International History: A Cultural Approach 9781780938066, 9781780937281, 9781474204538, 9781780935850

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International History

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International History A Cultural Approach Akira Iriye and Petra Goedde

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BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC Bloomsbury Publishing Plc 50 Bedford Square, London, WC1B 3DP, UK 1385 Broadway, New York, NY 10018, USA 29 Earlsfort Terrace, Dublin 2, Ireland BLOOMSBURY, BLOOMSBURY ACADEMIC and the Diana logo are trademarks of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc First published in Great Britain 2022 Copyright © Akira Iriye and Petra Goedde, 2022 Akira Iriye and Petra Goedde have asserted their right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act, 1988, to be identified as Authors of this work. For legal purposes the Acknowledgements on p. viii constitute an extension of this copyright page. Cover images: (left to right, top to bottom) Engraving by Vicky (GB), Photo by Roger Viollet; Photo by Chip HIRES/Gamma-Rapho; Photo by Jeff J Mitchell; Photo by Universal History Archive/UIG - all via Getty Images All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers. Bloomsbury Publishing Plc does not have any control over, or responsibility for, any third-party websites referred to or in this book. All internet addresses given in this book were correct at the time of going to press. The author and publisher regret any inconvenience caused if addresses have changed or sites have ceased to exist, but can accept no responsibility for any such changes. A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Names: Iriye, Akira, author. | Goedde, Petra, 1964– author. Title: International history : a cultural approach / Akira Iriye and Petra Goedde. Description: London ; New York : Bloomsbury Academic, 2022. | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2021038577 (print) | LCCN 2021038578 (ebook) | ISBN 9781780937281 (paperback) | ISBN 9781780938066 (hardback) | ISBN 9781780935850 (pdf) | ISBN 9781780936307 (ebook) Subjects: LCSH: History, Modern–20th century. | History, Modern–19th century. | Cultural relations–History. | International relations–History. | International relations and culture. | International relations--Social aspects. Classification: LCC D421 .I75 2022 (print) | LCC D421 (ebook) | DDC 909.81—dc23 LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021038577 LC ebook record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2021038578 ISBN: HB: PB: ePDF: eBook:

978-1-7809-3806-6 978-1-7809-3728-1 978-1-7809-3585-0 978-1-7809-3630-7

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CONTENTS

List of Illustrations vii Acknowledgements viii List of Acronyms ix

Introduction: Culture and International Relations

Part One The Rise of the Modern

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1 The Dialectics of Nationalism and Internationalism 2 Cross-cultural Encounters 3 Imagined Communities

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4 Modern Consciousness

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Part Two Movement and Empire 5 Movements

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6 Imperial Cultures 7 Racial Formations

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8 Cultural Internationalism

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Part Three Global Cultures 9 Visions of Modernity

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CONTENTS

10 Modernity in Crisis 11 Cold War Cultures

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12 Challenging the Cold War Consensus

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Part Four Transnational Connections 13 Cultural Globalization, 1970–1990 14 The Growth of Non-State Actors 15 The Post-Cold War World 16 The World Today Conclusion

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Notes 295 Further Reading 301 Index 307

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ILLUSTRATIONS

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The HMS Beagle near the Straits of Magellan during Charles Darwin’s voyage around the world, 1831 to 1836 John Gast, “American Progress,” 1872. Oil painting on canvas Europe’s nineteenth-century colonization, the “Scramble for Africa” Puck Magazine: “School Begins.” Depictions of American colonization as an educational mission, 1899 Paris 1889 World’s Fair. Native Javanese were housed in a replica of an indigenous village and put on display for the duration of the exhibit Metropolis, poster, 1927. The movie depicted a dystopian vision of a futuristic urban society The League Against Imperialism’s Honorary Presidium and Executive Committee in 1929 Kwame Nkrumah, first prime minister of the newly independent Ghana, welcomed Louis and Lucille Armstrong on their African tour, 1956 A public health campaign against female genital mutilation (FGM) in Uganda, September 2004 Germans celebrating the fall of the Berlin Wall, November 12, 1989 A demonstrator in Tahrir Square, Cairo, during the Egyptian uprising uses her cell phone to record the protest, January 2011

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ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This book emerged out of our shared interest in reframing the history of international relations around the theme of cultural interactions. We had written about culture and power, internationalism, transnational civil society, and cultural globalization, yet neither of us had attempted a comprehensive history of international relations with a cultural approach at its core. This volume is the result of our combined research and experience in the field, and it has been an adventure and a privilege to embark on this project together. We would like to thank the people and institutions who have helped bring this project to fruition. They are first and foremost our respective institutions, Harvard University and Temple University. Temple has granted a summer research stipend as well as a semester long sabbatical leave. The Roosevelt Institute for American Studies in Middelburg, Netherlands, offered a welcoming environment in the very last stage of this project. Our colleagues in the field as well as in our own departments served as important sounding-boards for our ideas. They are too numerous to list here, but we need to single out one, Richard Immerman, who has read the manuscript in its entirety, has given freely of his time, and has offered invaluable suggestions and advice, as always. We are also grateful for the support of two remarkable research assistants at Temple University, Stanley Gibson Schwartz and Noor Abdelkader. Without their indefatigable dedication and hard work we would have missed many more deadlines. Our editors at Bloomsbury, Maddie Holder and Abigail Lane, have shown remarkable patience for all those times—too numerous to count—when we did miss deadlines. We also want to thank our families for their unwavering support over the years. Throughout the book we have used footnotes only sparingly, primarily to allow readers to trace direct quotes in the text. It is not meant to obscure the vast trove of remarkable work written by our colleagues in the field over the past decades. The list of further readings at the end of the volume offers a glimpse of the breadth and depth of the scholarship, and it is by no means a complete list. Without these scholars’ commitment to researching and writing international history from a cultural perspective, we would not have been able to write this book. It is to them, therefore, we owe the biggest debt and heartfelt gratitude.

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ACRONYMS

AFSC

American Friends Services Committee

APU

African Progress Union

ASEAN

Association of Southeast Asian Nations

CCF

Congress for Cultural Freedom

CIT

Central Institute of Labor

CND

British Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament

CND

United Nations Commission on Narcotics Drugs

CPP

Convention People’s Party

DACA

Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals

DWB

Doctors without Borders

EC

European Community

ECHR

European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms

EEC

European Economic Community

EPA

Environmental Protection Agency

FGM

Female Genital Mutilation

FIFA

Fédération Internationale de Football Association

GATT

General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade

IACHR

Inter-American Commission on Human Rights

ICRC

International Committee of the Red Cross

ICT

International Criminal Tribunal

ICTR

International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda

ICTY

International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia

ICW

International Council of Women

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ACRONYMS

IGA

International Gay Association

IMF

International Monetary Fund

INGOs

International Non-Governmental Organizations

IWSA

International Woman Suffrage Alliance

LAFTA

Latin American Free Trade Association

LGBTQ

Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender, and Queer

NAACP

National Association for the Advancement of Colored People

NAFTA

North American Free Trade Agreement

NGO

Non-Governmental Organization

NIEO

New International Economic Order

NLF

Algerian National Liberation Front

NSDAP

National Socialist Workers’ Party

NWSA

National Women’s Suffrage Association

OAS

Organization of American States

OFF

Office of Facts and Figures

OPEC

Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries

OWI

Office of War Information

PNF

Partito Nazionale Fascista (Italian National Fascist Party)

PSB

Psychological Strategy Board

RAF

Red Army Faction

SANE

American Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy

SDS

Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund (Germany)

SDS

Students for a Democratic Society (USA)

UGCC

United Gold Coast Convention

UN

United Nations

UDHR

Universal Declaration of Human Rights

UNEP

United Nations Environmental Program

UNESCO

United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization

UNFDAC

United Nations Fund for Drug Abuse Control

ACRONYMS

USIA

United States Information Agency

VOA

Voice of America

WCTU

Women’s Christian Temperance Movement

WILPF

Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom

WPC

World Peace Council

WTO

World Trade Organization

YWCA

Young Women’s Christian Association

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Introduction: Culture and International Relations

The history of international relations emerged as a field of study alongside the rise of nation-states in the nineteenth century. It has thus been shaped to a significant extent by the rivalry and competition among nations, whether actual or potential. Generations of historians have defined nations in terms of their military and economic power and analyzed international relations in the modern era as consisting of competition and conflict among them, each pursuing its own national interests and, occasionally, seeking to contain the power of others that appeared to pose a threat to those national interests. Thus the study of international relations has fundamentally revolved around relations of power as defined by and through states, including efforts among dominant powers to maintain a balance among them, augment their own relative power, and forge or dissolve alliances. Decision-making became a key focus of historians’ research as they sought to understand who made decisions and how, what informed national policies, and what the consequences of those decisions were not only for the particular country but also for the entire world. The historical agents in these narratives of international relations were mostly white male elites, who wielded political and economic power within their domestic state apparatus, and interacted with mostly white male elites in other nations as they forged alliances, waged war, and negotiated treaties. This approach, with geopolitics at the center of international relations, dominated the writing of international history for a long time. The revisionist approach that emerged in the 1960s did not significantly diminish its powerful grip on scholarship in the field. Even today, most general surveys and popular monographs on international relations focus on nations, boundaries, and diplomacy. Power is conceived in geopolitical terms, and so international relations are fundamentally a matter of geopolitical equations. Thus conceptualized, the study of international relations remains fundamentally an exercise in geopolitical analysis. 1

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Culture generally receives marginal, if any, attention in such histories. Despite a growing body of literature on the cultural dimension of international relations, scholars have yet to integrate that scholarship fully into general surveys of international history. There are several reasons for this omission. First, culture does not fit easily into an international framework of military, political, or economic power relations. There is no cultural equivalent of a balance of power, nor does culture bestow power on nationstates. Even when historians did acknowledge a phenomenon such as cultural power, they could not easily locate that power in international relations. Besides, it is much easier to define what makes a great power than a great culture. Second, unlike geopolitical decisions, which are made by political actors and state representatives, cultural affairs usually belong to the domain of non-governmental organizations and private individuals. To be sure, a state can and will lend its institutions to the preservation and proliferation of what it regards as the dominant culture within its boundaries. It does so through the funding of educational institutions, museums, theaters, and music venues. But its national archives usually preserve only the papers, actions, treaties, and memoranda of state political actors. Unless they operate in the service of the state, which many of them do not, cultural actors in national and international affairs often remain hidden from the gaze of historical researchers. Third, whereas power is generally measured within the confines of a particular country and in comparison to other countries, culture rarely adheres neatly to national boundaries. It operates both below and above the level of the nation-state. On the local and transnational level, cultural boundaries are fluid and various sub-cultures constantly vie for dominance. Local cultures can wield power in one environment and be subaltern or diasporic in another. Furthermore, with the advent of new technologies of communication in the late twentieth century, cultures, which are marginalized in some parts of the world, have been able to create virtual cultural communities that have gained in strength and visibility because of their transnational connectivity. Lastly, scholars of transnational cultural history have not consistently explored the overlap between culture and power politics. Studies about the cultural dimension of transnational relations or the transnational dimension of cultural history have intrinsic value and have made important contributions to scholarship on those terms. Yet studies that do not directly engage with questions of power and geopolitics have made it easier for scholars of international relations to continue to ignore the cultural perspective. Cultural historians rightly focus on context more than causation. They analyze meaning rather than decision-making. Their efforts to give voice to the powerless, to sub-cultures, and to marginalized groups, including women and minorities, have prompted some traditional historians to dismiss their findings as irrelevant to the big questions of power, national security,

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and national interest. Cultural historians frequently encountered criticism that culture was but a side show to what “really” happened, and reality in the eyes of geopolitical and realist historians was determined by power and politics, not by culture and rhetoric. What geopolitical historians often failed to understand was that this focus on culture, on the voices of the powerless, on marginalized communities, is absolutely central to questions of power politics. Culture is not merely a reflection of an external, measurable, geopolitical reality. It helps produce that reality by revealing the deeper non-rational, emotional, ideological, and moral foundations at the root of every decision-maker’s worldview. Rather than one of several variables in a constructed hierarchy of causation, which places either geopolitics or economics at the top and culture somewhere near the bottom, culture should be understood as an integral aspect of both geopolitical and economic relations. It does not simply add a layer of meaning to history, it changes our understanding of that history. That idea is at the heart of this volume. A cultural approach to international history, then, is fundamentally different from the usual geopolitical or economic analysis. To begin with, such themes as the rise and fall of the great powers, military rivalries, balance of power, alliances, world systems, and other aspects that always presume possibilities of conflict, even of war, are still relevant in the history of cultural affairs. But they are contextualized and explained through other events and transformations during times of peace and international cooperation. There exists, of course, such a thing as the culture of war or a culture war, including wartime propaganda, chauvinistic expressions that distort and belittle an enemy, and the state’s sponsorship of nationalistic cultural products. This volume focuses on cultural relations as well as the cultural dimension of geopolitical relations, including the cultural expression of an antagonistic relationship among states. There is a “culture” of everything, and international affairs are no exception. The cultural underpinnings of geopolitical affairs forms one aspect of a cultural approach to international history. Another consists of peacetime and peaceful encounters and exchanges among individuals and their organizations in different countries. For this reason, the cultural approach to international history will have far more to say about peace than about war. Cultural exchanges among people of different countries tend to develop with their own momentum; for this reason the term “transnational” may describe their activities better than “international.” We explain what we mean by “transnational” in greater detail below. Nations are still important agents in this history, but they share the stage with individuals and groups who established connections across boundaries through their movement, products, and ideas, often shedding their national identity and creating new imagined communities transcending territorial boundaries. People from various countries may, for instance, interact with one another as tourists, business representatives, exchange students, or religious missionaries.

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INTRODUCTION

Various organizations may hold international conferences, national museums may exhibit works by foreign artists, orchestras may invite conductors and soloists from other countries, and ordinary people may enjoy sampling foreign foods. These are all examples of cultural interactions across national boundaries. They amount to a series of transnational experiences: mutual encounters, contact, and engagement. International relations become transnational relations when cultural encounters create their own spaces apart from state-centered and power-oriented international affairs. Culture, in a sense, converts international relations into transnational interactions. Our own past research in the fields of international, transnational, and global history inform the following chapters. Whether writing about USEast Asian or US-European relations history, or thinking conceptually about cultural internationalism, cultural globalization, transnationalism, war, peace, or non-governmental organizations, our basic premise has been to uncover the multiple forms in which power and culture intersected in the realm of international relations. This is not to say that we intend to sidestep the great watershed moments in the history of international relations or regard them as inconsequential to our way of writing history. A cultural approach to foreign relations history does not replace geopolitical or economic approaches. Rather, it enriches and contextualizes these approaches, giving us a multidimensional and more nuanced understanding of the relationship between nations, regions, cultures, and people. A focus on cultural affairs deepens our understanding of history and alters the narrative by involving far more individuals and communities of people and their beliefs and activities in the story of international affairs. The great historical transformations of our age cannot be explained exclusively in geopolitical or economic terms. Changes in values, perceptions, morals, emotions, and cultural norms—cultural factors for short—contributed to those transformations. This book represents a synthesis of the history of international relations from a cultural perspective. It applies a methodology and terminology that borrows from neighboring disciplines, such as anthropology, sociology, and cultural studies; it draws on a broader set of sources beyond the archives of states; and it prompts a reconsideration of periodization. The following brief outline of key concepts will render visible the core principles underlying this study.

Culture To fully understand what we mean by a cultural history of international relations, we will briefly outline our conceptualization of the term “culture.” This is a notoriously difficult yet necessary undertaking, though it might not satisfy all readers of this volume. It is difficult, because the meaning of

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“culture” has evolved over time alongside the subjects in this volume. It is necessary, because it plays a central role in this book’s approach to international history. Our understanding of culture has been shaped by a group of political and cultural theorists who in the mid- to late twentieth century contributed to the rise of the cultural turn in historiography. One of them was the Italian linguist and philosopher Antonio Gramsci, whose idea of cultural hegemony has helped historians conceptualize culture as an integral aspect of power relations both within the confines of the state as well as in international relations. The concept offered a way to explore through a cultural approach both the exercise of and challenge to power.1 In the 1970s, the anthropologist Clifford Geertz articulated the concept of culture and its relation to politics, which was likewise instrumental in prompting the cultural turn. For Geertz, culture was more than values, customs, and rituals, but “the structures of meaning through which men give shape to their experience.” And politics, likewise, was more than “coups and constitutions, but one of the principal arenas in which such structures publicly unfold.”2 This expansive understanding of culture and its relationship to politics, domestic and transnational, allows historians to focus on the underlying, often intangible assumptions shaping international relations. From Michel Foucault and Jacques Derrida scholars learned to pay attention to discourse and language in international relations, while Pierre Bourdieu’s concepts of habitus and field helped refocus attention on the centrality of power structures in cultural analysis.3 While the following chapters do not directly reference these scholars, our choice of subjects and agents, and our discussion of transformations and watershed moments in international relations over the past two centuries, have been informed by their theories. Our approach to culture in this volume is two-pronged. First, we position cultural developments at the center of the narrative. That includes tracing the flows of people and goods across national boundaries as well as focusing on transnational debates about ideology and knowledge production over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, including socialism, communism, social Darwinism, modernism, fascism, nationalism, and internationalism. We also trace the emergence and transnational proliferation of major movements in art, literature, and music. Second, we explore the major political and economic watershed moments in international history through a cultural lens. In other words, we highlight the cultural context in which the political story of foreign policy and decision-making processes in international relations unfolded. A cultural approach to foreign relations history includes interpreting traditional state-centered sources in new ways with the help of new methodologies. It further includes the incorporation of alternative sources, such as major print media, visual images, and collections from non-governmental archives. These sources allow historians to write race, class, and gender into the history of international relations. A cultural approach thus gives us a

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more inclusive understanding of the intangible underpinnings shaping transnational relations.

The Transnational Approach We have articulated our understanding of the transnational approach elsewhere, but it is useful to briefly summarize here how it relates to culture, and how it is applied in this volume. The transnational approach draws on cultural analysis yet moves beyond it in scope. It allows us to explore questions of politics, economics, environment, disease. and social change as they transcend borders. It decenters the state as the primary agent of change in international relations, though it does not abandon the state as a meaningful category of analysis. Instead, we apply a broader understanding of international relations as the movement of ideas, goods, and people across national boundaries. By decentering the state and exploring currents that cross national boundaries, we can trace the emergence, expansion, and limits of a global cultural outlook. More importantly, we can focus on the meanings individual people and groups invested in their own identities in relation to the nation-state. Ethnic, racial, gender, sexual, ideological, and class identities are not necessarily bound by the state and thus can connect in an imagined transnational space. Furthermore, multinational corporations, non-governmental organizations, religious groups, and other special interest groups increasingly operate on a transnational level, independent of and sometimes in opposition to the nation-state. Our purpose with this volume is to show the interconnections that exist between state and non-state agencies and actors, and to write the latter into the core of international history. The emergence of transnational history in the 1990s owes much to the cultural turn, particularly the latter’s emphasis on dominant cultures and sub-cultures within and beyond the state. Cultural historians first explored cultural diversity and competition below the level of the nation, exploring the cultures of marginalized groups, cultural conflict at the local level, and the emergence of counter-cultures. By the mid-1990s, they increasingly turned their attention to diasporic cultures, borderland cultures, and cultural globalization, moving into the realm of transnational history. Historians of international relations were still debating the merits of the cultural turn for their discipline when cultural and area studies specialists pushed in on them from the outside. The exponential growth of transnational history deflected international historians’ concerns about the role of culture in their field, in part because the parameters of the debate expanded from the narrow focus on whether culture mattered to the much broader concern with how ideas, goods, and people moved across borders, and what impact those movements and transnational actors had on international relations. As it matured as a field, transnational history came to encompass much more than transcultural relations. It could involve both state and non-state

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actors. In fact, one of the key benefits of the transnational approach is that it encourages an exploration of the convergences between the two; the way state and non-state actors condition each other’s attitudes and actions in the international arena. Transnational history also explores the intersections among culture, politics, and economics in a multitude of areas, including gender, race, environmental, and social history. It is therefore important to emphasize that not all cultural histories of international relations are transnational and not all transnational history is cultural. In this volume, nevertheless, we focus on the convergences between the cultural and transnational.

Globalization It is also useful to outline the commonalities and distinctions between transnational and global history. Both address phenomena that occur beyond the level of a single state or nation. Both de-emphasize the role of the state as a category of analysis. And scholars often use these terms interchangeably, yet they differ from one another in a few ways. The transnational approach focuses attention on movement: the movement of individuals and groups across national boundaries, the movement of goods, and the movement of ideas. A transnational approach accepts the continued existence of territorial boundaries, and it identifies those boundaries, not as fixed and impermeable barriers, but as barriers to be transcended. Global history, instead, focuses on developments, transformations, and ideas that leave a global imprint. It does not aim to explore these developments in every part of the world, but it reveals the existence of phenomena that can no longer be traced to a single country of origin. The global history approach is in many ways deterritorialized, or, more accurately, de-nationalized. The global perspective encourages, in the words of historians John R. and William H. McNeill, a “bird’s-eye” view of history, focusing on themes such as religion, civilization, environment, and science.4 The concept of global history has in some ways replaced the older terminology of world history, in part because of the historical process of globalization that emerged as a subject of research in the late 1990s. We apply both global and transnational approaches at various points in this volume, depending on what the historical moment demands. For instance, the transnational approach captures best the earlier period of colonial and trans-Atlantic encounters as well as the rise of internationalism, while the global approach is better suited to the latter sections of this volume, when economic, political, and cultural globalization came to play an increasingly central role in international relations, and the pace of the movement of goods, ideas, and people accelerated markedly. Both perspectives, the transnational and the global, integrate cultural, political, and economic aspects, and include non-governmental transnational agents, offering a more differentiated telling of the history of international relations.

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Periodization The writing of culture into foreign relations history offers an opportunity to rethink established patterns of periodization. The traditional division of historical epochs in international relations has centered around wars and geopolitical crises: the Napoleonic wars of the turn of the nineteenth century; the American Civil War; the Franco-Prussian War; the two World Wars; the Cold War; the Vietnam War; America’s wars in Iraq and Afghanistan post 9/11; and others. The customary divisions in the teaching of international relations history in major textbooks usually go from 1815 (the end of the Napoleonic wars) to 1914 (the outbreak of the First World War); 1914 to 1918 (the First World War); 1918 to 1939 (the inter-war period); 1939 to 1945 (the Second World War); 1945 to 1990 (the Cold War); and the 1990s to the present (the post-Cold War era). We have, instead, identified four broad historical eras, whose turning points are determined by global cultural currents rather than geopolitical events. The first period encompasses roughly the years 1800 to 1870, which witnessed the emergence of a modern consciousness. By that we mean the awareness among people that they were living in a world that was dramatically different from what had come before, that change rather than continuity governed their lives, and that this change came by way of technology, automatization, and centralization. Much of the focus in this part will be on Western Europe and North America, where industrialization, urbanization, and the consolidation of the nation-state wrought dramatic transformations. This period is usually considered part of the age of nationstates, and we devote some attention to the cultural attributes of the formation of national identities, or, to borrow Benedict Anderson’s terminology, the formation of “imagined communities.”5 But alongside the rise of nationalism, we also pay attention to the early contours of international “imagined” communities, beginning with the Napoleonic age, when much of Europe shared the common experience of war, revolutions, and nationalist movements. The second part of the volume is devoted to the years 1870 to 1920, which we identify as the first age of globalization that produced both cultural internationalism and inter-racial, inter-ethnic hostility. There is some overlap between our periodization and the one defined by the British historian Eric Hobsbawm, who has called this the Age of Empire. Our focus, however, moves beyond the geopolitical contours of empire, to the cultural context of the vast movement of people, the encounter between imperial and colonial cultures, accommodation and resistance, ethnic conflict, as well as cultural internationalism. The cultural lens upends the geopolitical straight line many international historians have drawn from the imperial competitions among established and rising powers like Germany and Japan in the late nineteenth century to the First World War. Attention to cultural transformations reveals a much more inchoate trajectory in world affairs at

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the turn of the twentieth century, a period ripe with possibilities for international cooperation, making the First World War anything but a foregone conclusion. The third part covers the years 1920 to 1970, in a departure from the traditional division at mid-century between the World Wars and the Cold War. This alternative periodization does not ignore the Second World War as a watershed moment in international history, but rather allows us to call attention to continuities that are woven through the transnational fabric of this era. For instance, internationalist currents picked up momentum during the 1920s, diminished in the 1930s, and resumed with renewed momentum in the post-war era. The totalitarian ideologies of fascism and communism permeated many countries and reflected competing visions of modernity in the 1920s. Even though Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy disappeared, fascism was by no means dead in the early post-war period, living on as state ideologies in some states, such as Spain and Portugal, and as influential parties in many other countries. Communism expanded rather than contracted in the post-war period. Not until the student movements of the 1960s did a transnational cultural and political reckoning with these totalitarian ideologies occur. The final section covers the period of globalization from 1970 to the present, when cross-border movements of people, capital, goods, and ideas increased dramatically. These global movements challenged the modern nation-state as the key framework for ensuring people’s security and livelihood. Non-state bodies, in particular business enterprises and nongovernmental organizations, increased dramatically in both number and power during the 1970s and 1980s, as did the number of cross-border migrants. The term “globalization” was applied much more widely to international transformations, beginning in the 1970s, first in the economic realm, then spreading to the political and cultural realms. While we recognize the end of the Cold War as a watershed moment, we also reveal some of the continuities that connect the Cold War era to what came after. Many cultural transformations emerged prior to the end of the Cold War and continued unabated afterwards. Future historians might well regard the Cold War as one aspect of the far more momentous changes brought about by the growing political, economic, and cultural interdependencies among countries in the second half of the twentieth century. And they might well identify cultural globalization as a cause rather than a consequence of the collapse of the Cold War system. There is no doubt that the world today is much more closely connected through transnational networks of exchange. The rise of the internet in the 1990s has shrunk distances and has created new imagined communities characterized by a myriad of shared identities of which nationality is but one. Urban areas across the world look much more alike, with cities such as Mumbai, Nairobi, Tokyo, Paris, and New York offering its visitors the same name-brand stores, the same restaurants, and similar cultural experiences.

