Abstract
There is no shortage of historical literature on internationalism being published these days. Indeed, internationalism and internationalists are at the centre of several modern classics within the field of international history since the 2010s. On the back of the transnational turn in history, with its focus on objects, ideas, and people across borders, the renewed interest in internationalism saw a significant shift in focus. The dominant narrative hitherto had been that internationalism was liberal, benign, toothless, and going on somewhere in the cosmopolitan stratosphere. Yet Glenda Sluga's work has shown that internationalism and nationalism were mutually constitutive and equally important phenomena of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Equally important, Mark Mazower has brought out the power that lay in the ability to shape and organize the international sphere across the same centuries. Meanwhile, Patricia Clavin and Susan Pedersen have explored the palette of internationalism operating in the midst of the League of Nations, the first global intergovernmental organization, and their formative effects on the postwar order.
Internationalists in European History situates itself in this historiographical field and springs out of the four-year collaborative research project ‘The Reluctant Internationalists’ (2013–17/18), headed by Jessica Reinisch, who is also one of the book's editors. Reinisch has been at the forefront of dismantling the myth that internationalism was inherently benign and monochrome. The 2016 special issue of Contemporary European History, ‘Agents of Internationalism’ in which she edited, set the course, expanding the historians’ gaze to take Nazis, fascists, neoliberals, conservatives, imperialists, religious denominations, and technocrats into the internationalist fold. David Brydan – Reinisch's co-editor – is indicative of this expansion, as his work focuses on fascist, conservative, and religious movements, and particularly (more recently) Catholic internationalism in the postwar era.
A second important agenda evident in Brydan and Reinisch's previous work and projects also enlivens this volume: an interest in internationalists, the complex, multidirectional, and often frustrated agency of internationalist actors. Studying internationalism ‘from below’, as the volume intends, means appreciating the ‘ubiquity and heterogeneity of internationalist endeavours’ and paying ‘close attention to how people have been “doing internationalism”’ (p. 7). If done well – as in this volume – such an approach is the perfect vehicle to challenge, transcend and connect the neat categorizations that can dominate studies of internationalism on a larger scale.
The volume also seeks to reintroduce a focus on Europe and Europeans in the history of internationalism. To the editors, the thrust to overcome stale Eurocentrism has also meant that Europe's ‘own diversity of ideas and change over time, as well as the knowledge that important debates about internationalism originated in non-Anglophone parts of the continent’ (p. 10) have been lost in the process. Both the selection of empirical cases and the fact that the volume ends with an agenda-setting afterword from one of the leading connectors of European (integration) history and international history, Kiran Klaus Patel, underscores this aim.
The volume is divided into four parts: Communication and infrastructure; Local encounters; Internationalism as activism; and Europe in a global context. The first three parts have four chapters each, while the last part only has two. The first part – Communication and infrastructure – is perhaps the most coherent one, questioning the ‘mechanics’ and/or ‘software’ of internationalism and international cooperation. This is a worthwhile endeavour: Brigid O’Keeffe's chapter on Esperanto and the language politics of internationalism in revolutionary Russia commences a red thread throughout this part: the complicated and fraught nature of communicating to a diverse audience and across borders. In its early years, the Communist International quite literally could not get its message across to Anglophone devotees. Other contributions here also show the inherent power relations and hierarchies baked into the ‘software’. Heidi Tworek's chapter on telegraphic language dives into details of coding to show the growing hegemony of certain Western languages over others, while Valeska Huber displays the imperial undercurrent of ‘basic English’ as a potential universal language. We are reminded that even the infrastructure of internationalism was loaded with values.
The two middle parts – Local encounters and Internationalism as activism – are equally absorbing in their rich detail and ability to capture tensions between competing and overlapping internationalism, often through the lens of one or a few persons or a specific body. Sławomir Łotysz's chapter on local experts, UNRRA and the building of the first Czechoslovak penicillin factory in the late 1940s convincingly makes the case for investigating local engagement, personnel, and knowledge as crucial components for how technocratic (or other) internationalism(s) works on the ground. Kristy Ironside's chapter about American progressive writers and their struggle for royalties from the Soviet Union in the mid-to-late 1950s is a fascinating study of unreturned ‘internationalist love’ through the lens of the increasingly frustrated author Howard Fast. The last part both applies a global perspective to European imperial internationalism and provincializes Europe's role in developmental internationalism in the postwar era.
This reader is left wondering why, in a volume dedicated to internationalists in European history – the connections between internationalism and Europeanism – the international governmental and non-governmental organizations and the many European organizations are left almost completely unexplored. Grumbling about what could have been in the volume is, of course, unfair. Internationalists in European History offers a perspective on internationalism that is deeply under-appreciated: a focus on resistance, ambivalence, miscommunication, disconnects and destructive silences – both in the interwar and the Cold War era. The volume reminds us that ‘doing’ internationalism – particularly in the peripheries of Europe (see, for instance, Elidor Mëhili's chapter on Radio Tirana) – was anything but smooth sailing. Indeed, the constant need to overcome technical, ideological, and geographical hurdles demanded a rare combination of conviction and improvisation from this volume's protagonists. A focus on this – from below – is very welcome.