Internationalism in the Age of Nationalism by Glenda Sluga

Author:Glenda Sluga
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: University of Pennsylvania Press

Chapter 4

What Is the International?

A quarter of a century after the apogee of internationalism, through a window of Cold War détente, the world took on a global hue. The viewers of American television, and its global affiliates, could watch Henry Kissinger, the period’s ubiquitous American statesman, speak of “an extraordinary opportunity to form for the first time in history a truly global society, carried by the principle of interdependence.”1 Readers of social scientific literature could find the same view corroborated by Harvard professors such as the political scientist Stanley Hoffmann, who tendered that a new language of internationalism was needed to describe the exercise of international power by “non-state actors,” “multinational companies, international organisations, and the like.”2 Since then, the historian Akira Iriye has recovered the 1970s as a decade that witnessed “a definite phase of globalization, a process that was to continue into the subsequent decades” and aided the emergence of “a genuine world community.”3 In the context of the longer history of twentieth-century internationalism, the conceptual materials of this new “global” era look remarkably familiar.

The 1970s were a curious combination of the old and the new, not least because of the simultaneous pull of the universal and particular, the international and national. Kissinger, for one, hedged his bets, warning that the seventies would be viewed in retrospect as either “a period of extraordinary creativity or a period when really the international order came apart, politically, economically and morally.”4 Daniel Moynihan became as convinced during a stint as ambassador to the UN that even if the talk was all global villages and spaceship earth, something closer to regression was taking place; the world was relapsing into a timeless mode of tribal fragmentation and strife.5 It was not only the foundations of empires that were vulnerable. The seventies saw Pakistan violently splinter to form Bangladesh, Cyprus sundered into a Turkish north and Greek south, and the Arab-Israeli conflict spread, taking as its emblematic hostage that cosmopolitan city, Beirut. There was no shortage of “peacekeeping” for the UN, as the organization now turned to the task of stabilizing the conflicts that continued to erupt across the globe and utilizing in new ways the international military force that had been dreamed of half a century earlier.

How we understand the seventies as a transformative decade depends on setting and perspective. While most studies of the period place events at the United Nations offstage, in this chapter I look at the international organization as a compelling theatre of competing narratives of a twentieth-century internationalism imagined in the language of a “truly global society,” and the fragmentation of existing states into smaller nations. The UN was the forum for economic claims so unprecedented that they profoundly troubled American diplomats while cheering the delegates of new postcolonial states. As a result, in the same decade that some historians argue a truly international human rights agenda was born, Western governments began to disown the international organization at the symbolic center of the modern experiment in institutional internationalism.

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