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The rapid spread of the Covid-19 virus across the globe in 2020 offers a stark reminder of how closely connected the world’s peoples have become. Yet as the world’s cultures have become more entangled, local spaces, particularly cities, have also become more diverse, offering a multi-ethnic, multicultural experience to a multi-ethnic, cosmopolitan community. As these global cities evolved over the past decades, homogenization and heterogenization went hand in hand, presenting a much more complex, at times contradictory, image of cultural globalization than either critics or proponents of globalization want to acknowledge. The close proximity of different ethnic and cultural communities in these urban centers both create greater acceptance of cultural diversity and fuel ethnic and cultural conflict. Despite these conflicts, however, the movement toward greater diversity is unlikely to be reversed. The biggest challenge for future generations will be to create the social, economic, and political conditions that make cultural diversity not only acceptable but desirable—and to make people see cultural diversity as a source of strength rather than a threat.

PART ONE

The Rise of the Modern “The production of ideas, of conceptions, of consciousness is at first directly interwoven with the material activity and the material intercourse of men, the language of real life,” Karl Marx wrote in the 1840s. He declared further that “conceiving, thinking, the mental intercourse of men, appear at this stage as the direct efflux of their material behavior. The same applies to mental production as expressed in the language of politics, laws, morality, religion, metaphysics, etc., of a people.” While the exact relationship between consciousness and material conditions is still the subject of much debate— did material conditions “create” consciousness or did consciousness “shape” material conditions?—there exists a general consensus that the emergence of a modern consciousness in the nineteenth century was inextricably tied to pursuits in the social and economic spheres. Much of what we identify as this new consciousness was taking shape in the West, in particular Western Europe and North America, where industrialization and expanding trade contributed to enabling more and more people, not just the aristocracy, to experience higher standards of living and partake in cultural pursuits. Among those cultural pursuits were the rise of romantic literature and music, which transcended national boundaries. This same period also saw the rise of nationalist movements all over Europe and the Americas, but this did not prevent the development of cosmopolitanism, the belief that people everywhere—at least in the West—shared certain ideas and aspirations. Among the most influential of such ideas were Marxism, socialism, and anarchism, all of which challenged the sovereign state as the key determinant 11

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of people’s identities. More traditional identities, above all religious and ethnic, remained, but they were transformed by significant developments in these communities as technical innovations—in particular, the telegraph and the telephone—narrowed the sense of distance and facilitated communication across borders. Modernity took root in Europe during the Age of Enlightenment, when through geographic exploration and scientific discovery, the world became better known and was experienced increasingly through a secular rather than religious lens. The invention of the printing press in the fifteenth century had steadily increased the dissemination of religious and secular texts to a broader readership, facilitating the proliferation of new ideas throughout the western world and ultimately the entire globe. The spread of secularized enlightenment ideas also led to the de-centering of the Christian West. The French philosopher Voltaire was among the leading advocates of a more global understanding of knowledge, elevating to prominence the contributions of Arab, Indian, and Chinese thinkers, philosophers, and inventors. Modernity, while primarily associated with the advances of the western world, was built on significant discoveries and ideas outside the western world. Everywhere in the world, what came to be identified as modern civilization steadily transformed people’s ways of life and thought, often accompanied by a consciousness about the tension between modernity and tradition. This consciousness was a phenomenon one could find among non-western as well as western people. The opening of Asia, Africa, and Latin America to western economic penetration should be seen not only as an instance of imperialism, but also as a key cultural development that shaped the ways of life of all people in the mid-nineteenth century. Indeed, “Asia,” “Africa,” and “America” were cultural terms before they acquired political meaning. The Ottoman Empire, encompassing southeastern Europe, North Africa, and what would later be called the Middle East, played a major role in international cultural developments during this period. The opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 connected the Mediterranean Sea with the Indian Ocean. In Asia, among Commodore Perry’s gifts when his squadron returned to Japan in 1854 were two telegraph sets that literally opened the “eyes and ears” of the Japanese still living in their feudal age. The elites of the Ottoman Empire, the Qing Empire, and Japan, as well as other countries began to embrace modernization with varying degrees of enthusiasm. The following pages explore the cultural currents and consequences that contributed to the rise of this global network. They include a close examination of how nationalism and internationalism informed each other in a dialectical relationship, the former driving the latter forward and the latter redefining and transforming the former. Cross-cultural encounters expanded by mid-century, creating both greater opportunities for transnational cooperation and new points of friction that increased the potential for conflict as nation-states emerged, expanded, and competed

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for economic, political, and cultural dominance. Geopolitical watershed moments of the nineteenth century, such as revolutions, wars, and the national unifications of Italy and Germany will be examined within this broader framework of cultural encounters, with a particular emphasis on the relationship between culture and power. The rise of the modern consciousness was at once a process that emerged within the structures of the nation-state and outside of them. It was not just a unidirectional phenomenon emanating from the industrializing West and spreading to the non-western world, but a dynamic process of cultural encounter between communities, regions, and states, albeit often under conditions of unequal power relations. It bound together the nations of Europe, Asia, and Africa in ever tighter webs of connections. The modern consciousness was forged within this framework of economic, political, scientific, and intellectual exchanges.

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1 The Dialectics of Nationalism and Internationalism

Over the course of the nineteenth century some influential ideas and perspectives emerged in the West that would seek to codify what was happening in the world. This can best be seen in the development of the conceptions of nationalism and internationalism, as exemplified by new ideas of the modern nation-state on the one hand and by some global visions on the other. These forces of nationalism and internationalism, rather than working in opposite directions, were mutually constitutive. Forged at the Vienna Congress of 1815, both nationalism and internationalism gained strength throughout the nineteenth century. Historians and the public usually understand international relations at the turn of the nineteenth century as a story of warfare among European states in which France under Napoleon Bonaparte sought to augment his power. At one point, Napoleon tried to conquer Russia, extend French power to the Middle East, and even form an alliance with the young republic of the United States to challenge British supremacy at sea. All such attempts ended in failure. Napoleon was eventually exiled to the island of Elba, off the western coast of Italy, while the victorious coalition led by Britain and Russia met at a conference in Vienna in 1814 to re-establish some sort of order in Europe. Although quite tenuous, the Vienna system of international relations managed to avoid another major war in Europe until 1914. How do we reconfigure the history of the Napoleonic wars or the Vienna Congress and resulting system of peace within a cultural framework? How did the tumultuous developments in Europe affect cultural pursuits there and elsewhere? Answers must begin by recognizing that until that time Europe was by no means the undisputed cultural center of the world. The Ottoman Empire had, from time to time, claimed to be a major cultural influence in the world, as did the Ming, Qing, and other empires in control of China. In economic production, until the end of the eighteenth century, the Ottoman and Chinese peoples produced more wealth and were more advanced in pottery, rug-making, and other artisanal productions than the rest of the world. There were other cultural centers as well: the Persian 15

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Empire, the Mughal (Indian) Empire, the United States, and others. All of them together with Europe and the Middle East constituted global cultures, and the world was a space of cultural complexity and diversity. The balance began to shift at the beginning of the nineteenth century with the Napoleonic wars. Even as the European countries engaged in devastating warfare, their global economic and cultural influence expanded to an unprecedented degree. Historians have traditionally referred to this transformation as the rise of the West. Prior to 1800 the West—primarily Europe—had been just one of many centers of culture and power in the world. Yet in the nineteenth century it achieved a decisively dominant position, so much so that the label “great powers” was synonymous with Europe and the United States, and “civilization” came to mean the West’s intellectual and artistic achievements. The West’s power and culture reinforced each other to such an extent that, by the turn of the twentieth century it was dominating the rest of the world politically, militarily, economically, and culturally. International relations, which used to entail a complex web of interactions among various regions of the world, had now become virtually synonymous with intra-European affairs. How did this transformation come about? One reason was technology, namely, that from the last decades of the eighteenth century onward technological innovations in Europe and North America—ranging from the steam engine and steam ships to the telegraph—enabled people to establish connections with one another at greater speed and with greater ease than ever before. Such innovations were in turn products of a scientific revolution that had developed new ways of looking at the universe, separating humans from nature and expanding the exploitation of natural resources for industrial production and international trade. There was, of course, nothing new about global trade, which some scholars trace as far back as the Age of Migration and the silk routes of antiquity, others to the Age of Exploration in the fifteenth century. But the new technologies made it possible for merchants, manufacturers, and consumers to connect with one another much more easily. Connections, again, were the key, and as closer and more extensive contacts were established among countries and peoples of the world, those who were energetic, assertive, and even aggressive in such activities steadily grew more influential. The long wars of Europe did not stifle such overseas activities, and this is another reason why the West on the whole achieved its ascendancy around 1800. Warfare required arms, and antagonists strove to produce more and better weapons of destruction. War and industrialization reinforced one another in that new technologies and manufacturing methods enabled nations to produce greater quantities of weapons while at the same time enhancing the overall economic output of countries. War and imperial expansion in turn propelled further industrialization by opening new markets abroad as well as making it possible to recruit a fresh labor force. The non-western world was equally dynamic, yet without sharing the West’s

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passion for establishing connections all over the world. As a result, people in those regions were less affected by the rapidly advancing technologies Europeans and North Americans had developed. All these factors contributed to the emergence and consolidation of nation-states in late eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe. The centralization of power in the body of the state was not just a political move, it was rooted in cultural transformations, among them the spirit of nationalism that swept across the European continent. The production of what Benedict Anderson has called “imagined communities,” bound together by a common language, heritage, religious and secular values, was either imposed by ruling authorities over their consolidated territories or grew organically from the bottom up through grassroots movements. Nationalism and its relationship to a newly emerging internationalism take center-stage in the cultural reconceptualization of international history.

Nationalism Words like “national” and “international” had been in use in Europe since the seventeenth century, when some countries came to define themselves as nations. A nation referred to an entity that had a unified and central government, that ruled a space with fixed geographical boundaries, and whose people identified with this political/territorial entity. Wars were fought in the name of the nation, and theorists wrote discourses on national interest, national power, and national identity. But the ideology of nationalism, or a mentality that defined individuals in terms of their identification with and loyalty to a particular country, developed more slowly. Other centers of identity and loyalty such as the family, the village, the guild, the church, and the royalty, competed with the nation. Nationalism was an idea that transcended these loyalties and bound individuals to their nation as the core of identity that remained with them from birth to death. That such ideas first developed in the West in the seventeenth century had far-reaching consequences for the subsequent development of world history. European kingdoms and societies might have continued to exist in their traditional ways, loosely tied together within an empire, like the Ottoman or the Qing Empire. Europe, too, had its empires, most prominently the Habsburg Empire, whose domain spanned from Spain to Austria. Some kingdoms, however, refused to remain incorporated into an imperial system and managed to create and preserve separate existences. One of these was Britain, which by the seventeenth century consisted of England, Scotland, Wales, and Ireland. Another was France, which repeatedly repulsed attempts by both the British and the Habsburgs to extend their domain into its territory. In the meantime, various German-speaking states in Central Europe envisaged the possibility of coming together to form a new German

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nation, just as city-states and provinces in the Italian peninsula began to entertain visions of uniting to form a new nation. Nationalism was a concept that helped trigger and promote movements for separate political existences, divorced from an imperial system of governance. It was an ideology that brought together people who shared religious beliefs, the same past, ways of life, or who spoke the same language. The establishment of a unified nation also frequently included the suppression of minorities within its bounds, creating new nationalist movements in the process. This was the case in both Ireland and the United States. Both were initially part of the British Empire, but neither could muster sufficient enthusiasm in support of British nationalism. They eventually sought to establish their own national existences—the Americans in 1776, the Irish more than a century later in 1919. Both did so in the name of freedom and human rights, thereby drawing on ideas that frequently served as the framework for an overall nationalistic ideology. Nationalism rested on a cultural foundation. As Benedict Anderson has argued, nationality, nation-ness, and nationalism were themselves “cultural artifacts of a particular kind.” In other words, the idea of the nation was inseparable from and foundational to the physical existence of the nationstate. Language, and through it literature, was one such cultural foundation. The emergence and expansion of print capitalism since Gutenberg helped spread ideas, ideologies, and cultural narratives that bound people together through a shared language (and a shared literacy). British nationalism was inseparable from the literature of William Shakespeare, whose works helped forge a sense of pride among all who spoke the English language and a sense of belonging among his readers. Similarly, the literature of J.B.P. Molière provided the underpinning for French nationalism. German nationalism drew inspiration from the writings of Goethe and Schiller, key figures of the Romantic period. And Johann Gottfried Herder’s ideas about the German nation as a cultural community bound together by common language, folk traditions, music, and literature, inspired late eighteenth-century European philosophers and political theorists. Language and literature became carriers of a nation’s cultural capital and fostered a sense of belonging among those with shared knowledge of common texts, stories, and histories. The rise of nationalist sentiment in Europe was in part a result of the Napoleonic wars and the subsequent Vienna peace of 1815. Napoleon’s assumption of power in France in 1799 and his declaration of himself as emperor marked the official end of the revolutionary era. Yet far from abandoning the ideas brought forth by the revolution, he supported many of them, and did much to propagate them throughout the territories he conquered. He succeeded quite brilliantly in instilling in his soldiers and among French citizens a new kind of nationalist fervor and patriotism based on the ideals of liberty, fraternity, and equality. As he marched his army across Europe and deep into Russia, he spread those very same ideas wherever he went, generating new movements for independence with often

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unintended and—for Napoleon at least—disastrous consequences, since citizens, inspired by nationalist fervor, first turned against the Napoleonic armies and then against their own imperial rulers, particularly in the Russian and Austro-Hungarian realms. The agreements reached in 1815 at Vienna under the leadership of the Austrian Minister of State Prince Clemens von Metternich went a long way toward re-establishing the old order. Yet they disappointed many supporters of the American and French revolutions who had hoped for a fundamentally new system of international relations that took note of the new ideals of democracy, liberalism, and national self-determination. Metternich, a consummate practitioner of what later became known as Realpolitik, ensured the return to power of the pre-revolutionary aristocratic elites, keeping the balance of power among the great nations of Europe, and ignoring principles of rights and equality, including the right to selfdetermination. As rulers over a sprawling empire encompassing multiple languages and ethnic groups, Austria-Hungary’s leaders had a vested interest in maintaining the status quo. That meant suppressing, or at the very least co-opting, revolutionary ideas such as self-determination and nationalism. Nationalism constituted the greatest threat to the continued existence of the empire, as its leaders well knew, because empires consisted of peoples of many different ethnic backgrounds, including in the case of Austria-Hungary Germans, Slavs, Hungarians, Bosnians, and Serbs. These groups had little in common with each other culturally, linguistically, even politically, yet lived under the same centralized political authority. They increasingly longed for a government that represented their particular political, ethnic, and cultural interests. Outspoken nationalists in these regions advocated for the splintering of the empire into smaller nation-states. But the opposite occurred as well during this period, namely the call among nationalists for the consolidation of separate states and principalities into unified new nations. Nationalism thus proved to be an unpredictable force, creating sub-national movements that challenged centralized authority, even as it produced coalitions among people across national boundaries with new loyalties that could not be controlled easily by the political elites. Eventually, nationalism created new entities that had the potential to upset the balance of power within Europe. While nationalism rose in reaction to the Napoleonic conquests in many European countries, this nationalist fervor did not disappear once Napoleon disappeared. In fact, after the Vienna Congress re-established many of the old monarchies, citizens turned against their own authoritarian rulers. Much of the political upheaval of the nineteenth century can be explained as a battle between those who wanted to restore the old order that had existed prior to the French Revolution, with political elites and monarchs returning to power; and those who wanted to cement and expand the revolutionary gains made toward liberalism, republicanism, individual rights, and the rule of law.

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Nationalist ideas and the movements they generated were slower to develop in areas where people and their political leaders did not rely on nationalism for governance or for ideology. Nationalism was inherently separatist, or “particularistic” to use a term that differentiates between particular and more general identities and loyalties. Before 1870, small groups of people, for instance young Egyptians, were driven by a sense of nationalistic self-identity, but this would grow into a serious movement for independence only in the early part of the twentieth century. By then nationalism would come to be seen as a universalistic, not just a particularistic, ideology. Nationalism also provided an ideological basis for a country’s external relations. In times of peace, cultures of various countries could interact with one another and enrich people’s lives across borders. Cultural exchange could therefore only occur in times of peaceful relations. But culture was also connected to the exercise of national power. Power and culture, as it were, reinforced each other so that the latter would confirm and sustain the former. Nationalism relied on a stark and exclusionary definition of cultural identity, particularly in the service of waging war against an external adversary. To the extent that individuals identified themselves with the country of their birth or residence, defending its existence and ensuring its survival would be considered the primary responsibility of citizenship. Citizens went to war in the name of loyalty, and victory enhanced the nation’s prestige, often augmenting its territory. Because national leaders were asking their people to devote themselves to a cause greater than an attachment to family, church, local community, or friends, they had to imbue the nation with emotional attributes, expressed through symbols (the flag), music (the national anthem), or literature (written in the language of the nation). Already in the eighteenth century and continuously thereafter, political philosophers and theorists wrote treatises on nationalism, making it one of the leading ideologies in the world by the middle of the nineteenth century. Poems, songs, literary tracts, and music compositions all served to elevate nationalist ideals beyond the quotidian existence of citizens within a state, transcending class and region. As developed by such thinkers as Germany’s G.W.F. Hegel and France’s Jules Michelet, nationalism was a belief in one’s country’s spiritual unity from time immemorial. The nation existed in history as well as in geography, and nationalism was an expression of the people’s identification with it. By definition, one country’s nationalism could not be exchanged with another’s. Different countries defined their respective nationalisms in their own ways, often in opposition to their neighbors. For instance, the British might take pride in Shakespeare and the French in their language that had been systematized already in the seventeenth century. Germans and Italians might put their respective musical traditions at the core of their national identities. For Americans, forging a national identity out of the multiple ethnicities who made up the country proved more challenging. Conscious of this challenge, the

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nation’s leaders focused on pride in the country’s birth and development as a land of freedom. No matter how each country’s nationalism was characterized, or its origin story told, it was the glue that held its citizens together. Similar nationalisms did exist in other parts of the world as well, although the circumstances of their development were different from those in Europe and the United States. The terms “nation” and “nationalism” had European roots, but there were counterparts elsewhere. In China, for instance, the word “guo,” meaning country, had existed since the times of Confucius, as did “guojia,” or “national family,” referring to the political structure or governance of the state. In the Middle East and South Asia, where for centuries populations had embraced large territorial units such as the Ottoman and Mughal empires as the key political structures, the term “empire” was more commonly used. The distinction between “empire” and “nation” was not always clear-cut, but traditionally an empire tended to refer to a large territorial unit that comprised a number of provinces with their own populations and traditions. Such had been the Holy Roman Empire, the Byzantine Empire, the Spanish Empire, and, most notably in the nineteenth century, the British Empire. The empires in the Middle East, South Asia, or East Asia were essentially spaces with conglomerations of different sets of people, as were the native American empires such as the Aztecs and the Incas. Nationalism in the context of such empires often had the connotation of a part of an empire asserting its separate identity, an obvious example being the United States. Its size was such that it could have been another empire, and indeed some of the Founding Fathers referred to the nation as “the rising American empire.” China, while traditionally an empire, in time developed a sense of national unity, which it pitted both against the reigning Manchu (Qing) dynasty and against the expansion of the power of western states in the nineteenth century. In doing so, the Chinese could incorporate the ideology of nationalism into their own vocabulary. In contrast, in the Ottoman Empire, those who developed Turkish nationalism distinct from Ottoman self-identity were eager to reshape the empire into a nation, in the process shedding the vast region of those—such as Greek residents—who were not considered to belong to the new “Turkey.” The Qing Empire ruled China and its vicinity while the Ottoman Empire presided over much of the Middle East and North Africa. As a final example, in the British colony of India, nationalists sought to coalesce ethnic and religious groups in an effort to create a new state that would be free from foreign domination. In these regions, neither nationalism nor internationalism existed as an indigenous ideology. Even if there was an enormous range and variety in the conceptualization of nationalism, it nonetheless spread steadily to all parts of the globe throughout the nineteenth century. More people in 1900 defined themselves in national terms than in 1800, and nationalism, inherently particularistic in nature in that it stressed the unique destiny of each people claiming to represent a nation, developed into one of the most universally held ideologies.

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Nationalism became a key foundation of modern international affairs and modern world history. Nationalist ideology played a defining role in the emergence and triumph of the nation-state, which, in turn, further fueled nationalist sentiment. Political leaders consolidated states and principalities into centralized nations, investing them with a historical narrative of a unified past. Two prominent examples of national consolidation in the mid-nineteenth century were Italy and Germany. Italian nationalism had been inspired since the early nineteenth century by the writings of Giuseppe Mazzini, who envisioned an Italian “risorgimento,” a resurgence of the ancient Roman Empire. Before unification, the Italian peninsula had consisted of a patchwork of about a dozen larger states with smaller ones sprinkled among them. One of the larger states was Piedmont in the north of Italy, a constitutional monarchy under King Victor Emanuel. Its prime minister in the 1850s, Camillo di Cavour, entered into a coalition with a nationalist general, Giuseppe Garibaldi. In 1860, Garibaldi organized an armed expeditionary force, the so-called “red shirts,” and marched south to unify, by force if necessary, the Italian states into a single entity. Italy’s unification was the result of the fusion between pragmatic political realism, ideological politics, and military power. Mazzini provided the ideological justification for unification, while the Piedmontese statesmen Garibaldi and Cavour contributed political realism and military prowess. German unification proceeded under similar circumstances, spearheaded by Otto von Bismarck, Prussia’s chief minister under King Wilhelm I. There were altogether thirty-nine different German principalities, with Prussia the largest and most powerful. Before Prussia’s push toward political unification in the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War, the principalities were loosely connected through a customs union, which eliminated tariffs and thus facilitated regional trade. In the aftermath of France’s humiliating defeat in 1871, Wilhelm I was crowned emperor of Germany in the Hall of Mirrors at Versailles. Aided by historians and political theorists, Germany’s new leadership consciously cultivated the idea of a national culture alongside the establishment of a politically cohesive nation-state. Benedict Anderson’s concept of “imagined communities” manifested in Germany as a process of investing political boundaries with cultural meaning. Imagined communities relied on the ability of a centralized state to define the values, establish the rituals, and shape the production of knowledge within a geographically bounded area. Political power within these new nation-states thus rested on the cultural power to shape a national consciousness.

