Cosmopolitanism in Conflict by Dina Gusejnova

Author:Dina Gusejnova
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan UK, London

The other important feature of British debates during (as well as following) the Great War, that Zimmern’s comments discussed above exemplify, is the disagreements about the scope and the speed of international organization . Zimmern was clearly sceptical about any proposals for ‘world-government ’ because he saw them as bound to sacrifice the liberty he valued in Britain if the British were to be absorbed in a supra-national organization where it would be outvoted by the representatives of other numerous nations or states who valued liberty much less. He had a rigid conception of sovereignty and insisted that a state either was fully sovereign or was not a state . We already saw who the main target of Zimmern’s criticisms in 1915 was. And that is not surprising, given how his target has been described by a later historian: ‘Hobson…was a maximiser. For him a League of Nations was the first step towards a world federation, which would alone wield enough power to guarantee peace.’19 Hobson believed that ‘nothing short of a representative international government , involving a definite diminution of sovereign rights of the separate states will suffice’.20 Hobson was joined by people such as H. N. Brailsford and—up to a point—L. T. Hobhouse .21 On the other side, there were thinkers such as Leonard Woolf and Goldsworthy Lowes Dickinson , with whom Zimmern was much closer, though not identified.22 Though most liberal internationalists were in agreement soon after the outbreak of the Great War on the need for the establishment of an international organization charged with the task of preventing war, they differed on the extent of that organization’s powers as well as on whether it was the moral or the institutional aspects that had to take priority.23 Woolf and Dickinson were almost as reluctant as Zimmern to accept anything approaching world-government . In a review of Hobson’s Towards International Government , Woolf took issue with Hobson’s proposals for international machinery: ‘Machinery cannot create mind. … The only way to build is from the bottom, whether you are building a house or a democracy. And so it is no good in international affairs beginning with your supreme International Council.’24 In his own more modest proposal, in the Fabian-commissioned and influential International Government (published in July 1916), Woolf advocated an international authority that would establish international arbitration and argued that the already existing institutions of international cooperation, many of them voluntary, offered a platform on which to build such an authority.25 No wonder that Lord Robert Cecil, who ‘incorporated virtually the whole of Woolf’s ideas into the British Draft Covenant which he gave to Woodrow Wilson in Paris’ in 1919, also ‘gave Leonard—privately—a cogent criticism of International Government . …it seemed to Cecil that a lot of what Leonard advocated had more to do with international cooperation than with international government ’.26 No surprise either that the British Draft that Lord Robert brought with him to Paris (and which was in such agreement with Woolf’s moderate proposals) had been drafted by Alfred Zimmern .

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