missionary policies concocted by popes Benedict XV and Pius XI, inscribed in the Maximum Illud and Rerum Ecclesiae encyclical letters. In these historical observatories, this presentation will highlight the central role played by Catholic and protestant forms of religious internationalism, how they interacted with (geo)political dynamics and with imperial and colonial projects, namely with the definition of internationally regulated, politics and policies of mission in colonial contexts.

The paper will discuss the dynamics of the Soviet heritage policy as a reflection complex interplay between cultural elites of national republics, Soviet state and heritage international agencies. Based on the interviews with former key experts from the Soviet ICOMOS committee as well as other activists in conservation and heritage protection in the Soviet Union, the paper will discuss the specifics of heritage as an instrument of cultural power in the socialist system.

Cet article étudie la genèse du Bureau international de l’enseignement technique, fondé à Paris en 1931 et ses efforts pour constituer un savoir-faire technique destiné à façonner les politiques scolaires européennes. Dans le contexte de la Grande Dépression des années 1930, ce Bureau se configure comme une organisation d’experts dont l’objectif est de repenser la formation des futurs travailleurs. Ceci pour mieux l’adapter à la recomposition du tissu productif et contribuer ainsi au redressement des économies en crise. L’article interroge tout particulièrement les interactions entre ce réseau d’experts et le Bureau international du travail, le problème étant de savoir comment se structurent la collaboration et les échanges d’informations entre organisations et réseaux internationaux.

Education as a Field of International Action. The International Bureau of Technical Education in the 1930s

This article focuses on the International Bureau of Technical education, founded in Paris in 1931, and on its efforts to provide technical expertise in order to shape European educational policies. During the Great Depression of the 1930s, this Bureau acted as an organization of experts whose goal was to rethink the professional training of young people. The main challenge was to improve technical education in order to overcome the effects of the economic crisis. The article especially addresses the interaction between this network of experts and the International Labour Organization. From a methodological point of view, this sheds light on the collaboration and the exchanges of information between international networks and organizations.

“Christian Transnationalists, Nationhood, and the Construction of Civil Society,” in  Donald Yerxa, ed., Religion and Innovation: Antagonists or Partners?  London: Bloomsbury, 2016:141-156.

On the writing of national histories framed by engagement with Christian internationalism, by Inazo Nitobe, Silas Molema, and Phillip Hitti

Paper presented at 'Practicing Theory - ASCA International Workshop and Conference 2011', Amsterdam School for Cultural Analysis, University of Amsterdam, 2nd-4th March 2011 https://asca.uva.nl/programme/archive-conferences/asca-international-workshop-2011-practicing-theory/asca-international-workshop-2011-practicing-theory.html?1583659550967

This article draws on archival and oral historical sources  to provide the first longitudinal portrait of the complex relationship between MARS and CIAM up to the outbreak of the Second World War and, in the process, to interrogate aspects of the role of internationality – the state or condition of being international – during the early years of British architectural modernism. In doing so, it has four main sections. The first clarifies notions of internationality and their application when thinking about CIAM. The next considers the founding of MARS as CIAM’s British affiliate, examining the balance sought between nationality and internationality at a time of considerable political and cultural turbulence. The third part examines the stumbling path followed by MARS in its dealings with CIAM, ending by making use of newly available evidence to relocate the Group’s 1938 Plan for London within its international context. The concluding section reflects further on the significance of internationality, as mediated by its relationship with CIAM, for the MARS Group in its formative years.

This chapter analyses the position of the Perhimpoenan Indonesia, an Indonesian students’ association in the Netherlands in the interwar era which has been widely recognized as a trailblazing organization within the Indonesian political landscape, in relation to a few concepts from the work of Benedict Anderson. There has been an evolution in the thinking of Anderson, in which he replaced the strictly comparative framework of Imagined Communities with a global conception of nationalism in Under Three Flags, in which travelling ideas and intellectuals were of central importance. In this sense, expatriate communities such as the Indonesian students in the Perhimpoenan Indonesia were repositioned from being eccentric to the Indonesian political landscape to being in the centre of the international stage.

The aim of this paper is to provide an appreciation of the expatriate connectivity of Italian and the French citizens through their respective elections and how these two communities responded politically in their elections from Australia. Specifically, the paper will examine the cases of Italians in Australia voting in the 2013 Italian elections and equally that of French citizens in Australia voting in the French Presidential and the following Legislative Elections in 2017. It examines the voting patterns there might be between those voting in the home country (Italy and France) and those voting in external electoral colleges in this case the relevant Australian college. This paper shows that those living abroad, in this case Australia, provide different political choices and low voting participation compared to domestic districts as the transnational community can be influenced by the political context of their host country.