Internationalism Nationalism often served as ideological underpinning for war. Internationalism, by contrast, was conceptualized as nationalism’s antithesis:

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as surmounting national differences and nationalistic imperatives in the service of peace and mutual cooperation. Because nations were seen as normative human groupings whose continuing existence was assumed, they had to carve out a space for internationalism if they wanted to maintain peace. Instead of preparing themselves for possible warfare against each other, they had to establish some channels of communication for resolving conflicts without resorting to the use of force. Thus, as nationalism grew, so did the imperative for institutions that fostered the spirit of internationalism. Peace no longer meant the simple absence of military confrontation, it had to be secured through alliances and active networks of cooperation, communication, and mutual understanding. Nationalism and internationalism, then, developed together as a pair of contrasting yet interrelated phenomena. Just as nationalism grew more and more influential, so did internationalism gain momentum as a way to avoid war among nations. These two concepts developed in tandem in regions where nationalism grew strong, bound together in a dialectical relationship. Somewhat counterintuitively, internationalism was weaker in regions where nationalism was less advanced. Internationalism, then, can be understood both as an outgrowth of nationalism and defined in opposition to it. Whereas nationalism exalted the nation as the supreme focus of loyalty, as the key value above all values, internationalism sought to moderate forces of nationalism by stressing cooperation among nations, potentially paving the way for a peaceful world order. Nations must work together in the interest of the whole world, internationalists would argue, so as to minimize chances for conflict among them. Few internationalists, however, would go so far as to deny the legitimacy of national entities. Most internationalists would start from the assumption that nations were a permanent fixture, and that nationalism and internationalism can in fact be compatible. The precise relationship between nationalism and internationalism occupied the minds of some of Enlightenment’s greatest thinkers. Can nations really cooperate or even consider the wellbeing of the whole world when they are by definition entities that pursue their self-interests? Are nations capable of subordinating their ambitions, fears, and insecurities to something as vague as international order or even world community? These concerns reveal the contradictions inherent in the coexistence of the ideologies of nationalism and internationalism. They reflect different perceptions of human beings, or of human nature. Are men and women inherently peaceful? Or are they fundamentally self-seeking, self-promoting, self-aggrandizing beings? If the former, internationalism would be an easily realizable objective. If the latter, it would be nothing but a pipe dream. No wonder, then, that European thinkers beginning in the seventeenth century should have begun to engage in endless and heated debate on the nature of man. Among the most notable of the pessimists was Thomas Hobbes, whose Leviathan (1652) depicted humans existing in the “state of nature”

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as self-centered and in constant conflict with one another. Within this conceptualization of humanity, internationalism could never be an acceptable doctrine because it was based on an unrealistic, unrealizable view of human nature. Somewhat more optimistic were those, such as John Locke, David Hume, and Adam Smith of the late seventeenth and eighteenth century, who argued that humans were inherently neither good nor bad, and that a person’s proclivity toward moral or evil behavior depended in large part on social circumstances. French writers of the Enlightenment, known as philosophes, went a step further and argued that humans in “the state of nature” were essentially good, and that it was the political and social surroundings that could produce an environment in which immorality and evil could emerge. They asserted that every human being was born virtuous, endowed with faculties for empathy toward others. Such reasoning could be extended to behavior among various countries. Many philosophes believed that through reason, people and their communities, including nations, would be able to cooperate with one another so as to increase the level of general wellbeing without sacrificing their own interests. The German philosopher Immanuel Kant epitomized this thinking in Perpetual Peace in 1795, just before the outbreak of the French Revolutionary War, arguing that peace was the inherent condition of man and therefore that it was possible for all countries to work together toward the goal of peaceful coexistence. The cultural roots of such thinking about both nationalism and internationalism are obvious. To Locke and those who followed him— Enlightenment thinkers in eighteenth-century France, exponents of nineteenth-century liberalism, and early twentieth-century socialists— conditions of potential conflict were not inherent in nationhood. Nations consisted of individuals and, as people became more civilized, so did the countries in which they resided. The more cultured they became, the less possibility there would be of international conflict. In essence, war was a state of mind, and because a cultured person would not resort to violence to assert his or her rights, a nation comprised of such people would be cultured enough to desist war. Both nationalism and internationalism, then, reflected certain views of humankind and of history. Had men and women reached a stage where they were civilized enough to prefer internationalism to nationalism? At least in the modern West, the answer seemed obvious. Nations were capable of associating with one another to ensure a peaceful world as long as nationalism was coupled with internationalism. Although the culture of war and the culture of peace might be incompatible, nations could come together to define an international order reflective of their commitment to peace. This was an important cultural assumption. After having established their separate national units, humans, at least Europeans and Americans, had proven capable of cooperating for the good of them all. European and American political and philosophical thinkers thought of themselves and

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their nations as rational as well as national beings and entities; and their ability to come together to live in peace all over the world as evidence of their advanced civilizational status. Between 1815 and 1870, such optimism seemed to have been at least partially vindicated. No large-scale military conflict erupted among European states since the end of the Napoleonic wars, and a nation was now being considered to have become “modern” when it eschewed violence as a means of attaining its objectives. Instead of engaging in armed conflict, civilized countries were focusing their energies on non-military ways of attaining their objectives. In particular, trade, shipping, and investment activities would supersede war as the normal means for promoting the national interest. In such a conception, internationalism emerged as a natural counterpart to nationalism. There now existed more independent nations than ever before, and even within extra-national, imperial units such as the Habsburg and the Ottoman empires, nationality groups were pushing for greater autonomy. Many contemporaries considered such a trend to be compatible with a vision of the world in which nations cooperated with one another. Nationalism and internationalism were not contradictory but mutually supportive. The idea of progress, reflective of an optimistic view of human nature among Europe’s intellectual and political elites, underlay such a vision. There was a culture of optimism that even induced some thinkers to predict a warless world, one in which nations cooperated with one another to promote peace. A key question was what such optimism implied for the West’s relationship with the rest of the world. For the very optimism those elites in the modern West professed about themselves, easily translated into a sense of moral and intellectual superiority over those living in the non-western world. As the countries of Europe and the United States became modernized, they regarded other parts of the globe, such as Asia, the Middle East, Africa, and South America, as stagnant, still existing in the pre-modern stage of history. Europeans and Americans frequently used words like “uncivilized,” “premodern,” and “barbaric” to describe these other people and their governments. They appeared to indulge in harmful vices, such as opiumsmoking, and they seemed to show little interest in modern technology and progress. Those assumptions were largely misguided, since discourses on humanity were not limited to the West. After all, questions concerning human nature— the relationship between man and god or between man and nature, or the meaning of life and death—were intrinsic to many cultures, religions, and philosophies. Religious and philosophical systems in the Middle East, South Asia, East Asia, and other parts of the world developed systematic thoughts about these issues. Islam, Buddhism, and Confucianism, for example, all produced what may be termed the idea of brotherhood of man, a universalistic vision of what people everywhere shared regardless of where they came from or what their circumstances were. These religions all postulated some

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conception of the universe and human beings’ place in it. Theirs were in many ways more universalistic in that national entities did not intervene between humans and the divine and so all people, regardless of where they lived, could relate to one another as believers. Such a belief was not the same as internationalism, so the dichotomy between nationalism and internationalism did not exist. Once people in the non-western world embraced nationalism, however, it was not difficult for them to come to understand internationalism as a modern equivalent of their traditional conceptions of universalism. What is sometimes referred to as Islamic cosmopolitanism saw all people as interrelated, which easily led to ideas of compassion and empathy for fellow human beings. South Asian philosophers likewise stressed the basic sameness of all people and their communities. The traditional Chinese idea of “comrades in the four seas” spoke of a Confucian emphasis on shared humanity. People brought up in these religions and philosophies, then, would have found Christian and modern western conceptions of humanity quite congenial. In time, when non-western countries established their own nations, not simply western-style nationalism but also internationalism would have found a friendly reception. In the wake of the 1796–1814 Napoleonic wars and the Congress of Vienna, European internationalists redoubled their efforts to promote their visions of world peace and interdependence. Several British writers, notably Jeremy Bentham, David Ricardo, and John Stuart Mill, returned to eighteenth-century foundations and reaffirmed that peace, not conflict, was in the true interest of a nation and that peaceful relations among states were always possible. Their optimism, in the aftermath of the long years of war, was derived not so much from an idealistic vision of human nature as from their belief in economic interdependence among nations. Drawing on ideas developed by Adam Smith in his influential The Wealth of Nations (1776), they argued that precisely because all nations sought to accumulate wealth, trade relations in peacetime were far more profitable to a state than preparing for or waging war. Commercial transactions must of course be based on international agreement and cooperation, and so what may be termed economic internationalism developed as a major ideology in the nineteenth century. If treaties and other legal agreements among nations constituted the sinew of political internationalism, economic internationalism provided underpinnings for the expanding trade, shipping, and investment networks being established across nations. The idea of international law, first articulated in seventeenth-century Europe, became a crucial instrument for the regulation of these transnational transactions. Although they were not quite the same entities that emerged in subsequent centuries, several nations had by then made their appearance in Western and Central Europe, endowed not only with a well-defined system of governance but also with an ethos of shared identity. Still, wars, most notably the Thirty Years’ War (1618–1648), were fought among these states,

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and after a series of destructive military clashes that devastated urban centers and the countryside, the belligerent nations negotiated an end to their war. The resulting peace, known as the Westphalian system after the name of the German province where the final agreement was signed, led to the idea of an international community in which nations agreed to specific terms for maintaining a peaceful relationship among them. This was international law as conceptualized by European writers of the time, most notably Hugo Grotius, the Dutch jurist. In his publication, The Laws of War and Peace (1625), he sought to codify as much as possible how nations were to conduct wars and how they should define their peaceful relationships in the absence of war. International law has “public” and “private” dimensions. Public international law refers to the rules that should govern the conduct of states toward one another in war and peace, while private international law entails the rights and duties of individuals and groups of people when they encounter one another—for instance, when they travel, get married and have children, or when they commit a crime abroad. Since the seventeenth century, these laws have been revised and recodified on numerous occasions, at first among nations negotiating with one another, then at international conferences, and in the more recent decades by international organizations. But the key is that there existed such a thing as the international community, or “the great society” (magna civitas) as it was called in the seventeenth century. The term implied that there was a larger community consisting of separate nations, bound together by certain rules as they interacted with one another. Although such a vision was more often honored in the breach than faithfully acted upon, the idea spread that an international society—or a world community as it is more often called today—could exist in which many countries share basic laws and values, just as had been practiced among citizens within separate countries who had lived together in an orderly fashion for centuries. International law and the ideas and values that underpinned it grew steadily in the nineteenth century. At first “international” primarily meant “inter-European,” and non-western countries were not considered part of the community. However, with the steady extension of trading, shipping, and other connections between the West and the non-West, and as treaties were signed with the Ottoman Empire, China, Japan, Siam (Thailand), and other countries, these countries, too, came to be seen as members of the international community. Books and treatises on international law were translated into non-European languages, and by the end of the nineteenth century, some international conferences came to include participants from various non-western states. In time, Ottoman Turks, Chinese, Japanese, and others would begin to insist on equal participation in the allegedly universal community of nations. In addition to political and economic internationalism and international law, cultural internationalism, namely the view that the basis for a peaceful world order must be built on the basis of cultural contact, interaction,

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understanding, and even fusion among different countries of the world, requires consideration. If states develop political internationalism, and if economic internationalism entails exchanges of goods and capital, cultural internationalism fundamentally operates on the interpersonal level. It involves individuals from various countries meeting and interacting through their respective cultural products, including arts, literature, music, and customs. As men, women, and children appreciated artistic products, poems, or musical works brought in from other countries, they participated in the weaving of networks in which all people, regardless of where they came from, attained a sense of shared experience. As culture is enjoyed and appreciated across national boundaries, the experience may give rise to the idea of common humanity. Across Europe, there had long been museums exhibiting works of art from all over the world. While such exhibitions may have been more an elite than a mass phenomenon, the nineteenth century gave rise to world fairs: public exhibitions where traditional cultural products, contemporary commodities, and even people from non-western countries were on display. London had its “jubilee” exhibition in 1851, Paris its celebratory fair in 1871, and Philadelphia its 1876 centennial world’s fair, celebrating the hundredth anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. All these exhibitions served to draw the public’s attention to the diverse cultures and peoples of the world and fostered a spirit of cultural internationalism, just as the more elite-oriented projects such as museums, musical performances, or literary works in translation had done in the past. While such exhibitions enhanced the sense of global interconnectedness, they also highlighted difference by showcasing the alien and exotic in a European setting. In particular, displays of indigenous cultures, mostly from Asian and African colonial outposts of the major European powers, did not so much encourage intercultural dialogue as they signaled the assumption of white supremacy over non-white peoples. They codified racial hierarchies within the international system and presented colonialism as a civilizational mission. Because nationalism and internationalism assume the existence of sovereign nations, cultural internationalism was largely confined to the West prior to 1870. Nevertheless, as noted earlier, we should recall the tradition of Islamic cosmopolitanism or of Asian ecumenism, both of which contained elements of cultural internationalism. Moreover, the Ottoman Empire was a depository of cultural artifacts of many lands, ranging from Persian carpets to Chinese silk. Istanbul had long been a center of cultural internationalism in the sense that people from various parts of the world came there and mingled with one another, bringing with them their own cultural legacies. The opening of the Suez Canal in 1869 promised to further facilitate global cultural as well as economic exchanges. Indeed, the khedive of Egypt turned to the Italian composer Giuseppe Verdi to compose an opera to celebrate the event, and his Aida was produced in Cairo in 1871. The opera would soon be performed throughout Europe and the whole world.

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Music, indeed, has always been an effective instrument of cultural internationalism. Musical compositions can be performed and heard anywhere in the world, and the nationality of the composer or the listener is of minor significance. Even if a listener cannot read musical scores or play an instrument, he or she can enjoy a performance. What is communicated musically can be appreciated by people of all ages, countries, and backgrounds. Before 1870, few Europeans or Americans might have had a chance to listen to non-western music, and only a tiny minority of elites outside the West would have had access to live performances of compositions by westerners. A young Japanese novelist, Nagai Kafu, who spent several years in the United States at the beginning of the twentieth century, recorded in his diary that he must have been one of the first among his countrymen to hear a live performance at the Metropolitan Opera in New York. When he heard Enrico Caruso there for the first time, he was overwhelmed and assumed that it would take a long time before anything similarly modern was performed in his own country. Recognizing the cultural dimension of international relations during the first seventy years of the nineteenth century is vital. The growth of contact among all regions is striking when compared to the world a century earlier. This was the time when nationalism grew, but so did internationalism, and to a disinterested observer it might have seemed that the latter was steadily gaining in influence so that in time nationalistic antagonisms might give way to transnational cooperation and interdependence.

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2 Cross-cultural Encounters

In most parts of the world prior to 1870, there existed no formalized international relations. Nonetheless, people engaged in transnational exchanges on a cultural rather than a political level. While there could be no internationalism without nationalism, transnationalism was possible anywhere, any time. Although Asia, the Middle East, and Africa included few nations modeled on the Western example, they embodied their own non-national cultures, among which it was perfectly possible to develop a transnational network of interactions. Cultural encounters and exchanges, rather than international affairs, characterized the relationships among them as well as between the West and the non-West. Cultural encounters took many forms, ranging from religious to commercial activities. Christian missionaries ventured into new areas, often accompanying and relying on the protection of colonial administrators, while non-western religions expanded as well. International organizations fostered the transnational exchange of people and ideas, often converging around particular causes. And finally, a relatively small group of cosmopolitan sojourners—scientists, trades people, and knowledge producers—forged transnational networks of international scientific, cultural, and political cooperation, contributing to the rise of a modern consciousness. The cultural foundations of transnational trade are often overlooked by historians, but material culture in the mid- to late nineteenth century increasingly drew on transnational objects and art forms.

Religious Encounters Christian missionaries became key agents in the global transmission of cultural capital. Long before 1870, Christian churches and organizations had been active in the Middle East, South Asia, and East Asia, seeking to convert native populations to their faith. European and American missionaries who preached the gospel in foreign lands met with a range of responses. Since missionaries were not official representatives of their respective governments, these encounters were truly transnational and 31

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transcultural. Yet they were not always peaceful, as local authorities and people often resented, and were openly hostile to, missionaries arriving from the West. Missionaries of all Christian denominations had long actively engaged in proselytization in many parts of the world. During the first decades of the nineteenth century, the American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions, a New England Protestant organization, began sending missionaries to the Ottoman Empire, India, China, Japan, and Korea in increasing number. The Catholic Church had begun such efforts much earlier, in China during the fourteenth century and in Japan during the fifteenth, with missionaries arriving by land and by sea. Making connections everywhere in the world, they may be credited with having been pioneers in global networking. In these activities, missionaries had the support of their governments back home. Because many non-Christian states in the world, such as the Ottoman Empire and the Chinese Empire, resisted the coming of western Christian missionaries, sometimes even forbidding proselytization in the interior of their domains, missionaries turned frequently to their home governments for support. Diplomatic negotiations for the rights and protection of missionaries marked an important milestone in international relations in the first half of the nineteenth century. Here was an instance where non-governmental bodies did not hesitate to call upon secular state authorities for help, a pattern that would prevail for a long time. This does not mean, however, that religious bodies and their representatives overseas were mere agents of their home governments. Frequently, they took the initiative to serve the authorities of the country in which they worked as missionaries. Perhaps the best examples of this in the mid-nineteenth century were several American missionaries in China, who actively promoted understanding between the two countries through various activities, including the writing of books and pamphlets. Samuel Wells Williams, for instance, published The Middle Kingdom in 1848, a massive volume detailing the history, institutions, and customs of the Chinese people. The book remained a standard reference work for westerners eager to get to know the country. Williams also wrote a biography of George Washington in Chinese, and another missionary translated George Wheaton’s International Law into Chinese, considered to be the standard reference work at that time. Through some such work, Christian missionaries, Chinese officials, and others began to share a common experience. The missionaries’ perseverance did not always result in conversions to Christianity. And when it did, it sometimes had unintended consequences that eluded western as well as indigenous control. In the southern provinces of China, for instance, many were eager converts and launched their own mission to bring Christianity to the rest of the country, eventually erupting in the so-called Taiping Rebellion, loosely translated as the rebellion of “great peace.” This rebellion was brought about by a prophet, Hong

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Xiuquan (1813–1864), who had converted to Christianity and received instruction from the American Baptist missionary Issachar Jacox Roberts. He claimed to have had a vision in which it was revealed to him that he was the younger brother of Jesus, and that he was brought back from heaven to earth to rid the world of evil. He began preaching his own version of Christianity in rural China, calling for a new just and egalitarian order based on strict Christian principles. The teachings of Taiping prohibited the consumption of alcohol, the smoking of opium, and other sensual pleasures. Taiping religious doctrine also contained a progressive streak, giving more freedoms to women. They no longer had to bind their feet and were allowed to serve in the Taiping bureaucracy. The movement spread across China and directly challenged the Manchu dynasty by capturing Nanjing in 1854. Under the banner, “Heavenly Kingdom of Great Peace,” followers of Taiping led an uprising in the southern provinces and steadily moved north, until they were crushed by the central government with the assistance of foreign troops. Having begun as a non-governmental organization under the leadership of a Christian convert, it gradually became more political and saw itself as an alternative to the Qing dynasty. Eventually crushed in 1864, the Taiping Rebellion marked a truly transnational moment in Chinese history. Religious encounters were also deeply embedded within the system of colonialism. Colonizers brought with them Christian rituals and belief systems and set up institutions to convert indigenous populations. Their efforts produced mixed results, often leading to cultural clashes that sometimes turned violent. One particularly violent confrontation occurred in India, where the alleged violation of religious customs triggered a mutiny of Indian soldiers in the service of the East India Company in Meerut, north of Delhi: the Sepoy Rebellion of 1857. The soldiers believed that British officers were trying to force them to convert to Christianity because of what came to be known as the “greased cartridges controversy.” The British had introduced new rifles, which required soldiers to bite off the end of the cartridges to load the rifles. Even though the cartridges were supposedly greased with beeswax or linseed oil, rumor spread that they were greased instead with pig or cow fat, which went against the religious precepts of Hindus and Muslims. The soldiers, known as Sepoys, interpreted this as a plot by the British to force them to adopt Christianity. The uprising quickly spread to Delhi and other areas in northern and central India. The British responded with a brutal counterattack that eventually put down the rebellion, even though Indian soldiers vastly outnumbered the British by almost seven to one. The British prevailed in part because they were supported by Indian elites and large indigenous landholders who stood to gain from their allegiance to the colonial authorities. In the aftermath of the Sepoy Rebellion, the British government dissolved the privately-held British East India company and took direct control of the colony. Religious identity remained strong in India throughout the period of British colonial control.

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While they made common cause during the Sepoy Rebellion, almost a century later Muslims and Hindus clashed violently in 1947 after the British withdrawal and the division of the subcontinent into Muslim-dominated Pakistan and East Pakistan (now Bangladesh) and Hindu-dominated India. Other religions, too, were traditionally active in spreading their faith to distant parts of the world. Islam, in particular, had been a proselytizing religion, the followers of Mohammed believing it their mission not only to remain true to their faith but also to convert others. The Ottoman Empire had extended its sway to the Balkans, and at the end of the seventeenth century it almost reached the gates of Vienna. For the Ottoman leadership, it was a difficult question whether to accede to the wishes of western Christians to proselytize among its own people. Ultimately, though, the principle of pluralism in governance, namely that within the empire all nationalities and religions were tolerated, prevailed. From the 1830s on, American Protestant missionaries appeared in Asia Minor, engaging in religious and educational activities. Religion also served as a tool to consolidate power and sometimes functioned in ways that mirrored European nationalism, unifying groups across large geographic spaces. In these situations, religion worked as a glue to create an imagined community, with a sense of religious belonging much like the secular national communities of Europe and the Americas. Within the Ottoman Empire one such movement was Wahhabism, which originated in the eighteenth century on the Arabian peninsula. Its founder, Muhammad Ibn ‘Abd-al-Wahhab (1703–1792), felt that Sunni Muslim practices had become too relaxed and called for stricter observances among believers. He criticized what he deemed as people’s polytheistic beliefs, because they worshipped objects such as trees, monuments, tombs, and saints. He insisted on the absolute unity of God and found a supportive ear among the people of the Najd province as well as in the local ruler of the House of Saud. In 1803, Wahhabists under Saudi leadership and with the help of Saudi military forces attacked and took over the holy cities of Mecca and Medina, damaging religious sites and tombs in order to prevent what they deemed to be the blasphemous worshipping of false objects. The success and expansion of the movement in the nineteenth century can in part be attributed to its appeal to people who felt threatened by the influx of new ideas, goods, and people from Europe, which they deemed incompatible with their belief system. A crucial distinction between this and the Christian missionary movements was, however, that Wahhabism did not set out to proselytize among nonbelievers. A similar movement was underway in India and China. Centuries earlier, Buddhists from India had been actively engaged in proselytizing among the Chinese as well as in Southeast Asia, and from China Buddhist influence had spread to Korea and Japan. By the eighteenth century, however, such activity had declined. China had become predominantly secular with the Qing dynasty governing its vast territory with the aid of Confucianism, which

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provided the spiritual foundation for education and recruitment of officials. Whether or not Confucianism should be categorized as a religion was at the time, and still remains today, a matter of debate; to some, including Benjamin Franklin and the French philosopher Voltaire, it was primarily the basis for a secular system of governance, something they admired. The Chinese political elite accepted Confucianism as the fundamental ideology of the state, not something to be preached to others in order to convert them. India, in the meantime, had been under the rule of the Islamic Mughal Empire, but here, too, Muslims in Southeast Asia were not actively engaged in spreading their religion to neighboring lands, which after all were also mostly Islamic. While there was little indication of conscious efforts to spread Islam into new areas of the world, Islamic revival movements did, in fact, spread beyond the Arab peninsula. In West Africa, a Muslim cleric of the Fulani people, Usman Dan Fodio (1754–1817), began to call for a return to the original Islamic practices of Muhammad. He advocated for a strict regimen of prayers, fasting, and other religious exercises. And he claimed to have visions, one of which called on him to take up arms against the enemies of Islam. In 1804, he led a revolt against the rulers of Nigeria and set up a confederation of Islamic emirates. Women played an important role in the religious reform movement by contributing to the group’s military and religious campaigns and gaining status as religious scholars in their own right. Among them were several of Dan Fodio’s daughters, including Nana Asma’u, who is still revered in modern-day Nigeria as a model for modern feminists. Institutionalized religion played a somewhat different role in the international arena. It had always been an important agent of cultural change and exercised significant influence in national and international affairs, often in tandem with, but occasionally in opposition to, state power. In many parts of the world, church and state—religious institutions and governmental authorities—shared power and influence. Traditionally, the former had been more enduring than the latter, as can be seen in the fact that in Europe the Catholic Church had continued to wield influence on people’s beliefs and lives, whereas kingdoms, monarchies, and other secular authorities came and went. However, as modern nation-states emerged in the eighteenth century, they gradually came to amass authority, extending it even to churches and parishes. After the United States proclaimed the separation of church and state as a principle, it was becoming more common among nations to place state authority above the authority of the church, or rather assigning secular affairs to governmental offices, while leaving spiritual matters of faith and soul to the care of the church. The secularization of the state offered religious institutions an opportunity to claim their standing as non-governmental organizations, existing apart from administrative affairs but reserving for themselves the authority to speak for the consciences and concerns of private individuals. As such, they

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could at times wield significant influence. For instance, the Catholic Church spoke out against social ills like alcoholism and drug use and united with other organizations as well as individuals to promote such causes when it deemed the state to be insufficiently concerned. Quakers were at the forefront of the anti-slavery movement in Britain and the United States, while other Protestant churches, especially those that were called “evangelical,” actively preached alcoholic abstinence. Religious institutions also served as non-state actors when they devoted themselves to internationalist causes such as humanitarianism and cultural internationalism. All religions promoted international exchange and understanding, believing that their representatives were helping build global networks of peace. Some, notably Protestant Christians, believed that all people were equally God’s children, while others supported the activities of secular humanitarian organizations such as the International Red Cross. The Papacy at times intervened to support international cooperation and condemn violent conflict. In all such instances, religious and other nongovernmental organizations were steadily enlarging their spheres of action, thereby creating new layers of international relations. Religious belief systems also increasingly came into closer contact with one another over the course of the nineteenth century. These encounters formed part of a larger contingent of trade, political, and personal sojourners, who regularly traversed national boundaries. The result was clashes, conversions, and hybrids, as missionaries traveled across the globe, often arriving in the wake of colonial conquests. The new connections forged by these transnational actors permanently altered international relations and set the stage for epic clashes as well as periods of transnational cooperation.

Cultures of Commerce Among the non-state actors in the nineteenth century, one group was particularly notable for its role in international affairs: the network of businesspeople and manufacturers engaged in the making and marketing of goods across national boundaries. Although by definition their activities— bringing goods and individuals across national boundaries—belonged to the economic realm, they played a crucial role in transforming cultures on the local and transnational level and making an often lasting impact on the lives of people who became incorporated into their expanding global networks. Economic globalization, or the process of connecting the world through commerce and shipping, began around 1500, with the Age of Exploration, which established links between Europe, Africa, Asia, and the Americas. The Atlantic Ocean connected Europe and the west coast of Africa to the Caribbean and the American continent, while the Pacific, consisting of thousands of islands, opened new sea routes for ships carrying goods and

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people in all directions. What came to be known as the triangular economy included the vast shipment of humans from Africa to be sold as slaves in the Americas. The triangular economic relations between Europe, Africa, and the Americas played a key role in the industrialization of Europe and the United States. Without it the populations of Europe would not have increased at the rate they did, the resources would not have become available, and the extra food supplies necessary to sustain an industrial workforce would have been lacking. Slave labor in the Americas allowed white plantation owners to compete in the global marketplace selling sugar, cotton, tobacco, and other labor-intensive commodities at huge profits. It created a culture of exploitation, sustained by a belief system that cast whites in the role of superior civilization, on which they relied to justify their subjugation and enslavement of non-white peoples. Whereas during the sixteenth, seventeenth, and eighteenth centuries much world trade was characterized by the shipment of food items such as tea and spices as well as some luxury goods including porcelain, silverware, and carpets from the Middle East and parts of Asia to Europe and the Americas, the balance changed in the nineteenth century when Britain and some other European countries began to export their manufactured goods to various parts of the world. The Industrial Revolution in the West produced more than could be consumed at home, and as a result international trade and shipping expanded rapidly. This exchange of goods was not just an economic transaction, it was a cultural one as well. American middle-class households continued to clamor for material goods from Europe and exotic foods from African and Asian colonies, in part to project an air of cosmopolitanism, as the historian Kristin Hoganson has shown.6 A similar pattern could be observed in Europe, where material and culinary culture showed increasing signs of colonial influence. The cultural aspects of these trade relations left a lasting imprint on entire regions, not just the major trading posts. European and American merchants began appearing in the ports of China, Siam, Japan, and elsewhere, establishing their presence in “treaty ports,” namely those coastal cities where they were allowed to reside and engage in commercial activities. These traders, as well as missionaries who followed in their wake, were the first westerners to establish their presence in non-western countries. Intermingling between the two cultures was at first quite limited, but even so, local residents interacted with foreign merchants and missionaries in a number of ways, steadily transforming the character of the host cities. Not so much westernization but rather hybridization characterized these encounters. Foreigners and natives established a pattern of life that was derived from their respective backgrounds but fused the two in ways that became acceptable to both, including modes of communicating, dressing, and eating. Particularly in the vast British Empire of the mid-nineteenth century, commercial relations became part of a vast network of transnational

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entanglements. In their drive for expansion, the British had established outposts in Asia and the Americas by the early seventeenth century. Other European maritime powers established a foothold in Asia as well. The Dutch had been in Indonesia since 1602, but originally confined their outposts to the coastal regions of Java. In 1800, the Dutch East Indies became a formal colony. Fearing encroachments from other European powers into the area, the Netherlands took control of the entire region, employing brutal force, including a forced labor system, to extract resources from the interior and a quota system for delivery of highly profitable crops, among them sugar and coffee. European colonization efforts in China proved far more difficult. Westerners made inroads into China in the 1840s but never succeeded in establishing formal control. The British forced the Chinese into a series of what later came to be called “unequal treaties” in the aftermath of the Opium wars of 1839–1841, followed by a second round with French participation in 1857. The wars were the result of a trade dispute between China and Britain. The British sought Chinese tea, but Chinese merchants were not interested in much the British had to offer—except for opium, which the British cultivated in India. The Chinese government’s effort to stop the opium trade prompted a British military response. The treaties granted important trading rights to western powers and turned certain port cities, most prominently Hong Kong and Shanghai, into treaty ports where free trade prevailed. Subsequent treaties established the principle of extraterritoriality in China, which exempted foreigners from Chinese law and instead placed them under the jurisdiction of their own government’s legal system. While most European powers were primarily interested in free access to the Chinese market and to Chinese products, Russia and Japan made territorial inroads. The Russians descended from the north, and the Japanese moved into Korea and later Manchuria. The British did not encroach on China itself but took neighboring territories, among them Burma (today’s Myanmar). The French colonized Indochina, composed of Vietnam, Cambodia, and Laos. The Chinese were themselves actively engaged in expanding their empire into the northern and western territories of Manchuria, Mongolia, Tibet, and Xinjiang. The central state encouraged migration into these areas, both as a way to guard against intrusion from neighboring states, and to increase agricultural production for the rapidly growing Chinese population. In an ironic twist, China’s push into Central Asia mirrored European powers in both motivation and execution. Thus, China found itself in the unusual role as subject of European encroachment at the very moment it encroached on territories in its hinterland. In the neighboring country of Japan, too, significant developments took place during the 1860s that would usher in the political and cultural transformation of the country. The feudal regime that had been in existence since the early seventeenth century gave way to a western-style political

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system with a centralized administrative structure buttressed by modern armed forces. In the treaty ports, foreign and Japanese merchants were allowed to engage in commercial exchanges, thereby creating what amounted to a transnational community. It was these pockets of transnational engagement that eventually led to extensive international relations. Overseas colonialism was inextricably tied to the rapid pace of western industrialization, each fueling the other in an unequal cycle of resource exploitation, industrial production, labor extraction, and consumption. In the British Isles, where industrialization took root in the early eighteenth century, the connection to imperial expansion is directly traceable. The capacity to industrialize depended on the ready availability of natural resources, technology, capital, and labor. Britain had all of these and consequently was the first country to develop an industrial economy in the late eighteenth century. Its key domestic natural resources were coal and iron, which did much to fuel the earliest wave of industrialization. But Britain’s industrial capacity soon outstripped its domestic natural resources and prompted the extrication of resources available overseas in the far-flung colonies in North America, Asia, and Africa. Resource exploitation in these areas fueled industrial production in the metropole. One of the biggest colonial resources fueling British industrialization was cotton. English port cities like Liverpool became global hubs for the cotton trade in the early nineteenth century. Liverpool merchants took a leading role in receiving raw cotton from the major cotton-producing regions, most of them connected to the British Empire as current or former colonies. Those regions included the southern states of the US, South America, Egypt, and India, all of which shipped large quantities of cotton to the British port city. Once they arrived, merchants assessed, priced, and redistributed the bales to textile mills located in places like Lancashire and smaller textile mills strewn across the European countryside. According to historian Sven Beckert, the Liverpool merchants stood at the center of an emerging global cotton empire and profited handsomely at every turn of the manufacturing process from raw cotton to finished garment.7 Technology increased productivity, accelerated transportation, and reduced the cost of manufactured goods. A key invention driving industrialization was the steam engine by the Spaniard Jerónimo de Ayanz Y Beaumont in the early seventeenth century. In the 1780s, the Scottish inventor James Watt added pistons, which allowed steam engines to run without interruption. One of the first uses of the steam engine was for locomotives, which revolutionized transportation. Steam engines were eventually used in a vast array of mechanized production, including sugar refining and textile production. Another factor fueling industrialization was capital. Industrial entrepreneurs needed money to invest in new technologies and to increase production through the purchase of raw materials, expansion of factories, and hiring of labor. Here, too, Britain led the way. British financiers invested

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not only in their own manufacturing base but also abroad. By the 1870s, the pound sterling had become the world’s leading currency, financing much of the world’s industrial development. At the time, the UK and Ireland together accounted for roughly forty percent of global exports and just under thirty percent of imports. The final element accelerating industrialization was labor. Britain and Northern Europe experienced rapid population growth in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. This population boom was both a cause and a consequence of the industrial revolution. It produced additional workers as well as new consumers. Because rural areas could not offer adequate opportunities for the growing population, particularly for younger siblings who could not inherit or otherwise acquire land, people moved, first, from rural to urban areas, where the earliest factories were built, and later to overseas territories. Britain’s vast network of colonial outposts across the world offered diverse opportunities for European emigrants, but not all of these territories became settler colonies. The largest European settlements were established in British North America, Australia, New Zealand, and Southern Africa. The French settled in Algeria and North America, while the Spanish and Portuguese established a smaller number of outposts primarily in Africa, South America, and the Philippines. Those settlers played a vital role in the process of what later would be called cultural globalization, bringing their own language, customs, and culture to the new colonies. They, in turn, became transformed by the cultural experience in their new homelands. All elements of the process of industrialization, not just migration, engendered cultural transformations. The transfer of natural resources such as cotton, precious metals, agricultural products, and crafts from one part of the world to another transformed the material cultures at each node in the exchange. Technology transformed the ways people lived and worked and communicated with one another, both domestically and transnationally. Capital affected social relations and introduced what Max Weber would later call “the spirit of capitalism” to many parts of the world. Together with the transfer of workers to emerging industrial economies, these changes produced urban cultures that looked increasingly similar, just as each locale became more diverse, particularly in places with large immigrant populations, such as New York in the United States.

Migration Among all the transformations brought about by industrialization, migration had the greatest cultural impact. European migration across the Atlantic, the Pacific, and other oceans accelerated in the nineteenth century, in large part in response to the growing demand for labor in both agriculture and industry. Millions of Europeans chose the United States as their destination,

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a huge country with seemingly unlimited economic opportunities. American agriculture was export oriented. Cotton from the southern states, wheat from the Midwest, and other agricultural commodities were shipped to Europe to supply its growing population, an increasing portion of whom left their farms to work in factories and shops. Farmers from Britain, Scandinavia, and Germany quickly populated the American Midwest, while a large number of French moved to Canada. They brought their languages and cultural traditions with them so that the United States, Canada, and other destinations inevitably grew as multicultural nations. Migrants from Europe and North America also traversed the Pacific Ocean to settle in Australia and New Zealand. With the exception of French Canada (the Quebec region), the English language dominated in North America, Australia, and New Zealand, establishing the primacy of English as the language of economic globalization. These large-scale population movements had cultural implications as well as economic ones. The economic narrative emphasizes the role played by merchants, seafarers, and laborers (both free and forced) in meeting the needs of expanding global economies. Among the transatlantic laborers, the most conspicuous were slaves, the majority from the western parts of Africa, who were brought over to the Caribbean and the Americas to work on large plantations. At its height, in the mid-nineteenth century, several million African slaves worked in the western hemisphere. (The total population of the western hemisphere numbered over sixty million.) Their presence was not just part of the economic history of the region, but integral to its cultural history as well. African slaves brought with them their own linguistic, musical, literary, and religious traditions, in effect contributing to the cultural diversification of the western hemisphere. Their presence also affected the rhetoric of political discourse in the United States. Political leaders narrowed and distorted the meaning of freedom and justice to justify keeping the black population in perpetual bondage. Their captivity exposed the hypocrisy of the strongly held belief of the United States as “the land of the free” when nearly one-tenth of the population consisted of slaves. But it was not westerners alone who migrated long distances to establish connections with people in non-western lands. Economic globalization was buttressed by labor migration from the Asian continent, the Pacific islands, and the Middle East, all of whom clearly saw opportunities. Among them, Chinese emigrants were the largest group. The Qing dynasty had forbidden its subjects to leave the country, but by the middle of the nineteenth century, such restrictions had begun to be ignored, particularly during the Taiping uprising. During the 1850s and 1860s, a large number of Chinese left their native lands in the southern provinces to relocate elsewhere, in particular South and Southeast Asia. Chinese men began going abroad in search of better jobs, some venturing out across the Pacific to reach the west coast of the United States. There, during the 1860s and the 1870s, tens of thousands of Chinese laborers worked on railroad construction and in coal mines.

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They also settled in the growing cities along the west coast, particularly San Francisco. Even larger numbers settled in Southeast Asia, in particular Vietnam and the Philippines. Those settlements had a far longer history, with Chinese settlement in Manila dating back to the late sixteenth century. Cultural ideas also spread and evolved through short-term international travel. Not only the act of traveling abroad but also the experience of coming face to face with people and their cultures in various parts of the world widened circles of personal contact, which is the key to enhancing crosscultural awareness. Before 1870, traveling was not a widely shared activity. Even in the West, apart from armed forces or colonial administrators, few had an opportunity to go abroad or, if they did so, to stay for long periods of time. To be sure, those who had the time and means for traveling visited neighboring countries for personal enjoyment. Mountain-climbing, for instance, became popular in the nineteenth-century West, and cities such as Paris and Florence attracted tourists from various parts of Europe and North America. Artists were attracted to “exotic” scenery, as exemplified by Eugène Delacroix’s frequent trips to Morocco. Scientists, for their part, went all over the world to engage in research, Charles Darwin’s voyage to South America in the 1830s was perhaps the most famous example. At the time, going abroad for pleasure or even for research was limited to a tiny minority. Nevertheless, all such travels added up to the growth of networks conducive to establishing transnational awareness, which was an important aspect of cultural internationalism. An important by-product of the gradual increase in international travel was the rise of the travel narrative in the middle of the nineteenth century. The genre encompassed a broad spectrum of writings, from the highly scientific, political, and intellectual to narratives focused on landscapes, customs, foods, and manners. Alexander von Humboldt and Alexis de Tocqueville belonged in the former category. Humboldt traveled extensively at the turn of the nineteenth century, exploring South America, Cuba, and Mexico between 1799 and 1804, and writing up his extensive observations in numerous publications. While most of them were about the region’s flora and fauna, he included extensive descriptions of ancient civilizations and current political and social conditions. In 1804, he travelled to the United States before returning home to Europe. De Tocqueville’s deliberations on Democracy in America, first published in two volumes in France in 1836 and 1840, resulted from an extended research visit to the United States, originally to study its prison system by order of the French crown. The volumes’ great popularity not just in France but all over Europe and even within the United States in later decades significantly shaped the European perception of the American political, economic, and social system. He was later joined by other writers, such as Charles Dickens and Frances Trollope, whose observations focused more on the social conditions (in Dickens’ case) and manners and customs (in Trollope’s case) in the United States.

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Europeans also published narratives of journeys to Eastern Europe, Asia, and Africa. The French writer and historian François-René de Chateaubriand wrote about his travels to Palestine, Egypt, and Barbary in 1814 and set several of his novels in exotic places. In England, Alexander William Kinglake published an account of his travels to the Middle East region in 1844. Because international travel was still prohibitively expensive for ordinary citizens, these travel narratives offered an affordable alternative to learn more about the customs and culture of the far reaches of the globe, particularly the territories under European colonial control. They shaped attitudes and consolidated stereotypes of the non-western world that proved hard to break even as travel became more popular and affordable in the second half of the twentieth century. Migration was closely connected to the global movement of goods and capital. Those movements accelerated markedly throughout the nineteenth century, creating an intricate web of connections that bound the industrializing world ever closer to the rural areas of Asia, Africa, and the Americas. Cotton, timber, sugar, coffee, tea, and tobacco became staples of the industrial households of Europe and North America. Without access to and transfer of these goods from the periphery to the centers of manufacturing and consumption, industrialization would not have advanced at the pace that it did. The wealth generated by the exploitation of these resources benefited private merchants, financiers, entrepreneurs, and manufacturers. Its cost was shouldered by those living in the colonial outposts and working to extract or harvest the natural resources; the workers in the European and North American manufacturing centers; and the imperial governments that provided security in the colonies and along the shipping routes.

Disease, Death, and Nature A history of cross-border cultural encounters must also deal with microbes, medical science, and the natural environment. With increased migration came greater incidences of the transnational spread of diseases, as well as a greater awareness of differences in living conditions, life expectancies, medical sciences, and the role of climate and the environment in the health and wellbeing of people. For much of the nineteenth century, the average life expectancy in the world ranged from as high as fifty years in some western countries to thirty or forty in the rest of the world. The difference was due to a number of factors: the development of medicine, availability of qualified doctors and hospitals, and sanitary conditions at home, on the farm, and in the workplace. Modern medical theories and practices were much more widespread in the West than in the rest of the world, where traditional theories and practices prevailed. Yet western medical knowledge steadily spread, and some non-western countries began sending students to the West to expose them to the most advanced features of modern medical science.

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Despite advances in medical sciences, death was a constant companion of nineteenth-century life. Infant mortality rates remained extremely high in most countries throughout the century with rates between 100 and more than 200 deaths per thousand births. Violent deaths, particularly as a result of war, also remained high despite the fact that fewer wars were fought in the nineteenth century than before. Among them were the Crimean War involving Russia, Britain, and the Ottoman Empire, the American Civil War, and Prussia’s wars against Austria and France. There were also small-scale wars between European powers and non-western peoples, starting with the Opium war and followed by Britain’s fighting against local populations in South and Central Asia. Caring for those wounded and harmed by war became the mission of the International Committee of the Red Cross, founded in Switzerland in 1863, the first such organization devoted to wartime medical and humanitarian aid. The committee was instrumental in the drafting and adoption of the Geneva Convention in 1864, obliging signatories to care for wounded soldiers no matter which side they had been fighting on. This endeavor knew no national boundaries and suggested the rising awareness in the world that the worst tragedies of any war could be alleviated by transnational humanitarian interventions. Red Cross activities helped reduce wartime deaths, although by how much cannot be precisely stated. A far greater cause of death in the nineteenth century were the frequent outbreaks of highly contagious diseases, such as cholera, yellow fever, smallpox, and typhus. Cholera pandemics repeatedly spread throughout Europe, Africa, the Americas, and Asia, striking in five waves during the nineteenth century. The disease, which is caused by a bacterial infection of the small intestines and is transmitted through contaminated water, killed several million people in each outbreak. It did not respect national boundaries and its spread from one part of the world to others demonstrated the increased global interconnectedness. For instance, the first cholera outbreak of the century began in the Indian province of Bengal in 1817, had spread across India by 1820, reached China, Indonesia, Russia, and Central Europe before subsiding in 1824. The second pandemic moved from Russia westward through Europe, reaching North America by the early 1830s. Thus, even if diseases such as cholera could often be traced to a single local source, such as a water pump in the Soho neighborhood of London in the 1854 outbreak, they frequently spread within months to other regions, countries, and even continents. The spread of cholera in the nineteenth century closely followed the movement of soldiers, colonial merchants, and economic migrants from one region to another. The death toll from this and other pandemics throughout the century was significantly higher than deaths from war and violence. Diseases such as tuberculosis, pneumonia, and influenza had no effective cure. Medical advances by specialists in several countries eventually identified the source of contamination, but poverty and lack of sanitation in

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major cities delayed the effective suppression or eradication of these diseases. After the London physician John Snow had identified the particular water pump in Soho in London in 1854, he was able to halt the spread of the disease, but it took another two cholera outbreaks before German physician and researcher Robert Koch was able to identify the specific bacteria that caused the disease and develop a successful regimen to eliminate it in Europe. The most famous medical researcher of the period may have been Louis Pasteur, a specialist in bacteriology, whose innovations—including inoculations to prevent bacteria from spreading inside a body—occurred in the late nineteenth century. In the 1880s, Koch and Pasteur engaged in a heated dispute regarding their respective findings, highlighting the increasingly transnational network of medical knowledge exchange. In the field of epidemiology, there was the British physician William Farr, and the Italian scientist Filippo Pacini, whose own discovery of the cholera bacillus preceded Koch’s by thirty years but went largely unnoticed by the international medical community for a long time. Despite these deadly diseases, the world population increased steadily between 1800 and 1900, from roughly 900 million to a little over 1.6 billion. This was a much slower rate of growth than would come in the twentieth century, but the number of people in the western hemisphere grew much more rapidly (from 25 million to 144 million) than in Asia, Africa, or Europe. That, of course, had fundamentally to do with the massive movement of people across the Atlantic, which more than compensated for the hundreds of thousands of lives lost during the Civil War in the United States. Wartime deaths, diseases, and childhood mortality were all interrelated phenomena compounded by relatively few innovations in medical treatment or health, and little exchange of medical knowledge on a transnational scale. Natural disasters such as earthquakes, floods, fires, and drought were just as likely to claim hundreds of thousands of lives. Their causes and consequences included a cultural dimension in that responses to them reflected a society’s attitude toward calamity as well as the prevailing standards of medical and scientific knowledge. In some cases, what authorities claimed were natural disasters were actually brought about or exacerbated by human interventions, including droughts, floods, and fires. People’s responses to these disasters, as well as to epidemics and to dying in general, were deeply saturated with religious beliefs, rational considerations, and secular rituals of coping. An important question to ask, then, is how attitudes toward dying and death differed among countries and whether those attitudes changed as a result of coming into contact with other countries. These questions have yet to be adequately researched. It may well be that as countries and people came into closer contact with one another, ideas about life and death began to change. For instance, Christian missionaries may have brought with them the focus on living rather than dying when they moved into Asia. Buddhism had taught people throughout Asia that life

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on earth was but a phase in one’s longer life in the hereafter. To the extent that the idea of the sanctity of life fostered medical research, western medicine could bring new perspectives on life and death to non-western countries. In that sense, cross-cultural encounters had serious implications for life expectancies. When Charles Dickens visited hospitals in the United States in the 1840s, for instance, he was struck by the generally care-free atmosphere prevailing there. He felt that life and death were taken more casually across the Atlantic. But that may simply have been a reflection of the fact that medical science was more developed in Europe than in North America or anywhere else at that time. Americans went to Europe to study medicine, science, and other subjects, although in time medical schools were established in the United States so that the nation might train its own future doctors in the best possible environment. In Japan, “Dutch learning”—that is, the study of western sciences and ideas—was particularly influential in the field of medicine and demonstrated to the Japanese how different western medical science was from the traditional Chinese variety that had been more familiar to them. Attitudes toward the natural environment might also have differed substantially across various regions of the world, and here, too, researchers have not sufficiently explored how attitudes might have changed as a result of cross-cultural encounters. All literary traditions make references to the beauty and formidable force of nature, suggesting that people everywhere were awed by mountains, rivers, and oceans. But some cultures tended to view humans as part of the natural world, while others differentiated between humans and nature. In the West, this latter characteristic became prominent after the “scientific revolution” of the early modern era, when the natural world became an object of human observation, exploitation, and even conquest. Mountains and rivers became targets for human adventures, to be tamed and even “conquered.” Traveling was a means for men and women to express their superiority over nature, as was science. But there were also early stirrings of recognition of nature’s role in sustaining human existence. Alexander von Humboldt, the German naturalist, was consumed with studying nature, starting first in his own immediate environment of Brandenburg, then extending his explorations to other European countries, and eventually to the Americas. Thanks to a recent biography of his life and science, he is being rediscovered as a progenitor of the modern environmental movement, even though he lived and worked more than 200 years ago.8 He saw nature as a tightly woven network of organisms all dependent on each other for balance and survival and warned early on that human interference in the natural world had unforeseen and potentially devastating consequences for the environment. For instance, in observing the deforestation that made way for large monocultural plantations in Venezuela, Humboldt warned about barren land, soil erosion, and droughts. He might have been the first scientist to recognize the vital importance of large forests for rainfall and climate stability.

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Von Humboldt’s travels beyond Europe helped him recognize that in many non-western societies, humans considered themselves part of, rather than separate from or in control of, the natural world, so that all living things shared the same destiny. Increasing international contact in the nineteenth century may have had the effect of narrowing the gap between the western and non-western perspective. On one hand, Europeans and Americans traveling in the Middle East, Africa, or Asia introduced mountainclimbing, hiking, and sea bathing as important leisure activities, where nature and humans shared the same habitat. Not so much the conquest of nature, but enjoyment of what the physical world had to offer was at the core of such activities. This philosophy was not alien to non-western traditions, so that one may surmise that there was a great deal of give and take between the West and non-West at this level. As Asians and Africans came into contact with western visitors, they may have come to appreciate better the beauty of their natural environment on its own terms. Indicators of this view can be detected in paintings. In China, for instance, there had been a long tradition of painting lakes, rivers, and trees in brush, the so-called traditional Chinese painting. As westerners began to introduce the art of oil painting and perspective, some in China began to adopt the new ways of depicting nature. There was much mutual appreciation, and the result was cohabitation; not the overshadowing of one tradition by another, but the parallel existence of the two. Artists established new connections, borrowing from one another and enriching the way in which they related to the natural world. Similarly, traditional Japanese paintings, as exemplified by Hiroshige’s depictions of Mount Fuji along the road from Edo (later Tokyo) to Kyoto, would impress some westerners with their distorted perspective, while at the same time Japanese artists began to appreciate and incorporate western art’s approach to nature. Music was another medium through which humans connected to the natural environment. For instance, Haydn’s Water Music and Beethoven’s Pastoral Symphony each offered an idyllic representation of natural scenes. Romantic and nationalist composers, such as the Czech Bedrˇich Smetana with his composition Má Vlast (My homeland), embedded natural elements into their music and celebrated the natural beauty of their homelands. National pride was inextricably tied to the perceived beauty of the domestic landscapes. Non-western music was not traditionally known for its depiction of natural scenes, so those in the Middle East or Asia who heard European music may have gained a fresh approach to waterways and pastures, although it would take a while before Iranian, Indian, or Japanese composers would begin to make music in a similar fashion. These artistic forms of conservation of the environment formed part of the manifold ways in which the natural environment became an instrument for connecting people of the world to one another. They preceded by several decades the movement to conserve nature, which was spearheaded at the turn of the twentieth century by naturalists with the establishment of

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national parks and nature preserves across Europe and the Americas. But these examples also suggest that international relations could not be separated from intercultural relations and that these two sets of interactions affected one another. As nations relate to one another in peace or in war, ideas about life and death will be affected, and when people meet across borders, either directly or indirectly, they come to share their experiences, producing layers of consciousness through literature, art, or music. Human beings, in other words, are being constantly redefined, as are their interrelationships with the natural environment.