This paper maps the travel itineraries of several foreign “architects” of Caribbean and Latin American cultural modernity, identifying their direct or indirect relationship to international communist organizations such as the Communist International or Comintern (1919-1943) and its social networks. The presentation documents examples of the political, cultural, artistic, and cinematographic outcome of the dynamic interaction between the foreign and the native, the local and the international within the history of the Comintern and its legacy to Caribbean and Latin American culture. The essay provides examples of the significance of personal politics, radical ideology and the transnational experience in molding Caribbean visions of modernity and national identity, arguing in favor of their inclusion as components in the construction of cultural perspectives. The discussion focuses in the lives of several individuals connected to the Comintern radical network in the Caribbean and Latin America either directly or indirectly, providing examples of unexpected and sometimes, previously never revealed aspects of their lives and relationship to the agency and its regional affiliates.
WORK IN PROGRESS

This article examines the significance of the Free Trade Area of the Americas (FTAA) from the point of view of Brazilian workers in the hemispheric movement against the accord. This movement constituted a moment when workers positioned as competitors in the regional labour market attempted to organize in such a way as to confront the structural conditions of labour that have accompanied neoliberalism. It also illustrates the need for instruments of struggle that recognize both the particularity of Southern working class formation, and the interdependent relation between the well-being, wages and working conditions of workers in the Global North and South.

... Page 12. 438 / MANU BHAGAVAN The Indian Economic and Social History Review, 46, 3 (2009): 427–456 ... Nehru, 'Towards a World Community', Speech before the 11th Session of UN, 20 Dec. 1956, in Madhavan, India at the United Nations, pp. ...

"""India and the Quest for One World is the gripping story of India's quest to create a common destiny for all people across the world based on the concept of 'human rights'. In the years leading up to its independence from Great Britain, and more than a decade after, in a world torn asunder by unchecked colonial expansions and two world wars, Jawaharlal Nehru had a radical vision: bridging the ideological differences of the East and West, healing the growing rift between capitalist and communist, and creating 'One World' that would be free of empire, exploitation and war.

Madame Vijaya Lakshmi Pandit, Nehru's sister, would lead the fight in and through the United Nations to turn all this into a reality. An electric orator and outstanding diplomat, she travelled across continents speaking in the voice of the oppressed and garnering support for her cause. The aim was to lay the foundation for global governance that would check uncontrolled state power, address the question of minorities and migrant peoples, and put an end to endemic poverty. Mahatma Gandhi's legacy would go global. All that stood between the Indians and success was their own fallibility, diplomatic intrigue, and the blinding haze of mistrust and overwhelming fear engendered by the Cold War.

As Manu Bhagavan recounts the story of this quest, iconic figures are seen through new eyes as they challenge all of us to imagine a better future. Based on seven years of research, across three continents, this is the first truly international history of newly independent India."""

From the Palgrave Macmillan Foreword by Akira Iriye and Rana Mitter: "This book takes one of the best-known concepts in contemporary international society, the idea of 'human rights', and completely changes our understanding of how it emerged in the post-war era....  One of the most fascinating aspects of [India and the Quest for One World] is the way that it addresses the transnational aims of the series by linking the domestic and the supranational.... The history of human rights will never be the same again."

The series of revolutions across southern Europe which began in 1820 (Spain, then Piedmont and Naples, and lastly the wave of conspiracies in France) might provide grounds for believing in the existence of a revolutionary “Liberal International”. The idea of an international conspiracy of liberals began as a prominent theme in ultra-royalist propaganda but was also taken at face value by many police authorities around Europe; and two modern historians, José Luis Comellas Garcia-Llera and, later, Marion S. Miller, have argued for the existence of a liberal international not as a single well-defined organisation but as a set of close-knit relationships among liberals in the various European countries, especially those of southern Europe . We do indeed find exiled Italian revolutionaries being supported in Paris, London, Madrid and Barcelona by local liberal élites. Ideas and model constitutions also circulated from country to country, for instance from Spain to Italy, where the Spanish resistance to the Napoleonic Empire and to the absolutism of Ferdinand VII enjoyed high prestige . A “Holy Alliance of Peoples” to counter the Holy Alliance of monarchs was a powerful and stirring idea for liberals: French as well as Italian Carbonari formed a corps of volunteers to defend the Spanish constitutional regime in 1823 as the French army prepared to intervene in favour of the Bourbons of Spain. The presence of foreign volunteers on Spanish soil makes one ask whether there was an international activism, if not a fully-fledged International. More fundamentally, the proliferation of international contacts forging relationships to counter the Holy Alliance casts a new, transnational light on the underground opposition within France .