Racial Encounters Cross-cultural encounters among peoples meant above all engaging with difference. Perceptions of racial and ethnic difference were already well developed by the middle of the nineteenth century. The idea that the modern nation-state represented racially and ethnically identifiable groups of people both reflected and encouraged the growth of racial and ethnic consciousness in European countries. It propelled different ethnic entities to begin calling for constructing a nation of their own. Italians embraced the idea a unified country, Germans sought their own German nation, and Poles struggled to create their own political space divorced from the Russian and Austrian empires in an effort to build an independent nation. Transnational ethnic consciousness became a source of nationalism. Furthermore, as Europeans expanded into overseas territories, they searched for non-commercial justifications for imperial rule over far-flung peoples and places. The emergence of the new imperialism alongside a revolution in evolutionary science helped transform what had been prejudice against people of different ethnic and racial background into a hardened racial ideology. Europeans convinced themselves that they inhabited the pinnacle of civilization and had thus earned the right to subjugate the lesser races of Asia and Africa. They found a rich scientific literature to support that claim, beginning with the theory of natural selection espoused by Charles Darwin. He had developed his ideas about “the preservation of favoured races in the struggle for life” during a voyage to South America, the South Pacific, and Australia aboard the H.M.S. Beagle in the early 1830s, published twenty years later in The Origins of Species. Darwin’s emphasis on natural selection and evolutionary teleology came to define the nineteenthcentury racial worldview. Darwin was the most prominent scientist to argue for a theory of natural selection, but he was not the first to do so. His grandfather, the physician Erasmus Darwin, had already developed a version of the theory in the 1780s. Even before Erasmus, the seventeenth-century philosopher Thomas Hobbes had characterized nature as an arena of destructive competition. Human beings living in a state of nature—that is, without any form of social

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FIGURE 1 The HMS Beagle near the Straits of Magellan during Charles Darwin’s voyage around the world, 1831 to 1836. © Getty Images.

organization or what he called a “social contract”—would face a life that was free yet “nasty, brutish, and short.” Thomas Malthus’ 1798 Essay on Population also anticipated Darwin’s emphasis on the struggle for survival. Darwin first read Malthus’ Essay on Population in 1838, yet it was the voyage on the Beagle more than previous scholarship that spurred him to imagine a new paradigm for the natural world. In the rocky wastes of Tierra del Fuego and the Galapagos Archipelago, Darwin saw nature not as a stable, harmonious mechanism, as scholars and scientists had assumed, but as a howling wilderness filled with competition and destruction. The European conquests of North and South America inspired Darwin’s theories of natural selection. In Buenos Aires, Darwin wrote, “few countries have undergone more remarkable changes, since the year 1535, when the first colonists of La Plata landed with seventy-two horses. The boundless herds of horses, cattle, and sheep, not only have altered the whole aspect of the vegetation, but they have almost banished the guanaco, deer, and ostrich.”9 The triumph of European species in the Americas reinforced European ideas of their own superiority over other places and people. From the observations of survival of the fittest in the natural world, it was only a small step toward assumptions about racial and class hierarchies in the social environment of human beings and nations. Darwin could hardly avoid noticing the similarities between the cut-throat competition he

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observed within the natural world and the struggle for resources and wealth within the industrial-capitalist environment of mid-century England. Scientific racism and Darwin’s theory of natural selection shared many of the same assumptions. Both, for instance, sanctioned competition as a test of fitness to survive. Darwin had hinted at the compatibility when he wondered about the benighted condition of the natives of Tierra del Fuego he had encountered during his voyage on the Beagle. “I could not have believed how wide was the difference between savage and civilized man,” he wrote. “[I]t is greater than between a wild and domesticated animal, inasmuch as in man there is a greater power of improvement.” Around the same time the Philadelphia physician Samuel George Morton made similar observations about America’s African American and native population. He drew on pseudo-scientific ideas to argue that Indians were biologically inferior and therefore destined to lose in competition with Europeans. Writing in 1839, Morton contended that Indians’ intellectual faculties “appear to be of a decidedly inferior cast when compared with those of the Caucasian or Mongolian races.” No amount of education, Morton believed, could improve the Indians; they were fated for extinction. Darwin’s notion that the natural environment shaped human character facilitated the development of a theory of scientific racism, particularly his view that the savagery of the inhabitants of Tierra del Fuego was the product of their harsh environment. The natives, he wrote, “naked and scarcely protected from the wind and rain of this tempestuous climate, sleep on the wet ground coiled up like animals.” Their subsistence consisted of shellfish and sea-eggs. “In search of food they are compelled unceasingly to wander from spot to spot.” As a result, “these poor wretches were stunted in their growth . . . their skins filthy and greasy, their hair entangled, their voices discordant, and their gestures violent. Viewing such men, one can hardly make oneself believe that they are fellow-creatures, and inhabitants of the same world.” Reminiscent of Hobbes, Darwin argued that nature, “by making habit omnipotent, and its effects hereditary, has fitted the Fuegian to the climate and the productions of his miserable country.” The Harvard zoologist Louis Agassiz echoed that idea in the 1850s when he argued that distinct environments created different races, endowing each with particular attributes that were inherently unequal. Agassiz became known as one of the founders of scientific racism. He drew on some and rejected other parts of Darwin’s theories of evolution, maintaining a lifelong faith in creationism. Together these theories distinguished between races that were unable to overcome the challenges of a harsh environment and those who tamed nature. Europeans possessed superior qualities, scientists speculated, because they had learned to cultivate the land and thus make nature adapt to human needs rather than the other way around. For Europeans, then, civilization became synonymous with the regulation of nature. Alfred Russel Wallace, who formulated his own theory of natural selection independently of Darwin, argued in 1864 that the European had risen “in a few centuries

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from the condition of the wandering savage with a scanty and stationary population, to his present state of culture and advancement.” Bolstered by this supposedly scientific evidence, Europeans could regard as natural their expansion at the expense of indigenous populations. This logic enabled them, as Wallace explained, “when in contact with the savage man, to conquer in the struggle for existence, and to increase at his expense, just as the better adapted increase at the expense of the less adapted varieties in the animal and vegetable kingdoms.”10 The expansion of Europeans beyond the European continent, he concluded, was the natural improvement of humanity. As they encountered different ethnic communities, Europeans began to develop and expand on theories about race, in particular about the relative qualities and characteristics of various racial groups. Something akin to proto-anthropology was bound to emerge out of such inter-racial encounters. Racial scientists published books laying out in great detail various subcategories of the human race. Even if the “science” of race was underdeveloped, treatises appeared comparing the white, black, and other races in the world, and about the children of parents of different races. In the middle of the century, European and American scientists began to formalize a hierarchy of races. For quite some time they had adhered to a general consensus that there were four principal races in the world, all color-coded: white, black, red, and yellow (sometimes referred to as brown). Their skin colors were sufficiently distinctive that it seemed plausible to generalize about racial categories. Not surprisingly, all writers placed the white race at the top, characterizing it as intelligent, innovative, and capable of constant improvement. Most writers put Asians (“yellow” or “brown” people) on the next tier, the “red” Indians next, and “blacks” at the bottom, depicting them as lazy and not susceptible to improvement and education. This sort of racial determinism had become quite popular in Europe and North America by the 1850s and was used to explain why the western countries were more advanced technologically, more adventurous in “opening” foreign markets, and more eager to send their own people all over the world. Racial determinism also served to justify colonizing foreign lands, exploiting foreign natural resources, and denying colonized peoples the rights enshrined in the major post-revolutionary, enlightened, European and American constitutions. Concepts such as liberty, fraternity, equality, national sovereignty, and self-determination applied to whites only, paving the way for the colonization and subjugation of non-white peoples. The United States did not engage in overseas imperialist ventures until the turn of the twentieth century, which did not mean that Americans eschewed the idea of empire and colonialism. To the contrary, throughout the nineteenth century American presidents sought to extend the reach of US territory through westward expansion and through political maneuvers designed to block European powers from extending their own sphere of influence in the western hemisphere. Until the early twentieth century, the

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United States lacked the power to enforce any hemispheric or global imperial ambitions, but that did not keep its presidents and foreign secretaries from articulating them periodically. In 1823, when President Monroe issued a statement that warned European powers not to expand their colonial foothold in the Americas beyond what they already held, he had no means to enforce it. The Monroe Doctrine remained an aspirational document for the remainder of the nineteenth century, until the United States intervened in Cuba and proved that it had the power both to block further European expansion and to expel European powers from the western hemisphere. Americans pursued westward expansion for many of the same reasons as their European counterparts, above all the exploitation of natural resources. The American West held great mineral deposits, among them coal, copper, gold, and silver. It offered grazing land for cattle, fertile ground for agriculture, and lumber. Seeing opportunities for capitalist investment, entrepreneurs set up cotton plantations, cattle ranches, and mining operations, relying on cheap labor in the West and slave labor in the South, displacing Indigenous people who had lived and worked on the land as long as they could remember. National security also played a role as Americans sought to reduce their dependence on European imports. Furthermore, much like Europeans, Americans looked upon the West as an outlet for surplus migration. Westward movement served as a guarantor of social mobility, a key advantage the United States had over Europe. Americans saw the West as “free” space, ignoring the presence of Native Americans in the western territories. And lastly, Americans annexed western lands as a preemptive strike against potential European encroachments. Their primary adversaries were the Spanish who, until the mid-nineteenth century held military outposts in the western regions of the continent. By the end of the Mexican-American war in 1848, the United States had established firm control over the Hispanic territories of the American West, paving the way for the admission of several new states into the union. Americans differed from Europeans not so much in what they did, but how they went about justifying it. They infused their concrete territorial aspirations with a rhetoric much in line with that of the founders of the republic, including ideas about spreading democracy, liberty, prosperity, and civilization. By the middle of the nineteenth century, they had developed the concept of “manifest destiny,” which served to legitimize their expansionist policies. It emerged in the 1840s after the Mexican-American War, when the United States annexed Texas, and absorbed the Oregon territory. Its originator was John O’Sullivan, an otherwise unremarkable businessman and democratic politician, who declared at the time that the United States had a mission “to overspread the continent allotted by Providence for the free development of our yearly multiplying millions.” O’Sullivan drew freely on religious tropes to justify the practical pursuit of westward expansion. There was a distinct racial connotation to the idea of manifest destiny, as westward expansion was closely associated with the spread of Anglo-Saxon

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civilization and the displacement of native American populations. Supporters of expansion either ignored native peoples who resided in those western territories or depicted them as part of the savage natural environment. To them manifest destiny meant cultivation of the wilderness and the establishment of outposts of western civilization. An 1872 painting by the artist John Gast illustrated both the idea of manifest destiny and the racial connotations of westward expansion. Entitled “American Progress,” it portrayed an angelic white female figure, hovering over the American continent, facing westward. The eastern section of the continent on the right side of the painting is saturated in light golden-earthy hues, becoming progressively darker toward the left side, representing the American West. Holding a book in one hand and a telegraph wire in the other, the figure faces westward bringing with her light, education, and knowledge. “Progress” in the painting is depicted as technology and land cultivation. In the background on the right side viewers can make out the faint contours of the Brooklyn Bridge under construction at the time. The telegraph posts and wires symbolize the new communication technology, transporting news and knowledge across the continent. Three railroad tracks and steam-powered trains move in the same direction, alluding to the completion of the transcontinental railroad network three years earlier.

FIGURE 2 John Gast, “American Progress,” 1872. Oil painting on canvas. Envisioning America’s Manifest Destiny. © Public domain.

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Progress in this painting also meant the advance of white people across the continent. Stagecoaches and covered wagons carrying settlers occupy the center of the painting, while in the foreground in the eastern part farmers cultivate the land. The dark shadows in the west depict native Americans on horseback, tepees, buffalo, and other wild beasts. Humans and animals in this section of the painting appear to blend into one another and become part of the wilderness. Much like European colonialists’ depiction of their role in Africa and Asia, Euro-Americans saw their advance as a triumph of the white race over the darker ones. They had convinced themselves that they were destined to rule over and civilize the tribes on the “dark continent” of Africa as well as native tribes of the American West. Cultivation and civilization, as defined by white Anglo-Saxons, became the ideological foundation for the material expropriation and exploitation of native populations. Racial ideology has to be understood as both cause and consequence of the new imperialism of the nineteenth century. By establishing trading posts in far-flung places in Africa and Asia, Europeans came into closer contact with peoples of different cultures and ethnicities. The appropriation of overseas territories, the extraction of foreign natural resources, and the enslavement and deportation of Africans for use as laborers in the Americas were incompatible with the enlightenment ideas circulating at the time in the European heartland, and thus required an ideology that justified the former and preserved the latter. Liberty and equality came to be considered as rights reserved for white elites who occupied the pinnacle of civilization, who had invented the technology to turn natural resources into industrial products, and who had developed sophisticated ways to govern themselves in a way that maintained order and advanced knowledge, in short, those who had developed a modern consciousness. The colonial subjects in the overseas territories, the rationale went, could not yet govern themselves; they needed guidance and white authority to manage their natural riches and civil affairs. The more engaged the metropole became in the affairs of the colonies, the more rigid and static became its ideology of racial supremacy. In other words, racial hierarchies were further reinforced and enshrined in the system of governance as a consequence of the encounter between the two unequal groups. Whites devised more rigid structures and rules, in order to maintain the two-class system of racial castes and keep native populations in a subordinate position. The racial hierarchies in the colonial empires mirrored the class hierarchies that became ever more visible in the industrial centers of Northern Europe and North America. The stirrings of opposition to these hierarchies that emerged in the middle of the century created new transnational imagined communities and a new political ideology that would transform European and American politics by the end of the nineteenth century.

3 Imagined Communities

While encounters among peoples of different ethnic, racial, and national background produced awareness of difference, which frequently erupted in competition and conflict, they could also create awareness of common interests and shared grievances, which produced new transnational communities built around particular causes and concerns. These groups often emerged first on the local level in towns, cities, or regions and later spread to the national and eventually international stage. The accelerated movement of people and ideas in the nineteenth century led to a proliferation of such groups, producing a phenomenon that would only in the late twentieth century be called international non-governmental organizations. The strongest of these international organizations or movements emerged in the political realm with the rise of socialism and communism. Other groups formed around humanitarian, artistic, scientific, and trade interests, constituting themselves as imagined communities whose operations transcended the boundaries of a single state.

Ideological Communities As an ideological community, socialism first emerged in the heartland of industrialization, Great Britain. It grew out of the dramatic economic changes brought about by industrialization, which had far-reaching social, political, and cultural consequences, transformed class relations within each country, and affected the international balance of power. Old landed elites lost power as new industrial entrepreneurs gained influence and demanded a political voice commensurate with their growing wealth. At the same time, industrialization deepened the gulf between rich and poor. Urban slums housed a growing class of laborers, living in cramped multi-story tenement homes, without sanitation and public utilities. A few blocks away, they could witness the construction of new opulent mansions lining the major boulevards of cities like Paris, London, and New York. As the poor eked out a living in closer proximity to the centers of wealth and power, they became increasingly conscious of the growing disparity in 55

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their living and working conditions. The industrial mode of production transformed work patterns; daily routines became increasingly monotonous, physically and mentally demanding; the work day dominated by fixed schedules. Urban workers had to contend with overcrowded living quarters, polluted air, and contaminated water. Most cities lacked municipal services such as garbage removal, running (clean) water, and sewer systems. These conditions provided fertile ground for the easy spread of communicable diseases, raising the mortality rate among urban populations. The dismal circumstances of urban working-class life in mid-century Europe spurred the rise of a new working-class consciousness and with it the popularity of the new political ideologies of socialism and communism. Socialism may be characterized as an ideology that put the interests of the society, particularly of the poor in rural and urban areas, above the state. Socialists promised to redistribute wealth, while communists insisted on sharing the national wealth and resources among all citizens equally, promising to destroy the existing system of private property and business ownership. Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels developed the theoretical framework for the transnational socialist movement after observing workers’ living conditions in Germany, France, and England. Both came from a middle-class background in Germany. They met in Paris in the 1840s, where they shared an interest in radical political causes and found the spirit of the 1848 revolution too timid. In Paris, they joined a secret society of mostly German exiles that called itself the Communist League. For this organization, they wrote what became the Communist Manifesto with its famous last line “Proletarians of the World Unite.” It was clear to them at the outset of their campaign that their new ideology had transnational political appeal. The Communist Manifesto asserted that the existing state system was beholden to the interests of the rich and the powerful and that ordinary people, above all workers, should organize themselves to weaken or even destroy such a system. The manifesto called upon workers of all countries to unite and rid themselves of their shackles. This was an unmistakable call to eliminate the existing system of states and establish a new world order on the basis of the solidarity of workers, one of the first examples of a transnational imagined community. Few went that far, and the majority of socialists remained more reformist than revolutionary. Nevertheless, socialism as well as communism presented a formidable challenge to the existing systems of governance in Europe. Socialism and communism were inherently internationalist ideologies, built on the premise that the working masses had more in common with one another across national boundaries than with members of other classes within their own nation. They moved alongside labor from Europe to the Americas, Australia, and New Zealand, in short everywhere industrial workers suffered dismal working and living conditions and encountered similar social and economic dislocations. The process of developing a

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transnational political consciousness, however, was slow, coming to fruition only in the late nineteenth century and in European countries with a high rate of urbanization and industrialization, particularly Britain, Germany, and Italy. While these countries established strong political socialist parties by the end of the nineteenth century, others, such as the United States, never developed a strong socialist movement, much less political party. That did not mean that the ideology held no appeal for American workers. Rather, their political activism came through the medium of labor movements, strikes, and local protests, such as the 1886 Chicago Haymarket protests and subsequent deadly riots. When Marx and Engels wrote their Communist Manifesto, few industrial workers were well enough prepared or organized to mount a global political movement. Thus, when an economic depression in 1847 led to factory closures, rising food prices, and unemployment in major European cities, they supported the liberal middle classes in the wave of revolutions that swept across Europe in 1848. In France, Austria, Russia, Italy, Hungary, and several German states, but also in parts of Latin America, liberal activists overthrew monarchical regimes. These revolutions sought a variety of reforms, including the establishment of constitutional governments that put “the people” back in power. Those who advocated for “the people,” however, usually meant the middle class, not Marx’s proletariat. After initial successes in the spring of 1848, most revolutions suffered from infighting between middle-class liberal and more radical working-class factions, but also among different ethnic groups in places like the Austro-Hungarian Empire. While different groups vied for power and called for national self-determination, aristocrats saw an opportunity to regain power, successfully thwarting the more radical reform plans of the revolution. In a few states revolutionaries managed to hold on to some reforms. For instance, the Danish king accepted a constitution and parliamentary rule. In France, however, the so-called Second Republic proved short-lived, ending in 1852 with the installation of Louis Napoleon, a nephew of Napoleon, as new emperor of France. In the German states, revolutionaries, mostly students, intellectuals, and bourgeois liberals, demanded unification, self-determination, universal (male) suffrage, freedom of the press, and freedom of assembly. In May, they succeeded in convening a first national assembly of delegates from several German states. Yet the effort was short-lived as well, first losing support from Prussia and Austria, the two largest German states, where reactionary forces had regained control, and ultimately being forcefully dispersed by military contingents from other states. By 1851, the pre-revolutionary order was restored, and the traditional aristocratic elites were back in power. In Ireland, the 1848 revolutionary upheaval was the culmination of several factors, some long-standing political grievances, others acute hardships and dislocations arising from the potato famine of 1848, which was causing mass starvation in the Irish countryside. Ireland had come under the jurisdiction of Britain in 1801, but a strong republican

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independence movement persisted throughout, shaped by the religious differences between a largely Catholic population and a political elite that was disproportionately Protestant. There had been an Irish rebellion in 1798, inspired by the French Revolution, and a movement called Young Ireland since the 1830s. Then in 1848 a potato blight destroyed almost the entire crop in Ireland, leading to widespread famine. The extent of the famine was a direct result of industrialization and British rule on the island. With the development of commercial agriculture and cash crops to support a growing industrial workforce, crop failures had a far more devastating effect when they occurred. In the years prior to the blight, many farmers had switched from subsistence farming, which included a diversity of produce, to producing cash crops, making them more vulnerable to drought and crop diseases like the potato blight. The common suffering and a growing wrath against the English intruders strengthened the Irish sense of separatism and stoked revolutionary sentiment. One of the leading political activists for Irish independence at the time, John Mitchel, wrote that “the Almighty, indeed, sent the potato blight, but the English created the famine.” In fact, during the potato famine, Ireland continued to export food and livestock to England, leaving the peasant population to starve. Furthermore, the English adherence to a laissez-faire economy led them to reject welfare measures to feed the population. A brief revolt by the Young Irish in the summer of 1848 was quickly put down by police forces, effectively ending the revolutionary movement. Mitchel had already been arrested earlier in the year and sent into penal exile in Bermuda. Many other revolutionary activists went into exile, most of them to the United States. In the Irish case, working-class discontent merged with ethnic nationalism and religious separatism to produce a powerful sense of community in opposition to England and in solidarity with a broader transnational revolutionary movement. Revolutions and reform movements also arose in several Central and South American states, including Chile, Brazil, and Mexico. In Chile, regional activists in the province of Pernambuco revolted against the conservative regime of Manuel Montt in 1851, but their struggle ended in failure. In Brazil, revolutionary challenges to the Brazilian empire lasted from 1848 to 1852. Mexico’s conservative government also faced challenges, particularly after the loss of vast northern territories to the United States in the 1845–1848 Mexican-American War, eventually leading to reforms and a succession of liberal governments in the 1850s. The spread of revolutionary sentiments across the Atlantic demonstrated the increasing transnational flow of ideas and people across great distances. While the 1848 revolutions were unsuccessful and did not bring about the predominance of any of the new political ideologies considered radical at the time—liberalism, socialism, communism—they laid the groundwork for several important political and cultural transformations in the latter part of the nineteenth century, including the unification of Italy and Germany

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and the rise of socialist, communist, and liberal parties, that would come to dominate the political landscape by the turn of the twentieth century. These upheavals marked the beginning of a global consciousness of large-scale economic and cultural transformations that the current political systems could not address adequately. Industrialization, urbanization, migration, and mechanization changed people’s lives, shifted political and cultural power within each state and across national boundaries, and created new transnational communities organized around class interests and political ideologies. The imbalance of power that resulted from these shifts would eventually cause massive economic instability in the industrial world. Because political leaders were unwilling or unable to address these imbalances and implement solutions through meaningful reforms, they set the stage for the First World War in the twentieth century.

Cultural Communities and Customs National or political affiliations made up only part of an individual’s identity. People usually belonged to a number of imagined communities throughout their lifetimes, some local, some national, and by the middle of the nineteenth century, increasingly transnational. Transnational communities normally existed outside of, or side by side with, the formal state apparatus. Religious communities, including churches, were among the most prominent of these communities, with powerful organizational structures that operated transnationally. Although at one point in history and in some states, religious and political entities were closely intertwined, by the nineteenth century religious affiliations and practices were increasingly relegated to the realm of the “private,” while public institutions such as the government and the armed forces followed secular rules, which were to remain largely separate from private beliefs or personal lives. A person would simultaneously acquire public membership in a nation awarded through citizenship and private membership in “non-state communities” such as religious organizations, business associations, athletic clubs, or other interest groups. The former came with one’s birth (hereditary), through a formal process of application to a state authority, or marriage. The latter was determined by personal, political, or professional interests and had to be actively pursued. Only this latter process of actively choosing one’s belonging to a particular imagined community was capable of transcending the boundaries of the state. While national, racial, and ethnic identities are largely affiliations determined by one’s birth and thus nearly impossible to shed, other identities are consciously acquired later in life, so that it is possible to replace or augment them with others. Despite these differences, both sets of identities only become real once they develop a consciousness. As Benedict Anderson has shown, in order to actively become part of a national community, each

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individual has to be able to imagine that community, or, to put it differently, to develop a consciousness of belonging to that community. For instance, there emerged in the early nineteenth century private groups that identified themselves as nationalistic and even patriotic, dedicated to the cause of enhancing national honor, prestige, and power. Some of them emerged during the Napoleonic wars, when citizens of France clamored for their patrie, waving flags and singing “La Marseillaise,” which became the national anthem. Not all French citizens belonged to those societies; they were French nationals without choosing to become French nationalists. In the United States, too, patriotic organizations consciously promoted nationalism, often through public displays of national symbols such as the flag or the anthem. In other countries organizations emerged dedicated to developing a sense of national consciousness, such as in mid-nineteenthcentury Italy and Germany. In these two cases, as in others, the spirit of nationalism preceded the actual territorial creation of the nation. Nongovernmental nationalist organizations, dedicated to the preservation of national cultural and linguistic traditions, became an international phenomenon. Despite the spread of nationalist fervor, or perhaps because of it, various movements and organizations emerged dedicated to broader humanistic endeavors that transcended national boundaries and celebrated a common European canon of ideals borne out of the enlightenment tradition and the spirit of the French and American revolutions. Those were causes based on values such as freedom, equality, and others that today would be subsumed under the umbrella of human rights. Among the earliest and most influential of these organizations were those that sought to abolish slavery in the Atlantic world. The anti-slavery movement included advocates in Great Britain and North America, making it one of the first transnational movements. The first abolitionist organizations were formed by English Quakers in the late eighteenth century, soon joining with African abolitionists, most prominently Olaudah Equiano, and advocates in the United States and West Indies. They used similar arguments on both sides of the Atlantic to abolish the slave trade and eventually slavery altogether. English abolitionists succeeded in banning the slave trade in 1807 with the Slave Trade Act, and in 1833 with the Slavery Abolition Act. Abolitionists in the United States campaigned not so much against the national government as against the slaveholding states in the South. But the objective was the same; the national emancipation of slaves, even if it meant disrupting the public order through illegal campaigns, such as in the “underground railroad,” which clandestinely helped slaves flee from their plantations so that they could live freely in northern states. New cultural communities also emerged through utopian movements, all envisioning a future in which nations would either cease to exist or live in peace with one another. While this was an international phenomenon (though concentrated in England and the United States), few communities

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reached a transnational following. Some utopian schemes, for instance the one advocated by the Welsh textile manufacturer and social reformer Robert Owen in the early nineteenth century, called for the establishment of communities in which members jointly owned property and resources and cooperated with one another in such matters as childcare, education, and public order. If successful, the hope was, these utopian communities would ultimately replace existing states. Anarchists went a step further and envisaged the global cooperation of all people regardless of their separate national origins. As formulated by some European anarchists in the midnineteenth century, people would ignore national distinctions, cross borders, and establish new communities as the basis of a new world order. To facilitate communication among people who spoke different languages, Ludwik Lazar Zamenhof, a Polish linguist, devised a new universal language, which he called “Esperanto.” These reformist movements envisioned a transnational order of brotherhood, mutual assistance, and cooperation regardless of their national identities. These movements provided a basis for the development of a nascent form of internationalism. Newly created transnational identities required new customs, and language became a crucial vehicle for the spread of those invented or hybridized customs. It became a barometer of the success or failure of internationalism as an idea. Westerners had to establish some means of transnational communication with non-westerners in order to transmit ideas and conventions beyond their own communities. As few Europeans or Americans bothered to learn Turkish, Hindu, Chinese, or other non-western languages, it was up to their host populations to take the initiative to devise a way to communicate with them. The result was what was called “pidgin English,” namely some English words strung together to form sentences that were usually simplified but sufficient for minimum business transactions. Going beyond this level of linguistic competence, Asian countries established schools where foreign languages were taught. Part of this was the widespread recognition that Europe and America were dominant in communications technology, transportation, and even military equipment, so that it was imperative to study their languages to learn something about the modern science from which their advanced systems of commerce, transportation, and communication seemed to be derived. Earlier in the eighteenth century, some Japanese had begun to study the Dutch language because the Netherlands was the only western country whose merchants and citizens were allowed to enter Japan in limited numbers. They brought medical, scientific, and general literature written in Dutch, so some Japanese began pursuing what they called “Dutch learning,” first by studying the language and then by using it to read books that conveyed what appeared to be the latest information. As other Europeans as well as Americans began to arrive, Japanese realized that the English language was more widely used than Dutch, so they founded schools to teach English and train interpreters. By the middle of the nineteenth century,

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people in most non-western countries had begun to learn English and, to a lesser extent, other European languages. Europeans and Americans did not have the same sense of urgency about studying non-western languages, but some became fascinated with those languages and even began to recognize the scholarly merit of studying them. Yale and Harvard universities, for instance, hired teachers from China in the 1860s and started Chinese language instruction, not so much to train experts as to prepare young students for business or missionary careers. By then, a large number of Chinese workers had arrived on the west coast, and some of them moved eastward across the continent, establishing Chinatowns wherever they lived. Although they were targets of discrimination and remained isolated from the surrounding communities, Americans inevitably became aware of their language—Cantonese—as well as their ways of life. A similar development occurred in Europe, where Chinese spread out everywhere, although there were larger numbers in Britain than elsewhere, due in part to the fact that Hong Kong had become a British colony after the Opium wars. Overseas Chinese as well as those from other parts of Asia and the Middle East also began adopting the western style of clothing, with men wearing jacket, tie, and trousers and women blouse, skirt, and stockings. The obverse was less common, leaving much room for speculation as to the reasons for this reluctance. It is not clear whether at the time western clothes were considered more convenient or more modern, or whether it was an expression of the sense of superiority of western cultures and customs. Like everything else, by the middle of the nineteenth century, westerners, at least in urban centers, exuded the confident air of belonging to a group of modern cosmopolitans, claiming their dress code as the latest in fashion, and therefore more valuable. Some non-westerners may also have felt that western-style clothing was more conducive to speedy movement and therefore more appropriate for living and working in an urban setting. Westerners, in turn, labeled local costumes as “exotic,” something that did not fit into the practice of modern living. One should recognize, however, that here as in language there was a good deal of hybridity—that is, the blending of western and indigenous traditions. In Islamic countries, for instance, Europeans like everyone else removed their shoes upon entering a mosque, which made the wearing of slippers a universal practice. Chinese and Japanese silk was softer and gentler on the skin than cotton, so the importation of silk garments had an important impact on what westerners wore. The phenomenon of hybridization was most readily apparent in the food that people cooked and consumed. Arguably, nothing is more foundational to a culture than food, and people have upheld and passed on their culinary traditions loyally and enthusiastically. At the same time, there has perhaps been more blending of food recipes and menus than clothing, housing, and other cultural products. We can best see this in recent history when, despite

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the overwhelming influence of the West on the rest of the world, Europeans and Americans have been eager to try exotic foods and to incorporate some non-western recipes into their own diets. There may well be no such thing as “western” and “non-western” traditions where food is concerned. Middle Eastern spices became a staple of European cooking from early on: tea and coffee originated in Asia and Latin America; various regions’ indigenous vegetables quickly spread to other areas; most countries had one kind of dairy product or another; alcoholic beverages were produced everywhere, and a variety of fish were consumed by all people. In the middle of the nineteenth century, just as Europeans and Americans brought their cooks with them wherever they went, and introduced their domestic cuisine to their hosts, the latter reciprocated by offering their own. Soon there would be Chinese and Indian restaurants in various parts of the West, followed by those specializing in other regional cuisines. Food became a vehicle through which people of different countries explored one another’s culture. Visitors to foreign lands invariably commented on what they were offered to eat, and host communities were curious about the dietary habits of visitors. In the nineteenth century, it was commonly said that while western dishes focused on animal meat, Asians preferred fish and vegetables. But such a distinction was only superficially accurate for, with the exception of South Asia where cows were considered sacred and therefore not to be slaughtered for food, most people ate the same things, differing only in how they were seasoned and cooked. These instances of blending created new ways of communicating in international relations and establishing new imagined transnational communities. Exploring these transactions across various countries, not just formally through diplomacy or through war, but in peacetime through the coming together of people and their cultures, has to be part of modern world history. By the middle of the nineteenth century, there had developed numerous networks across the globe to make contemporary observers recognize that geographical distances were shrinking. The question, of course, is how the shrinking of distances and the coming together of different cultural traditions affected power relations among nations. How were geopolitical vicissitudes affected by cultural linkages? If cultural globalization was taking place rapidly and steadily already in the middle of the nineteenth century, did this phenomenon help create a more stable and peaceful world order? Did economic and cultural interdependence lead to political internationalism? These were questions more and more people were asking toward the end of the nineteenth century, as will be discussed in the second part of this volume. Here, it will suffice to suggest that something was still missing, that despite all sorts of bridges and networks being built across nations, they were not strong enough to combat the tide of nationalism that was moving various countries in the opposite direction. That raises the question of why forces of nationalism remained so

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strong when cultural networks across the globe were expanding. One possible answer is that alongside these networks there simultaneously developed connections that were determined by unequal power relationships. Power differences within and among nations affected cross-cultural interactions in important ways. To understand this history as it developed during the first two-thirds of the nineteenth century, it would be useful to examine more closely various non-national identities—race, gender, youth, and so on—and see what role they played in international relations at that time.

Sub-national and Supra-national Identities Nations are not made up of homogeneous populations; they include various categories of marginalized people whose life experience and status in society differ markedly from those of the dominant group. National cultures are usually defined by those in power, primarily men, the wealthy, political elites, and the able-bodied. Those who do not belong to these categories often have to find ways to adapt to the social and cultural norms prevalent in their respective societies. Some of these underrepresented groups developed sub-cultures that allowed them to connect to like-minded individuals, sometimes hidden from public view, and sometimes in public establishments and spaces that accommodated their special interests. They included women, gays and lesbians, and ethnic minorities. While transnational connections among these various sub-groups were limited in the mid-nineteenth century, there existed a growing consciousness of common experiences across national boundaries, particularly among women who began seeking equal rights in Europe and North America. There also emerged a growing awareness of the special needs of children, youth, the aged, and the disabled that would later expand into international movements. Historians are only now beginning to explore the status of these marginalized groups in transnational context, developing a broader framework for understanding their role in the relationship among nations. A cultural approach to international history offers a unique opportunity to explore sub-national and supra-national groupings, whether defined by gender, race, ethnicity, age, religion, physical and mental abilities, and so on. These categories operate independently of national units and deserve to be studied on their own terms. The groups differed in their ability to establish connections across national boundaries and organize themselves for activities, be it for politics, service, ideology, sport, or entertainment. After constituting themselves on the local and national level, all eventually moved into the transnational sphere. Few managed to do so until the mid- to late twentieth century, constrained by the lack of support on the national level and insufficient means to travel, organize, and communicate over vast distances.

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One group that did begin to forge transnational connections during the nineteenth century were women. Probably helped by their sheer numerical clout—after all they made up about half of the world’s population—and by access of some to wealth and education—which would have translated into the exercise of political power had they been men—they began organizing. They first met in small groups within the sphere of private homes, then in national organizations, and eventually transnationally. Compared with later decades, this was a limited phenomenon, since the majority of women in all countries, and especially outside the West, lacked power, access to the public sphere, and were mostly confined to their homes. In the middle of the nineteenth century, the average life expectancy in most parts of the world was only about forty years, and women did not live much longer than men. A woman, then, could devote her entire life to the service of other people, be they her children, husband, or parents-in-law. This dynamic made it difficult to establish social connections beyond the local realm. Despite these formidable obstacles, a small number of European and North American women transcended their restricted universes and established contacts with one another beyond the local level. Among the most influential early advocates for women’s equality was the English author and reformer Mary Wollstonecraft. Her 1792 treatise A Vindication of the Rights of Women advocated for the equal treatment of women, particularly equal access to education. Though Wollstonecraft’s reputation fell into disrepute in England after her death in 1797 at the age of thirty-eight, she served as inspiration to American women’s rights advocates, among them Lucretia Mott and Elizabeth Cady Stanton. Having become active in the abolitionist movement in the United States in the 1830s, these two women resolved to create an organization supporting equal rights for women. Women who had participated in the anti-slavery movement drew valuable lessons from their fight for the rights to freedom and equality for African Americans, including the right to citizenship and the right to vote. They began to question their own status as disenfranchised second-class citizens within the United States. By mid-century most states within the union had legislated universal white male suffrage, but none had granted women the same privileges. In 1848, a group of activists met at Seneca Falls in upstate New York for a convention on women’s rights, where they composed the “Declaration of Sentiments,” which called for women’s right to education, property, marriage equality, and inheritance, as well as the right to vote. Some women argued for the removal of that last demand from the declaration, because it seemed too radical. Frederick Douglass, the convention’s only African American participant and one of only a handful of men present, made a forceful and ultimately convincing plea for its inclusion. Douglass, who saw much common ground between the anti-slavery and women’s causes, was instrumental in forging a coalition between the two movements during the 1850s. In the aftermath of the Civil War, however,

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when the government granted African Americans voting and citizenship rights, women came away empty-handed. In England, such a coalition never existed in the first place, in large part because the anti-slavery cause had already succeeded in 1833 with the abolition of the slave trade, long before women began to form political organizations and calling for the right to vote. The Syracuse declaration marked the opening salvo of the long international campaign for voting rights that would take more than seventy years before coming to fruition. The demand for women’s right to vote resonated in some countries, particularly ones with recent surges in immigration, such as Canada, Australia, and New Zealand. Still, until the twentieth century no global network materialized. While women were able to forge organizations to advocate for their rights in the nineteenth century without fear of persecution, gays and lesbians remained largely isolated and hidden from public view. In most parts of the world, sodomy was considered a criminal offense, with harsh punishments ranging from imprisonment to castration and even death. But in some countries, legal and medical experts began to speak out publicly in favor of de-criminalizing homosexuality. Post-revolutionary France struck sodomy from its penal code in the 1790s, triggering similar changes elsewhere. In Germany, the jurist Karl Heinrich Ulrichs publicly challenged anti-sodomy laws in court in 1867. While he was not successful, his public stance sent an important message to the clandestine community of same-sex couples. Prominent writers and intellectuals, such as the American poet Walt Whitman and the Irish playwright Oscar Wilde, who did not hide their homosexuality, suffered for their openness (Wilde was imprisoned for two years). These highly publicized cases brought the subject of homosexuality into public discourse, and while advocates failed to change the laws in many countries or to form associations to defend the right to same-sex relationships, their writings and public stances nonetheless created an imagined community. Another marginalized group that transcended national boundaries yet did not form a transnational imagined community until the latter part of the twentieth century was the community of the disabled. All societies included individuals who were judged to have a disability, either physical or mental. Physical disability as a consequence of war was on the rise in the nineteenth century, in large part thanks to advances in medicine. Soldiers who would have died of their injuries earlier increasingly survived because doctors had learned how to perform amputations, suture up serious injuries, and prevent infections. Those who did survive often required lifelong care and social support networks. Without a national welfare system in place, that work mostly fell to family members, and discussion about the nation’s responsibility for these disabled dependents was only beginning. Disability studies is a relatively recent academic sub-field that approaches the question of disability from an interdisciplinary perspective, including sociology, anthropology, history, medicine, and psychology. Most scholars agree that disability is a social construction born of local, regional, and

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national assumptions about what constitutes “normal” and “abnormal” human physiognomy and behavior. The idea of disability is also a cultural phenomenon because questions such as how a society defines individuals as disabled, how it provides for them, how “normal” humans relate to them, or how people with disabilities define their own place within society are all cultural questions. They also comprise an important element of the cultural dimension of international cultural relations. Few studies have ventured into the historical roots of conceptions of disability, much less explored them in transnational context. One exception was Michel Foucault, who examined the history of mental disability in his book Madness and Civilization: A History of Insanity in the Age of Reason. Foucault argued that the idea of normalcy in human behavior was a product of the Enlightenment when science established standards and measurements that not only applied to the natural world but to the behavior of human beings as well. Prior to the seventeenth century, mentally ill people would be treated as integral to human society, sometimes even considered to have special wisdom and supra-human faculties. Yet with the Age of Reason came what Foucault called “the Great Confinement,” when societies established insane asylums and began locking away people with mental and physical disabilities, effectively removing them from the public sphere. While critics have called into question Foucault’s generally positive portrayal of the acceptance of insanity during the Renaissance period, none doubt his depiction of insanity as a cultural and social phenomenon since the Age of Enlightenment. Others have documented a gradual process of transformation toward the end of the nineteenth century with a shift toward increased rehabilitation as opposed to marginalization. The founder of the Swedish “Society for Assistance to the Maimed, Crippled, and Injured,” Hans Knudsen, for instance, set up a school to instruct the disabled in trades and teach them skills compatible with the nature of their disabilities. While they were still mostly housed in separate facilities and out of public view, the emphasis was on rehabilitation and productivity more than passive care. Much work remains to be done to explore disability as a historical phenomenon, and its role as a cultural and social aspect of international relations. The spread of institutions for mentally and physically disabled people across Europe and the Americas in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, nevertheless, points to increased transnational networks among medical practitioners as well as the increasing transfer of medical knowledge and institutional practices across national boundaries. Just as knowledge about disability traversed national boundaries, so did the disabled, particularly during the period of mass migration in the middle to late nineteenth century. What to do about mentally and physically disabled immigrants became a thorny question in many colonial settler communities, in Australia, New Zealand, Canada, and the United States. Often, those who were deemed unhealthy or unfit in any way were deported to their home countries or prevented from entering the country in the first place.

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Nineteenth-century societies also shared concerns about how to protect other vulnerable members of their communities, above all children and the aged. Many cultures revered its oldest members giving them privileged positions within the social order and calling on their wisdom and sagacity. But no formal institutions existed for much of the nineteenth century that enshrined the rights of the old and infirm for housing, food, and care. In 1889, Germany became the first country in the world to establish a pension for citizens over the age of seventy. Until then those who could no longer work to support themselves had to rely on family members or charitable institutions in the final stages of their lives. While the challenges were common to all societies, there was as yet little transnational cooperation or exchange until the progressive reform movements of the early twentieth century. More transnational awareness, if not cooperation, emerged in the nineteenth century about the work that needed to be done to ensure the wellbeing of children and youth. Primary education was becoming compulsory in many European countries as well as North America by the end of the nineteenth century. Europeans followed the Prussian lead, which had instituted compulsory elementary education in 1763. In the United States, Massachusetts became the first state to make primary education mandatory for all children in 1852. Britain and France phased in compulsory education between 1870 and the early twentieth century. Compulsory education also spread to non-western areas at the time, including the Ottoman Empire, Japan, and parts of India. The primary purpose of education was to teach children how to read and write and gain a basic understanding of arithmetic. Yet, educational institutions also strove to instill in children and young adults an awareness of national identity and history. Historians of education have yet to explore in detail how much children and youth learned about other cultures and countries, whether, when, and how much foreign language training took place in schools, and whether the extent and quality of foreign language training increased over the course of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Education formed the basis for future generations’ ideas and attitudes, which in turn counted greatly in defining a world community. Few studies exist on such topics, and it would be difficult to generalize about children and young adults in global context. However, a glance at children’s books indicates that many of them had great appeal across national borders, though some were initially written in the service of national education. Stories now considered universal children’s tales, such as Grimm’s Fairy Tales and Arabian Nights, were based on national or regional folklore but appealed to young readers in many countries, and the principal characters in these stories shared universal human traits. The first version of the Grimm Brothers’ Fairy Tale collection was published in 1812 and translated into English and other languages beginning in the 1820s. Arabian Nights stories were collected over centuries and made popular in Europe

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through eighteenth-century translations, first into French and later into English and other languages. Over the years, some stories proved more adaptable to an international audience than others, for instance the story of Cinderella, which was turned into an animated movie by Walt Disney in 1950. Others, such as Aladdin, a story that was widely believed to be part of the Arabian Nights collection, could actually not be found in the original Arab language version of the tales. Emotions generated by these tales may be said to have united their readers across national boundaries. Stories from the Arabian Nights, while highly popular in the West, also inculcated youth with a false image of the Orient as exotic, mysterious, and full of dangers and adventures, thus distorting rather than enhancing western understanding of Arab culture. Exposure to cultural products of a foreign country thus did not automatically lead to better understanding. All countries consist of multiple categories of people: men, women, children, and senior citizens, the disabled, wealthy and poor, racial and ethnic groups. The degree to which these groups contributed to creating transnational networks of association constitutes another dimension of international cultural relations. Even when marginalized groups lacked formal institutions and organizations, they could make a transnational impact in the cultural sphere. For instance, women, gays, and lesbians contributed to the literary sphere, where their work was more easily accepted by the general public. Although it would be difficult to prove with any degree of certainty, it may be surmised that men as well as women read the novels by Jane Austen, George Eliot, Louisa May Alcott, and other English language female writers in the first half of the nineteenth century. And despite accusations of indecency against Walt Whitman and Oscar Wilde, their poems and plays enjoyed great popularity. For some women, writing became a critical outlet for their creative talents and a vehicle for their feminist ideas. Louisa May Alcott, the American author most famous for her novel Little Women, was active in the abolitionist and feminist movements of her time. Too young to have attended the Seneca Falls meeting (she was born in 1832), she nonetheless read and admired the suffragist manifesto and actively supported both causes throughout her life. Similar observations may be made of female artists and musicians whose work came to be known internationally. Romanticism, the dominant European artistic movement of the first several decades of the nineteenth century, closely resonated with women, romantic love being a typical theme in paintings as well as musical compositions and performances. They included the work of Clara Schumann, the wife of the composer Robert Schumann, known to be a close friend and supporter of Franz Schubert and Franz Liszt. Yet female musicians and artists struggled to gain recognition, often operating in the shadow of their male colleagues and benefactors. One art form where women dominated was ballet dancing, closely associated with music. The modern form of ballet originated in France under Louis XIV, who founded the Académie d’Opéra in 1669. From there it

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spread across Europe in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Mothers sent daughters to ballet schools primarily to learn correct posture and graceful movement, a social expectation for middle- and upper-class young women. The most accomplished ones would become professional dancers. While initially male dancers dominated the art form, by the middle of the nineteenth century, female ballerinas took center-stage in most performances all over Europe. The romantic movement also influenced ballet with the increasing incorporation of local and national folkloric elements into dance routines. As nationalism entered into performances with the creation of national ballets in places like France, Austria-Hungary, and Russia, troupes began to tour internationally as well. International competitions and performances offered opportunities for women to make connections not only among musicians and dancers from various countries but also between the performers and their audiences.