Introduction - Matthew S. Adams and Ruth Kinna

Part I: The interventionist debate

1 Saving the future: the roots of Malatesta's anti-militarism - Davide Turcato

2 The Manifesto of the Sixteen: Kropotkin's rejection of anti-war anarchism and his critique of the politics of peace - Peter Ryley

3 Malatesta and the war interventionist debate 1914-17: from the 'Red Week' to the Russian Revolutions - Carl Levy

Part II: Debates and divisions

4 Beyond the 'People's Community': the anarchist movement from fin de siècle to the First World War in Germany - Lucas Keller

5 'No man and no penny': F. Domela Nieuwenhuis, anti-militarism and the opportunities of World War One - Bert Altena

6 'The bomb plot of Zürich': Indian nationalism, Italian anarchism and the First World War - Ole Birk Laursen

7 The French anarchist movement and the First World War - Constance Bantman and
David Berry

8 At war with Empire: the anti-colonial roots of American anarchist debates during World War I - Kenyon Zimmer

Part III: The art of war: anti-militarism and revolution

9 The anarchist anti-conscription movement in the U.S. - Kathy E. Ferguson

10 Aestheticising revolution - Allan Antliff

11Mutualism in the trenches: anarchism, militarism and the lessons of the First World War - Matthew S. Adams
Index

This workshop brings together an international panel of researchers to explore the role of inter-nationalisms in shaping historical narratives and methodologies of academic discourses on scenic arts. The notion of nationalism will be assessed beyond the idea of nation building in order to highlight the concept of globalization at the turn the century, taking into account not only inscribed forms of knowledge, but also its performative dimension.
This event will be held at the Österreichische Gesellschaft für Musik, under the auspices of the Balzan Research Programme in Musicology “Towards a global history of music” in collaboration with the Institut für Musikwissenschaft of Universität Wien.

After the First World War, experts cooperated to build a better world. Within the international organization Congrès Internationaux d’Architecture Moderne (CIAM), architects aimed to improve society by creating efficient cities. While a common cause could dynamically unite a diverse array of experts, the organization’s goal of improving the world through technological progress for social ends would not withstand the test of reality.

This paper will examine Salcedo’s relationship to internationalism, especially as supported in Colombia by institutions such as the Museo de Arte Moderno de Bogotá and the Bienal de Arte Coltejer in Medellín. I argue that, particularly in cases of artists such as Salcedo, who so adroitly mined international artistic languages, it is impossible to approach Latin American art and its history without careful consideration of external points of contact. For many artists, the international art circuit—as established through museum and biennial exhibitions and specialized journals that were vehicles of art criticism—was an unavoidable frame of reference and a potentially powerful tool. Salcedo, among other artists, took advantage of the circuit whenever possible, presenting a kind of coded double-speak with works that flouted their international look while addressing specifically local concerns. Because local concerns are central to these works, however, approaching them through the lens of internationalism can only be a beginning; international terms, and especially international reception, can never sufficiently explain their potential meaning.

Clara Zetkin was once a renowned figure in the international working class movement; as a Marxist activist and theoretician she became an inspiration for men and women in their struggle against the dual enemies of imperialist war and capitalist oppression. She was dedicated to the Socialist cause and active throughout her adult life in the German Social Democratic Party, the Spartacist League and the German Communist Party. Zetkin was the comrade and friend of Rosa Luxemburg, Alexandra Kollontai and Lenin, but her memory has been eclipsed in recent decades. The founder of the Socialist Women's International but a fierce critic of what she saw as the shortcomings of bourgeois feminism, Zetkin interviewed Lenin on ‘The Woman Question’ and it was Zetkin who over a hundred years ago initiated the first ever International Women’s Day that continues to be celebrated to this day. So why is she now so little known in the English-speaking world? What is her abiding legacy and is there anything that can be learned from her career and example eighty years after her death? The contributors to this special SHS Occasional Publication devoted to Clara Zetkin seek to provide answers to these and other questions for a modern audience.

Post-Olympics reflections have been in full-flight. Yet the British left has managed to respond to a global event, and the opportunity for global empathy, with a remarkable display of inward-lookingness. The centre-left should recognise there’s life beyond its own borders.