4 Modern Consciousness

These developments add up to what may be termed the emergence of a modern consciousness, a cultural phenomenon that did not necessarily evolve along the same trajectory and alongside international relations in the geopolitical sphere. To be sure, the transnational elements of this consciousness was made possible within the European context by the general absence of war and the relatively free movement of people and ideas across national boundaries. But just as international affairs proceeded with their own momentum between 1815 and 1870, so did the cultural dimension. Nevertheless, in both interstate and intercultural affairs, the West’s ascendancy was unmistakable, giving rise to the question of whether western power paved the way for the proliferation of a western-inflected modern consciousness. As noted already, the nineteenth century showed the ascendance of western military and economic power, so that by the end of the century, the western world had extended its sway over most of Africa, significant portions of the Middle East, and many parts of Asia. This power was evident in the European and American colonies that dotted the map of the world, and in the western domination of the bulk of international trade and investment activities. Although the augmentation of western power accelerated in the last decades of the nineteenth century, by 1870 Britain had already established colonial or semi-colonial control over India, Burma, and China, while France had done likewise in parts of North Africa and Southeast Asia. Such extension of power was not yet called imperialism, a term that would become widespread only in the 1890s and beyond. The word “empire” had existed for centuries, but in the aftermath of the independence movements in most countries in the western hemisphere, the term “colony” came back into general usage to designate areas in Asia and Africa over which western nations exerted power. Colonialism included outright control over overseas territories as well as spheres of influence, designating areas that were controlled by a foreign power although not yet detached from their ostensible rulers and incorporated into its domain. Whatever the term used, there was little doubt in contemporary minds that the West was extending its dominance overseas. 71

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The expansion of western power came to be closely associated with the expansion of its culture. Western nations viewed their scientific discoveries, economic expansion, and political systems as indicative of their advanced civilization, distinguishing them from the rest of the world. The western idea of civilization was seen as inseparable from the expansion of its power. The concept of civilization was a rather recent phenomenon, a product of European enlightenment thinking that catapulted the West into its modern existence. “Modern civilization” meant almost exclusively western civilization, closely associated with European countries and their transplants overseas. The question then became whether the concept of modern civilization could be found in non-western parts of the globe, or whether it should be seen as an exclusive western export. Could there be a non-western indigenous version of the modern? Would non-western countries and people who wished to be modern or civilized have to follow the western model? These were questions that began to interest the minds of westerners and non-westerners alike in the middle of the nineteenth century. If modernity was something that the West had achieved, something that was inherent in its civilization, would other countries with their own civilizations convert to western ideas and ideals of modernity? Could modernity and tradition coexist? Political, business, and intellectual leaders in China, Japan, the Ottoman Empire, and a few other non-western countries, who greatly admired the economic and military achievements of the European powers, sought ways to integrate modern western ways of organizing, educating, and building into their own indigenous cultures. For instance, after emerging from the long-drawn-out Taiping rebellion and civil war in the early 1860s, China’s restored Qing dynasty grappled with the question of how much it should incorporate from the West in its restoration project. By then China’s leaders had determined that its political institutions would have to be modernized along western lines, the only question being which aspects of modern western institutions and practices it should adopt. Qing reformers were adamant that China should strive to become a member of what they called “the family of nations.” Instead of standing aloof from the rest of the world or rejecting European and American overtures for opening the country to more extensive foreign visitors, the Chinese should take the initiative to join the international community. Chinese officials established a new foreign office (Tsungli Yamen) and a school to train officials in international law. The Tsungli Yamen even took the initiative to join other nations in order to eradicate opium consumption. Traditional habits such as opium smoking would have to give way to modern ideas of health, officials suggested, and China should be willing to take the initiative in that direction. In time, the Qing court would begin sending young Chinese to study abroad, although such initiatives would materialize only after 1870. A similar development got underway in Japan, where many of those who emerged as the new leaders after the Meiji Restoration of 1868 had little doubt that the country would have to emulate the West if it was to avoid the

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calamities that had befallen China in the 1840s and 1850s. After the opening of the country in the wake of Commodore Matthew C. Perry’s visits in the early 1850s, products of modern civilization, ranging from railway construction to telephones, entered the country, and when the Tokugawa regime in Edo (Tokyo) was replaced by a new monarchic government in 1868, the emperor himself declared that the nation must learn from all countries. By the 1870s, words like “civilization” and “enlightenment” had become widespread, indicating a determination to identify the country as one that stood for modern civilization. In the meantime, the Ottoman Empire, which had always been involved in European affairs, likewise came to recognize the need to undertake reforms. Although much of the empire’s modernization efforts would come after 1870, critical efforts at modernization were undertaken as early as 1805, when Sultan Selim III, recognizing the superior strength of the modern European armies in the aftermath of the Napoleonic wars, tried to reform the military along European lines. His initial efforts failed, though, because the entrenched military class of Janissaries resisted the intrusion from European advisers. His successor, Mahmud II, who ascended the throne in 1808, succeeded by turning the clergy against the Janissaries. In addition to a modernized military, Mahmud also instituted reforms in education, social institutions, and politics. He created a school of military science and a medical college. He supported European language training, and had European classics translated into Turkish. He also instituted equality for all Ottoman citizens, regardless of religion. In Egypt, which had been part of the Ottoman Empire in the early nineteenth century, Muhammad Ali initiated similar modernization reforms. Sent to Egypt in 1805 by the Ottoman Empire to re-establish control after Napoleon’s departure, the Albanian-born Muhammad began with the modernization of the military and then moved to create a school of engineering and a medical school. He also implemented agricultural reforms by establishing a public works department, and consulting with European engineers to set up a modern system of irrigation. All this resulted in increased cotton production and more reliable crop yields along the banks of the Nile. These modernization efforts turned Egypt into the most powerful state in the eastern Mediterranean, eventually challenging the Ottoman predominance in the region. Yet Egypt’s modernization efforts stalled or were reversed after Muhammad Ali’s death in 1849, indicating that the transformations were not as deeply embedded in the national culture as Muhammad had wished. In the meantime, the Crimean War of the 1850s persuaded some officials and intellectuals in Constantinople to undertake further reforms so as to cope with the rising power of the European countries, including Russia. The Tsarist regime had emancipated serfs in 1861 and began its own programs for reform, although this proved to be a very slow process. Here, too, the key vocabulary was that of modernization and westernization.

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By 1870 many non-western countries were looking to the West for inspiration regarding reform and modernization. They had by and large accepted that the only path toward achieving parity with the West as well as safeguarding their own independence was through a process of modernizing their bureaucracy, education, science, and production. The only question that remained was whether this reform process would result in the transformation or possible destruction of the nation’s cultural traditions. In many ways, this was a question that most cultures undergoing reforms pondered. Fodor Dostoevsky’s novel The Brothers Karamazov offers a fictional account of the ways in which Russian intellectuals in the middle of the century struggled to define their response to modernization. While one brother embraces modernization wholeheartedly, another remains committed to traditional ways of life, while the remaining two try to adjust to new ways in a more pragmatic fashion. Such diverse responses were found almost everywhere, but few could escape being confronted with the effects of modernization. Something akin to modern consciousness was spreading to most parts of the globe, creating debate, dislocation, and uncertainty. Whether such a phenomenon narrowed differences between nations or, on the contrary, resulted in a more divided world, was a question that would only be raised in subsequent decades. It is impossible to generalize about a global cultural consciousness. A brief exploration into the dissemination of cultural products such as art and literature across national boundaries may offer a glimpse. Even before 1870 some western artistic influences—whether in literature, art, or music—were beginning to spread to non-western parts of the world and some nonwestern influences crept into western art and culture. Self-consciously modern novels, paintings, or musical compositions did not emerge in Europe until later in the century. Before then, classical traditions prevailed. In the middle of the nineteenth century, for instance, Charles Dickens in England and Émile Zola in France predominated the literary scene in their respective countries, and these writers were not self-consciously modern. That would have to wait until the arrival of Proust, Thomas Mann, and others on the scene. In music, too, the mid-nineteenth century was a heyday of romantic works, while music that was considered modern emerged only with compositions by Debussy, Poulenc, and others. Likewise, with paintings, where self-consciously modern art arrived with Cézanne, van Gogh, and others at the end of the century for whom art no longer meant representation but a more personal statement. It is important to note, however, that their modernity was in part a product of encounters with art forms from other parts of the world. Scholars have noted, for example, that the French impressionists and post-impressionists were inspired by the early nineteenthcentury ukiyo-e wood block prints made by Japanese artists such as Katsushika Hokusai and Utagawa Hiroshige, which arrived in France after Commodore Perry forced the opening of Japan to the world in 1853. These works of art and decorative arts became so popular in France in the 1860s,

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that the French art critic Philippe Burty coined the term Japonisme. There is, then, a paradox of sorts at the core of the creation of the modern in western art and literature. While it was identified almost exclusively with works produced in Europe, the artistic inspiration underlying these modern works included non-western elements; in short, what artists eventually identified as modern art was in fact a form of cultural and artistic hybridization. Furthermore, if literature, music, or art had not yet been labeled “modern” before the 1870s, there was a lag between modern technology, science, and medical research and their reflection in cultural productions. When the nonwestern parts of the world equated the West with modern civilization, they most likely referred to those technological and scientific advances that seemed to have made life more organized, efficient, and convenient, not the modern aspects of high culture that was yet to be invented in the West. To the extent that western art, literature, and music began to spread to Asia, the Middle East, and Africa, it was not so much modern as a mid-nineteenthcentury manifestation of European culture opening itself to a new world of creativity. The non-West was beginning to reciprocate by reading Shakespeare, by absorbing the technique of perspective through the study of Da Vinci paintings, or by listening to the music of Beethoven. But just as they were absorbing western representations and identified them as modern, so too did they contribute to modern art and culture in the West through making their own art and culture visible in the West. Western modernity thus came to be shaped through the cultural engagement with the world. In some such way, then, there was a leveling effect of cultural contact and borrowing. As the literary scholar Edward Said has shown, the non-western colonial consciousness seeped into western literature, including the classic Victorian novel. A new cultural consciousness was bringing people from Asia, the Middle East, Africa, Europe, and North America together as never before. It remained to be seen whether such proximity would result in greater international understanding. Would non-western parts of the world go beyond learning from and seeking to approximate the West? Would there in time emerge some kind of a world culture in the making of which all people and all traditions would play a part? Would the gulf between the West and the non-West remain unbridgeable? Or, alternatively, would there emerge some hybrid civilization that would blend together different traditions? All these possibilities had the potential to materialize in the middle of the nineteenth century, in the process enriching and further complicating the cultural dimension of international relations. While a transnational world was taking shape by 1870, it was not yet an international world consisting of nations. There were independent countries in Europe and North America, but in other regions of the globe, empires and civilizations, not nations, were the norm. Transnational relations were crucial to connecting those civilizations. International relations were as yet confined primarily to the West, and themes such as “the rise and fall of the great powers” or “the rise of the West” were peculiar labels contained within

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the history of the Euro-American world. The history of international relations in the nineteenth century thus encompassed a much smaller terrain than the history of transnational relations. The transnational world of the mid-nineteenth century encompassed all individuals who came in contact with one another across national and cultural boundaries, not just those who acted as official representatives of a state or a nation. In such circumstances, a history of that transnational world would be inclusive of non-national identities such as gender, age, and religion. The documentation of non-national phenomena such as environmental change, disease, material goods, and culture, became part of the history of the transnational world.

PART TWO

Movement and Empire When F.T. Marinetti published his futurist manifesto on February 5, 1909, in the Italian newspaper Gazetta dell’ Emilia, it created an instant sensation. “We are on the extreme promontory of the centuries!” he boldly declared. “What is the use of looking behind at the moment when we must open the mysterious shutters of the impossible? Time and Space died yesterday. We are already living in the absolute, since we have already created eternal, omnipresent speed.”11 Few had heard of him or the movement he represented. But within days a French translation appeared in Le Figaro, followed by an English version shortly thereafter. Though not a mass movement, the futurists gave voice to a popular obsession with modern technology, the power of the machine, and the thrill of speed. The manifesto brought into public consciousness the cumulative effects of decades of rapid economic, cultural, and political change in the industrializing world. It represented an embrace of energy, force, momentum, and mobility; an infatuation with all things new; and a wholesale rejection of the past. When examining the international history of the period between 1870 and 1920 through a cultural lens, movement emerges as a central theme. The concept of movement encompassed both a spatial and a temporal dimension. In its spatial dimension, the era witnessed the movement of goods, people, and ideas across national boundaries on an unprecedented scale. The period was marked by mass migrations of people from rural to urban areas, between nations, and between continents. Another central characteristic of the age was the accelerated movement of goods across vast 77

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distances precipitated by a transportation revolution. Improvements in shipbuilding and maritime technology, the expansion of the railway system in many parts of the world, and the building of canals shrank distances and created a greater sense of the world’s connectedness. In its temporal dimension, movement served as a metaphor for the rapid transformations people experienced in their daily lives, as industrialization changed the way they worked and lived; urbanization transformed their social relations; and faster modes of transportation and communication altered the relationship between time and space. Artists and intellectuals took up movement as an idea and an ideology. The concept of movement helped build modernity, but it also shattered much in its wake. Above all, it shattered a sense of the world as a well-ordered place, where institutions and communities functioned in predictable ways and exercised social control over its members. Political, cultural, and social boundaries disappeared, shifted, or were redrawn along new fault lines. Cultural transformations became enshrined in the political reordering of the world, and leaders justified political transformations by drawing on cultural arguments. Power and culture became inextricably intertwined in a symbiotic relationship. As states adjusted to the accelerated movement of ideas, goods, and people in the latter part of the nineteenth century, they increasingly sought to centralize political power, often by shoring up rigid ideas about national identity. Unification and national consolidation movements had been underway in the Americas, Europe, and Asia since the 1860s. In the United States, consolidation occurred in the wake of a devastating civil war, when a victorious North centralized political structures and sought to reintegrate the rebellious southern states into the national fold by emphasizing the common revolutionary heritage and ignoring the issue of racial equality. In Latin America, political leaders strengthened their grip on power, particularly Mexico’s Porfirio Díaz and Brazil’s Emperor Pedro II. On the European continent, Italy and Germany unified into centralized nation-states in the 1860s and 1870s. The movements toward national unification and consolidation came at the expense of indigenous and minority populations who were often excluded from citizenship or lacked basic political and social rights. States constructed national cultures, suppressed cultural and ethnic diversity, implemented universal military service, and declared a single national language. This became especially problematic in the multiethnic regions of the Austro-Hungarian and Russian empires. China and Japan had already imposed centralized national cultures in the early nineteenth century, but both made strides toward expanding their reign into other parts of Asia. Japan moved into Korea and Manchuria between 1874 and 1895, and the Chinese began in the 1870s to consolidate administrative power in the northwest region of Xinjiang and areas to the northeast and southwest. Colonization, industrialization, and urbanization dramatically affected the lives of people in Europe, Asia, the Americas, and Africa. They altered

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work patterns, living conditions, and leisure time activities in the industrialized world, and brought dramatic changes to the social and cultural fabric of people living under colonial rule. These changes accelerated with the outbreak of the First World War, drawing the peoples of the world closer together in an epic struggle that spread from Europe to the outer reaches of colonial empires. At the end of the war, nothing was as it had been before. Everyone alive at the time sensed the end of an era, and the triumph of modernity, for better or worse. The political, economic, and military aspects of the global transformations between 1870 and 1920 are fairly well known. How they related to global cultural changes and how, in turn, these cultural changes affected political and economic relations is less well known. Scholars usually focus either on the cultural or the political aspects of the era, rarely acknowledging that both are necessary to understand the vast transformations of the turn of the twentieth century. By integrating culture and geopolitics, new turning points are revealed, offering a more comprehensive accounting of the experiences of those who lived through the period. As the anthropologist Clifford Geertz has argued, if culture consisted of the structures of meaning through which human beings made sense of their experience, then politics represented a key space for the public unfolding of these structures. Since cultural and political developments in the national and international arena are inextricably intertwined, they deserve coverage in a single integrated narrative. Historians of industrialization, urbanization, and labor movements who take into consideration the cultural context in which those changes occurred, are able to contextualize the lived experience of a generation of workers and industrialists. Likewise, a cultural history of colonialism reveals how structures of oppression shaped not only the cultural identity of native populations under colonial rule but also altered the culture of the metropole. Moreover, they show the deep cultural roots embedded within the structures of power and inequality in the colonial system. Most European powers embarked on imperialist ventures into Asia and Africa in the second half of the nineteenth century. They crushed much of the indigenous cultures in the regions they occupied. They saw their colonial outposts as sites of economic exploitation, as laboratories of social and cultural experimentation, and as a proving ground for the superiority of their own civilizational model. Race was central to the colonizers’ justification for domination and played a key role in international relations at the time. Colonial cultures, in turn, became embedded in the metropole, as foods, artifacts, raw materials, and people flowed into the imperial homeland and transformed its local cultures. In short, colonialism transformed both metropole and periphery, albeit in vastly different ways. Finally, exploring international relations in this era from a cultural vantage point allows historians to draw on a rich yet underused archive of sources. War, colonialism, urbanization, industrialization, and other political, cultural, and social changes found expression in the artistic movements of

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the time. Examining those cultural products—paintings, sculptures, literary works, and musical compositions—offers a glimpse into the ways intellectuals and ordinary people processed the changes around them. Impressionists and early modernists used their art to process the social, cultural, and political transformations of the era. Their work offers an alternative lens through which to explore international history. The chapters in this part of the book examine the global transformations between 1870 and 1920 through four broad cultural developments. The first traces the movement of people and ideas across national boundaries, including the flow of European and Asian migration both within their own continents and to the Americas, Australia, and New Zealand. The second explores the cultural aspects of imperialism and modernization, as they unfolded together in the late nineteenth century, including the experience and cultural consequences of colonialism, and the cultural dislocations of industrialization and urbanization, leading ultimately to the First World War. The third focuses on how the rise of cultural anthropology and the expansion of racial theories shaped discourses in the western world and increased racial tensions at the turn of the twentieth century, as people of different ethnic and racial background lived in closer proximity to one another. The final chapter chronicles the rise of cultural internationalism, or more precisely, the increasing interconnectedness of the world in cultural, intellectual, and organizational terms. In the late nineteenth century, diplomats and internationalists reached the first international agreements regarding humanitarian aid and created the first international organizations devoted to women’s rights, humanitarianism, and social reform. These broader trends toward cultural internationalism were punctured by the First World War, which appeared to invalidate the spirit of internationalism. Yet upon closer examination, the war also strengthened existing international networks and even gave rise to new ones. Taken together these cultural transformations undergird and help explain many of the major geopolitical changes of the period. The narrative is not a simple one of cause and effect but rather an effort to make visible the close synergy and reciprocity that exists between culture and politics, and between culture and power. Assumptions, ideologies, attitudes, and prejudices guided populations and policy-makers in defining and redefining their relationship with others and staking out their place in the international order. Political power was often as much based on perceptions of inferiority or superiority as grounded in objective calculations of relative strength. Conversely, challenges to political power could and did on occasion come from marginal groups and constituencies altering the dynamics of transnational relations. Power, in short, was not just political or military, it was cultural as well. The following four chapters explore the cultural dynamics at the root of the great transformations of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

5 Movements

In 1870, Europe dominated international politics, the global economy, and global cultural production. Throughout the nineteenth century, European powers had been expanding their foothold in Asia and Africa through the acquisition of colonies, even though most of the direct economic benefits of holding such vast territories went to private corporations rather than the state. Industrialization accelerated as production of and demand for goods surged and industrial exports became increasingly important for national economies. Colonies became an integral part of the world economy through the extraction of natural resources and the supply of cheap labor. Fifty years later, however, the balance had shifted decisively toward North America owing to changing economic fortunes and the emergence of the United States as a political actor on the global stage. This shift in political and economic fortunes was intricately interwoven with the movement of people and ideas over the course of the half century between 1870 and 1920. Millions of people left Europe for one of the new settlements in North America, Australia, or New Zealand. A smaller number of emigrants moved to new settler colonies in Africa and Asia. They brought with them material goods, habits, customs, and ideas, transforming the culture of the spaces in which they settled. Movement became a dominant motor of modernization in this period, both as a practical concern and as an idea and ideology. In the practical realm, it encompassed faster modes of getting from one location to another. Movement was also integral to changes in modes of production, accelerating the speed with which goods were manufactured and brought to market. And lastly, movement meant people leaving their place of birth for new locations in search of opportunities. This last form of movement also included movement as an idea, the hope of social mobility, of moving up in the world to a higher rung in the social hierarchy. For many migrants it remained an aspiration throughout their lives as they struggled in their adopted countries to make ends meet. The ideal of social mobility was often realized only in the second generation, as children of immigrants were better able to take advantage of the opportunities afforded them. Movement as an idea also meant embracing new ideas and change, change that occurred in many parts of the world at a much faster

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pace than ever before. And finally, as the futurist movement demonstrated, movement also became embedded in art, literature, and ideologies, shaping the spirit of modernity and driving the process of modernization.

People The movement of people was a central aspect of the global transformations occurring from the nineteenth to the twentieth century. The largest wave of migration between the 1840s and 1940s occurred from Europe to the Americas, with an estimated 55 to 58 million people leaving their homeland for the New World. Most of them went to the United States and Canada to satisfy industrialization’s increasing demand for labor. They settled in the major industrial centers of the American Northeast and Midwest. After the American Civil War, industrialization accelerated, further increasing the need for workers and offering new economic opportunities for immigrants from overcrowded regions in Central, Eastern, and Southern Europe. Higher industrial output, in turn, spurred urbanization, westward expansion, and, eventually, the search for new markets overseas. The vast transnational movement of people was also a cultural event, not least because it posed a formidable challenge to the nation-building projects underway in Europe and the Americas. Between 1850 and 1940, when nationalism reached its pinnacle, roughly 60 million people left Europe. Most of them settled in the Americas, about a fifth of whom eventually returned to their country of birth. Immigrants fit into the national narrative of their adopted country no better than the ethnic minorities in the nation-states they left behind. They were often marginalized socially, culturally, and economically and struggled to find a sense of belonging. Many found solace in segregated ethnic communities where they could continue to speak their native language and follow the cultural customs and religious rituals of their home country. Their lives became a delicate negotiation between maintaining their ethnic identity and adopting elements of the host culture, resulting in hybridized cultures that embedded the immigrant within the national experience. In the United States, social workers established settlement houses to foster the process of assimilation among new immigrants. The most famous of them was Hull House on Chicago’s West Side, where many of the new arrivals from Eastern and Southern Europe lived in crowded run-down tenement houses. The mission of institutions like Hull House was to provide social services for the poor as well as language and cultural training to help new immigrants adjust to life in the United States. Its leader, Jane Addams, was a progressive reformer and civil rights advocate. She had been inspired by a visit to London’s Toynbee Hall, founded by British reformers in 1884. Toynbee Hall serviced the growing urban working class in the city’s eastern neighborhoods, which lacked the social safety net that smaller communities and extended family networks had traditionally provided. Settlement houses

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in the United States responded more broadly to the challenges newcomers faced, whether it was urban living, language acquisition, or the customs of a new country. They offered assistance to families and tried to bridge the gap between old and new worlds. They also offered opportunities to bring different ethnic groups together in areas that were traditionally segregated. Never did those interactions include the African American community. Most new arrivals moved into ethnically homogeneous neighborhoods, joined churches and social organizations affiliated with their home countries, and sought work in fields dominated by their own ethnic group. Ethnic neighborhoods provided some measure of security for newcomers, but they also stifled social mobility by making it harder for members to seek a livelihood outside their own neighborhood or in professions dominated by other ethnic groups. Education and job opportunities were often limited, particularly for racial minorities. Once they learned the English language, white ethnic minorities were better able to merge their cultural traditions with those of their host country and blend into the white majority in the United States. Non-white ethnic groups faced much greater limitations. Racial profiling made it impossible for them to live in certain neighborhoods, attend the schools there, or enter the professions of their choice. Ethnicity, over time, became a marker of strength and pride; race remained a marker of exclusion and disadvantage. The massive movement of people did not necessarily produce greater understanding of cultural difference or acceptance of cultural diversity. The dominant impulse in most immigrant societies at the turn of the twentieth century—Australia, New Zealand, Canada, United States—was to suppress cultural difference and instead enforce assimilation. Immigrant assimilation was seen as part of the larger project of modernization: peasant families from impoverished, rural parts in Europe and Asia would supposedly grow into modern citizens engaged in the rational pursuit of individual advancement and productive labor. That stark dichotomy was largely a myth. Many European migrants were already familiar with industrial labor and urban environments, and most of them did not come from the poorest segments of their home country. In addition, migrants understood their experience in the new country not so much as a process of modernization but rather as an ongoing negotiation between assimilating and preserving their ethnic and cultural identity. Both coexisted in an uneasy relationship over most immigrants’ lifespan. Immigrants’ experiences varied greatly by region, race, religion, ethnicity, and distance from their home country. Those who moved between different regions within their own country or stayed on the same continent were more likely to plan on returning to their homeland once they had made enough money to buy land or property at home. Transatlantic and transpacific migrants, on the other hand, more often resigned themselves to staying. Distance from home was certainly a factor in migrants’ ability to stay connected to the culture of their home country. It would, however, be wrong

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to assume a simple correlation between distance from home and levels of assimilation; a myriad of other factors helped shape the level of adjustment to a new culture. Above all, immigrant experiences were deeply personal, which meant that historians’ efforts to generalize often failed and are constantly being revised. Past models included the ideas of the melting pot, resistance and adaptation, and multiculturalism. None of them fully captures the diversity of experiences. More recently, scholars have developed the concept of cultural hybridity or creolization, which offers some flexibility but does not account for hegemonic differences. One exception is the cultural anthropologist Ulf Hannerz, who researched creolization in post-colonial Africa. He emphasized that the process of creolization did not occur on a level playing field. Rather, difference in power between the metropole and the periphery affected the parameters of creolization.12 The precise anatomy of creole cultures depended on how strong migrants’ cultural identification with their home community was; how much pressure the host country applied toward cultural assimilation; how strongly citizens of the host country identified with a single monolithic national identity; how strong regional cultural identities within the host country were; and how diverse the population in the host country was to begin with. Hannerz’s findings are useful for understanding nineteenth-century immigrant communities. The level of cultural creolization was often conditioned by each immigrant’s personal sense of identity and belonging. The willingness to assume the cultural identity of the host country was conditioned by the strength of the ties to the homeland on a personal and cultural level. Members of an oppressed minority within the AustroHungarian Empire, for instance, might have felt very little cultural loyalty toward their home country, yet still had strong personal ties to their own kin. They might have resisted assimilation more strongly precisely because of the experience of oppression at home. But their resistance might also have been weaker because adopting a new cultural identity held the promise of membership in the dominant cultural group. The concept of creolization first emerged in the context of transatlantic slavery and colonization. The mixing of African, native American, and European peoples and cultures in the Caribbean and elsewhere in the Americas from the sixteenth to the nineteenth century created hybrid cultures that were altogether different from any of their component elements. It is important to note that black participants in this early hybridization did so under the oppressive yoke of slavery, making it an unequal process from its inception. Nonetheless, creole cultures incorporated significant African elements, alongside French, Spanish, and English ones. Creoles also took great pride in their mixed heritage, though some denied their African roots. Regardless of the circumstances and power configurations involved, cultural contact almost always produced some form of creolization, creating something that was altogether different.

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Migration from Europe to the Americas, significant as it was, made up only roughly a third of the total movement of people across the globe during this period. Another great population movement occurred within East Asia, with roughly 50 million people migrating from regions in India and Southern China to Southeast Asia, the Indian Ocean rim, and the South Pacific region. A similar number moved from northeastern Asia and Russia into Manchuria, Siberia, Central Asia, and Japan. These figures do not include the millions of people who moved internally from rural to urban areas, or from central to peripheral regions within nations and empires. Nor do they include forced migration, such as the forced removal of native Americans from their homelands in the United States, or forced labor conscription in parts of Africa, Asia, and the Americas. As the historian Adam McKeown has pointed out, the simultaneous waves of migrations within and among these three regions—Atlantic, East Asia, and Central Asia—point to an increasingly interconnected global industrial economy, with similar needs for resource extraction, agricultural cultivation, industrial production, and labor in regions as far apart as the American West and the foothills of Xinjiang Province in the northwestern reaches of the Qing Empire.13 McKeown’s reference to resource extraction and industrial production points to the close connection at the time between the movement of people and the movement of goods. By the end of the nineteenth century, industrial economies moved raw materials, and produced and distributed finished goods at an unprecedented scale and over a vast geographic terrain. Industrialization was already well underway in many parts of Europe by 1870, producing goods primarily for the domestic market. Gradually, however, as manufacturing expanded, producers increasingly searched for overseas markets. While during the early phase of industrial expansion the search for new markets focused on the European continent, advances in shipping and lower transportation costs made global trade possible and increasingly profitable. The French economist Thomas Piketty has called this era a period of the first industrial and financial globalization and a key feature of capitalism, which, as he defines it, is predicated on the constant movement to expand beyond current ownership structures and state boundaries.14 The United States first expanded its trade connections domestically before searching overseas for markets by the end of the nineteenth century. Between the end of the Civil War in 1865 and 1900, it had expanded its network of railroads from 35,000 to around 200,000 miles of track. These tracks carried not only—and not even primarily—people, but also industrial goods, agricultural products, and livestock across the continent, linking distant parts of the country in ever closer commercial relations. Trade connections also contributed to the United States’ first foray into overseas expansion with the Spanish-American War of 1898. People, goods, and capital thus moved in tandem to connect distant parts of the world in ever closer webs of relations. The transnational movement of material and human beings also helped accelerate the transmission of ideas across space and time.

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Ideas As people traversed national boundaries, oceans, and continents, they brought with them customs, rituals, ideas, and ideologies. Among the latter were socialism, communism, and anarchism, which began in the urban environments of European manufacturing towns and gained in popularity alongside the advances of industrialization. In the middle of the nineteenth century, Marx’s and Engels’s ideas had as yet few supporters. But as industrialization spread across Europe; as industrial workers migrated from Europe to the Americas; as the gap in living standards between industrial elites and the working masses grew wider; as more factories became concentrated in urban areas; and as cycles of economic depression caused massive unemployment and economic hardships in all industrializing countries toward the end of the nineteenth century, socialist labor organizations and political parties grew in strength. They grew particularly in countries where industrialization was advancing rapidly and governments exercised little regulatory control, above all in Germany, Britain, the United States, France, and Italy. Paris experienced its first socialist-inspired uprising in the aftermath of the Franco-Prussian War of 1870–1871. In a revolt against the Germanbacked provisional government, which failed to provide basic public services to the population, Paris residents established the first, albeit short-lived, socialist commune, lasting from March to May 1871. Its reform efforts included improved working conditions, higher wages, the separation of church and state, and free education. Women played a prominent role in commune politics, demanding equality with men in the workplace and the public sphere, as well as open access to education. The commune experiment ended abruptly, however, with the deployment of the French army in the city. Several days of violence ensued in which French military officials executed 20,000 Commune members and their sympathizers and burned several municipal buildings to the ground, including the Hotel de Ville, which had served as the seat of the Commune leadership. Socialists reconstituted themselves in more moderate parties a few years later, among them the French Workers’ Party (1882) and the Revolutionary Socialist Workers’ Party (1890). Socialist movements spread across Europe. In Britain, labor emerged as a political party only after 1900 and developed an overall more moderate political platform than its French counterpart, with several policies aligning closely with the British Liberal Party. Among those were measures to increase government support, such as unemployment benefits, health benefits, and old age pensions. German socialists founded the Social Democratic Party in 1875. They successfully pressured the conservative chancellor Otto von Bismarck into establishing Europe’s first comprehensive social security network, which provided insurance against sickness, disability, and accident, as well as an old-age pension system. In return, Bismarck tried to crush

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socialism as a political movement by passing laws prohibiting socialists from assembling in public and publishing their own newspapers. Despite those efforts, the Social Democratic Party in Germany expanded its base. By the turn of the twentieth century, it was the strongest leftist political party in Europe. Socialists quickly developed international political networks, beginning with the establishment of the International Workingman’s Association, founded in London in 1864. However, it lasted only twelve years because of increasing tensions between its moderate and radical factions. The Second International lasted a little longer, from 1889 to 1916. It was constituted in Paris as a network of socialist parties across Europe. One of its founders was Jean Jaurès, an independent French socialist and leading supporter of international workers’ solidarity. The Second International designated May 1 as international Labor Day to commemorate the Chicago Haymarket riot of 1886 in the United States, signaling its global connections. The unrest in Chicago had begun with a general strike in support of an eight-hour workday, and escalated when a bomb exploded at a rally, killing several policemen and workers. Though initially a local labor dispute, Haymarket quickly became an international symbol of the growing labor movement. It also showcased the transnational connections among labor activists engaged in a common struggle for better working conditions and higher wages. European immigrants played a crucial role in the Chicago labor movements. Five of the defendants in the first Haymarket trial and five of the eight defendants in a subsequent trial were German-born with ties to the syndicalist and anarchist movements of Europe. A sixth was born in England, and only two were American-born. One of the defendants, August Spiess, was the editor of the German-language newspaper Arbeiter-Zeitung (Workers Daily), which published news related to workers’ interests and had become a major organ for the socialist and anarchist movements in the Chicago area. Most of the pamphlets calling for continued strikes in early May were printed in both German and English, catering to the sizeable German immigrant population in Chicago. These immigrants provided a crucial link between the European and American labor movements, so much so that after the riots, American anti-labor circles portrayed socialism and labor unrest as a foreign import. To this day, May 1 is celebrated as a workers’ holiday across the world, except, tellingly, in the United States. Transnational cooperation among socialist groups peaked in the period between 1890 and 1914. While socialist parties created a political platform specific to their own national political, economic, and social environment, they united behind several causes common to working people across the industrial world. Those included the eight-hour workday, fair wages, and the abolition of child labor. The Second International also began advocating for women’s rights in the early twentieth century. In 1910, it organized an International Women’s Conference in Copenhagen, Denmark, where delegates first suggested an International Women’s day. Initially celebrated

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on March 19, it was moved to March 8 in 1914. The day became a focal point not only for women’s labor activism but also for the broader aims of the women’s rights movement, such as the demand for universal suffrage. Socialism as an ideology and political movement challenged the established political order domestically as well as internationally. It represented a new interpretation of what equality meant and how power should be distributed among different segments of the population. Through its transnational networks, it also began to play an increasingly important role in the conduct of international relations, albeit for the time being primarily through grassroots challenges to the established power structures from the bottom up. Socialist internationalism suffered a serious setback with the outbreak of the First World War, when, to the great disappointment of socialists, the abstract solidarity among the workers of the world against the capitalist elite did not translate into a concrete resistance movement against war. Instead, socialist parties rallied behind their own national governments and supported the war effort against the foreign enemy. National identity trumped class identity, even though in the aftermath of the war, many blamed business and political elites for dragging ordinary working people into a war that was not in their interest. The Second International also faltered in the midst of the war. It disbanded in 1916. International socialism competed with, and ultimately succumbed to, the appeal of nationalism, which had been gaining political strength in the latter part of the nineteenth century. As already indicated earlier in this volume, nationalism developed in a complex synergy with internationalism, transforming nationalism in the second half of the nineteenth century into an international movement. Between 1850 and 1900, new national communities were forged out of disparate states and principalities. The United States, Brazil, Italy, and Germany were among the most prominent cases, illustrating the motivations and consequences of nation-building within the national and transnational context. In each of these countries, the process of cultural nationalization was accompanied by the suppression of ethnic and cultural minorities, whose narratives did not fit into the framework of the newly created nation-state. The spread of nationalism across Europe and the Americas was another example of the transnational movement of ideas over the course of the nineteenth century. While in most parts of Europe, nationalism was well ensconced within the bureaucratic structures of the nation-state by the middle of the century, some countries within and outside Europe followed suit later. The United States developed a unified national identity only in the aftermath of a bloody civil war between 1861 to 1865. Until then, the states of the Union had operated as semi-autonomous political entities exercising strong state power vis-à-vis a weak federal government. Differences between the southern states and the federal government came to a head over the issue of slavery in the newly acquired western territories. The Republican party’s opposition to the expansion of slavery into those territories set the non-slave

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northern states on a collision course with the South. After the Union victory in 1865, the political language switched from referring to the country in the plural—these United States—to the singular. Emancipation brought freedom and full citizenship rights to slaves in the South, including the right to vote for all men. Yet in practice a set of new segregation laws in the South effectively barred African American men from exercising those rights. That exclusion was part of the nation-building process in the reunited country. If white Americans could no longer define political citizenship in racial terms, they persisted in defining America’s national identity in those terms, as grounded in Anglo-Saxonism and excluding racial and other ethnic minorities until challenged by the civil rights movement of the 1950s and 1960s. Brazil also experienced a nationalist movement in the nineteenth century and struggled to define its identity within a multiracial and multi-ethnic national community. The planter elites’ economic and political power had depended first on slave imports and then, after the abolition of the slave trade in 1830, on cheap labor from Southern Europe, primarily Italy, Spain, and Portugal. By the end of the nineteenth century, around 3.4 million Europeans and about 70,000 Japanese had migrated to Brazil. When the country established a federalist system of government in 1891, it excluded slave descendants and native populations from suffrage in an effort to define itself as a racially homogeneous country. Portuguese-Brazilians were determined to retain political power in the new republic in the face of an ethnically diverse population. Despite this exclusionary approach to political participation, Portuguese language and Brazilian culture gradually incorporated non-white elements, including the adoption of more than two thousand African words into the Brazilian-Portuguese language. Miscegenation created the new ethnic category of mestizos, or Browns as Brazilians labeled them, which by the end of the nineteenth century made up about a third of Brazil’s population. European latecomers to the movement of nationalist consolidation did not have to contend with problems of ethnic and racial diversity since the majority of people within its boundaries were ethnically homogeneous. Italy’s unification in the 1860s created a new nation out of a loose collection of separate kingdoms and principalities. Despite its relative ethnic homogeneity, it established a highly selective citizenship policy, provoking challenges from within almost as soon as it had constituted itself. The new Italian nation formed a constitutional monarchy, which enfranchised only five percent of its population. Furthermore, the new constitution was by and large an exact replica of the Piedmontese constitution, elevating to national dominance the regional culture of the industrial north while marginalizing the cultures of the poorer agrarian south. Clashes broke out in the southern regions of Sicily and Naples, and cultural animosity between north and south never entirely disappeared, largely perpetuated by the differences in wealth and economic output that to this day separate the two regions.

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Germany’s unification followed a similar pattern of suppressing cultural and ethnic diversity in favor of a single national narrative. After Wilhelm I was crowned emperor of Germany at Versailles on January 18, 1871, the new empire had to contend with several non-German-speaking minorities: Danes in the north, Poles in the east, and French in the Alsace and Lorraine regions in the southwest. Much like the Piedmontese in Italy, Prussia significantly shaped the political, economic, and cultural identity of the new German nation. Its predominance—it occupied about two-thirds of the land in unified Germany—left little room for political and cultural diversity, though the southern, mostly Catholic states exercised subtle and sustained resistance to the Prussian leadership, exposing the limits of national unity. The idea of the nation became subject of much debate in the late nineteenth century, as intellectuals and political theorists attempted to redefine its meaning. In the 1880s, the conservative French political theorist and linguist Ernest Renan dismissed the traditional understanding of the nation based on racial and ethnic identity, as well as common language. Instead, Renan emphasized ideational characteristics rooted in the past and present, explaining that “the one [the past] is the possession in common of a rich heritage of memories; and the other [the present] is actual agreement, the desire to live together, and the will to continue to make the most of the joint inheritance.”15 Socialists and political leftists acknowledged the strong attraction of national identity working against their own desire for international class solidarity. While Marx and Engels had hoped that the workers of the world would share a common bond against the capitalist elites, their ideological heirs attempted to integrate national cultural with international class identity. In 1907, the Austrian social democrat Otto Bauer defined the nation as “the totality of men bound together through a common destiny into a community of character.” For Bauer, only socialism allowed all people to have an equal share in their national culture, thus strengthening the bonds of national identity. Sensing the changed political climate of the time he attempted to fuse the internationalist impulse of socialist worker solidarity of the mid-nineteenth century with the strong nationalist impulse sweeping across Europe at the turn of the twentieth century. In Europe, at least, cultural traditions both reflected and strengthened the political and social patterns of national consolidation over the course of the nineteenth century. The rise of romanticism in music and literature and the incorporation of folk traditions into classical music that had begun in the early nineteenth century gained momentum during the later decades. They gave artistic expression to the new nationalist fervor that accompanied pan-ethnic and national unification movements. Norwegian composer Edvard Grieg first performed his incidental music to Henrik Ibsen’s play Peer Gynt in 1875 in Oslo. While Ibsen’s play itself does not feature nationalist themes—it recounts the journey of a Norwegian sojourner from the Norwegian mountains to Africa—Grieg’s music inspired nationalist

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sentiments among citizens, in part because he included elements of Norwegian folk music in his composition. Czech composer Bedrˇich Smetana composed Má Vlast (My Fatherland) between 1875 and 1879, an obvious ode to his homeland. In Germany, Richard Wagner celebrated nationalist traditions with works such as Ring Cycle—based on the ancient Germanic epic saga Die Nibelungen—first performed in its entirety in 1876. The Nibelungen were based on an eighth-century myth recounting heroic tales of intrigue, deception, and power surrounding Germanic noble families. Some regarded the text and Wagner’s musical rendering of it as a kind of origin myth for the German nation, grounded in the heroic myths of the noblemen and women of the medieval era. Italy’s Giacomo Puccini created a similar nationalist saga with his 1900 opera, Tosca, in which Romans fought against Napoleon’s assault. Despite the greater level of international connections, or perhaps because of it, the spirit of patriotism and nationalism was stronger in Europe at the turn of the twentieth century than ever before. These artistic articulations of nationalism not only enhanced a people’s sense of pride and belonging in their own national community, they were also increasingly pressed into service to mobilize national communities against those who were perceived as either competitors in the international arena or threats to one’s own national integrity. The nineteenth-century debates about the nature and form of national identity reveal the complex relationship between individuals and the communities in which they lived. Renan might have underestimated to what extent the reliance on a common heritage was a constructed project guided by the political elite of the dominant socio-economic group within the nation. Bauer, in turn, might have overestimated the power of an increasingly egalitarian system of education and capitalism under socialism in the construction of a national consciousness. Modern scholars of nationalism further contextualized the concept of national identity beyond characteristics such as language and ethnicity, including the importance of print capitalism in forging national communities. Part of the nation-building process entailed erasing the voices and the memories of those who did not fit into the dominant national narrative, among them the poor, ethnic minorities, and otherwise marginalized groups. Movement of people, goods, and ideas permanently altered the international cultural landscape of the late nineteenth century. Long established and newly formed nation-states continuously renegotiated the balance between increasing international entanglements and growing nationalist sentiments. At the same time, the European states constantly renegotiated the balance of power among themselves, particularly when newly configured nations such as Italy and Germany upset the Vienna system put in place in 1815. By the end of the nineteenth century that international system no longer reflected accurately the power relations among the participating states. Unified Germany, for instance, was much stronger economically, politically, and militarily than Prussia had been in

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1815. The United States, too, had significantly increased its leverage in the international arena, although it was not yet using that leverage toward political ends. But the vast influx of European immigrants had made it one of the strongest economic powers in the industrialized world. Movement created new opportunities and greater wealth for some, and new hardships and conflicts for others. In the midst of such fluctuations, it became increasingly difficult to negotiate those new power imbalances. At the dawn of the twentieth century, nationalism had not only functioned as the prime progenitor of internationalism, if also became the greatest obstacle to international cooperation and the greatest threat to peace.

6 Imperial Cultures

The historian Eric Hobsbawm called the late nineteenth and early twentieth century the “Age of Empire.” This was not to deny the existence of empires prior to the nineteenth century, but to signal that empire and imperial politics had become the defining element of the international history of the period, permanently reshaping international relations and upending cultural identities. The second half of the nineteenth century boasted a great number of national leaders who called themselves emperors. By 1871 Europe alone claimed five emperors. By the 1920s, only one remained. Gone was the Austro-Hungarian emperor, Karl IV, forced to abdicate in 1918. Gone also was the Russian emperor Czar Nicholas II, a grandson of Queen Victoria, deposed and killed in the aftermath of the Russian Revolution of 1917. Germany’s emperor, Wilhelm II, another grandson of Victoria, was forced from the throne at the end of the First World War and retired into exile in the Netherlands. The Ottoman Empire collapsed shortly after the end of the war in 1922. Among Europe’s emperors, only the British one retained his title after the war. While empire is first and foremost a geopolitical construct, it is also an idea that draws on a set of cultural assumptions, legitimates itself through cultural symbols, and defines its relationship with other peoples, nations, and empires in cultural as well as political terms. The European empires of the nineteenth century, in particular, used cultural justifications such as their advanced civilization and sense of racial superiority to legitimate empire and the exercise of power over colonial terrains in Africa and Asia. We cannot gain a full understanding of the Age of Empire without heeding the cultural environment in which it came to fruition. The interest in acquiring and expanding empires was not exclusive to the European continent. Rulers presided over empires in China, Japan, Persia, Ethiopia, and Morocco. In China, emperors from the Qing dynasty ruled from the seventeenth to the twentieth century. Emperor Guangzu reigned from 1871 to 1908, followed by the young Xuantong, who was not yet three years old when he assumed the throne and was deposed three years later. For most of their reign the real power behind the throne rested with Empress Dowagers, first the Empress Dowager Cixi and then Longyu, who 93

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in 1912 sanctioned the abdication of the child emperor to make way for a republican government under the leadership of Sun Yat-sen. In Japan, Emperor Meiji reigned from 1867 to 1912. In Africa, Emperor Joseph IV ruled Ethiopia from 1872 to 1889. Hassan I ruled the Moroccan Empire from 1873 until his death in 1894, followed by his sons Abdelaziz, who ruled until 1908, and Abd al-Hafid, who abdicated in 1912 after a humiliating loss to French forces. In all these instances, cultural arguments served to legitimate imperial rule and imperial cultures consolidated and maintained political power. A defining feature of the modern age of empire was colonialism. Between 1875 and 1895, much of the world outside Europe and the Americas was systematically partitioned into zones of direct or indirect rule under the control of a few powers, chief among them Great Britain, France, Germany, Italy, Belgium, the United States, and Japan, while Spanish and Portuguese holdings contracted, mostly in the Americas. Britain increased its territory by about four million square miles, an area comparable to the size of all of Europe. France added about 3.5 million square miles, Germany about one million square miles. European authorities could not possibly exercise complete control over these vast terrains and thus relied heavily on local governing structures and indigenous collaborators. Political power thus was refracted through local structures. The imperial culture in the colonies was therefore not a one-directional imposition of power on subjugated populations but a process of cultural negotiation between metropole and colony. Colonialism, in turn, was closely tied to the development and expansion of industrial capitalism in Europe and America. Observers at the time recognized that this feature distinguished the “new imperialism” of the late nineteenth century from earlier periods. The exploitation of resources on the periphery, both natural and human, was not the only reason for Europeans to venture into the business of colonialism. In fact, some, among them the German chancellor Bismarck, did not believe that colonialism was a wise national investment. Nonetheless, the extraction of resources from the colonies had become an important factor in the conduct of industrial and financial operations in the metropole. Imperialism became an integral part of the expansion of industrial capitalism. As he prepared for revolution in Russia, Lenin asserted in a 1917 essay that imperialism represented the highest stage in the development of capitalism, which required the “territorial division of the world among the great capitalist powers” into a set of formal and informal colonies and spheres of influence. As Lenin and others reasoned, overseas expansion was crucial for capitalism to survive and thrive. While the political and economic aspects of empire and imperialism have been well documented, its cultural facets have only recently been studied more closely, and few studies have integrated them into a single narrative. A cultural history of empire and imperialism operates on three levels. The first level examines imperial ideology. Europeans built an ideological rationale

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for empire that helped them justify the subjugation of another people while holding on to enlightenment principles such as liberty, sovereignty, selfdetermination, and equality. The second level explores the cultures of imperial rule. Governance of colonial outposts was at once a political and cultural project, requiring the establishment of local cultural institutions, among them churches, schools, and private associations. These institutions became sites of interaction between colonial rulers and indigenous elites with the objective to cultivate a loyal base that could reap some benefit from colonial rule. The third level examines colonial cultures, including the nature of interaction between colonizers and colonized and the cultural transformation that occurred as a result of this interaction both in the colonial lands and in the metropole. Colonialism changed not only indigenous cultures in Africa, Asia, and the Americas but also the cultures of the imperial powers, as colonial goods, foods, and eventually people arrived in the metropole and altered its cultural anatomy.

The Practice of Empire Before exploring in greater detail the cultural transformations brought about by the system of colonialism, it is useful to first map out who participated when, where, and to what extent in the business of colonialism in the second half of the nineteenth century. During the Age of Exploration, European powers had focused primarily on territories in the Americas and the South Pacific. In the late nineteenth century, their attention shifted to Africa, and they began to divide up vast tracts of lands among them. At the dawn of the twentieth century, Ethiopia was the only country on the continent that had succeeded in fending off colonial domination in what had become known as the “scramble for Africa.” At the same time, the British, French, Dutch, and Russians pushed further into Central and Southeast Asia while the United States established indirect, and after 1898 direct, control over parts of the Caribbean, Central America, and the Philippines. Acquiring and maintaining imperial outposts in the farthest reaches of the globe was a costly undertaking, both financially and in terms of manpower. The economic benefits of empire often accrued to private entrepreneurs while the imperial state apparatus absorbed the cost of policing the colonies. Nonetheless, European powers were motivated by a host of incentives to participate in the colonial scramble. First and foremost, they did so in pursuit of raw materials and consumer goods, including tea from Asia, coffee from Latin America and Africa, sugar from the Caribbean and the South Pacific, and rubber, cotton, copper, petroleum, silver, diamonds, and other precious metals from Africa and the Middle East. Private companies generated great wealth, while the state paid for security and infrastructure. Investment in the colonies promised a far higher return than

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in the industrialized countries, primarily because of cheap and in some cases forced labor. A notable example was King Leopold of Belgium, who acted as a private entrepreneur when he established the Congo Free State, bypassing entirely the Belgian government. He also relied on a private army, the “Force Publique,” to press natives into forced labor, hoping to reap the profits of rubber harvesting in the region for his own personal wealth. A second motivation was national security. As resources on the European continent grew scarce and international trade expanded, European leaders felt increasing pressure to secure access to foreign resources and deny them to rivals. They hoped that by establishing a network of colonies throughout the world, they could reduce their dependence on imports from other European countries. In addition, because of the presence of standing colonial armies in these far reaches, they could respond more quickly to regional crises. This, of course, proved to be a costly undertaking, stretching the metropole’s financial resources ever thinner until they reached a point of what the historian Paul Kennedy has termed “imperial overstretch.”16 Thirdly, European powers sought colonial outposts as an outlet for their own surplus populations. To be sure, not all colonial outlets became destinations for imperial migrants as permanent settlements, only those with climates and environments conducive to European customs. Settler colonies emerged in East Asia, Africa, and the Americas, where Europeans, who had limited opportunities at home, found space for farming and entrepreneurship. In general, however, the idea of colonies as safety valves for excess populations proved to be more myth than reality. The number of Europeans who settled in African and Asian colonies remained small. Apart from the traditional migration routes to North America, Australia, and New Zealand, few Europeans settled in Africa and Asia. Exceptions included Southern Africa for the British, Dutch, and Germans, and Algeria, where a sizeable number of French nationals settled. Europeans saw other, less tangible, advantages to acquiring colonies. In the last third of the nineteenth century, the ownership of colonial outposts promised great power status within the European concert of nations. Leopold, for instance, who presided over the small and relatively new kingdom of Belgium, craved recognition and respect from his richer and more powerful neighbors. He regarded ownership of the Congo as a path toward participation in the European Concert of Nations. He seemed vindicated when his Congo colony took center-stage at the 1884 Berlin Congress. Convened by the German chancellor Otto von Bismarck, twelve European countries, the Ottoman Empire, and the United States signed the General Act, which confirmed the legitimacy of Leopold’s private control over the Congo Free State and secured open access to major trade routes and waterways on the African continent. The Act also officially committed the signatories to end the international slave trade. European leaders saw themselves as the vanguard of western civilization in these colonial outposts. This civilizing mission included a strong religious

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component, with missionaries from the major Christian denominations setting up outposts in Africa and Asia. Many of them firmly believed that they were doing God’s work by uplifting the lives of their heathen flock. Together with their secular counterparts they set up schools for the younger generation, trained the indigenous elite in western ways, converted them to Christianity, and staffed the middle and lower rungs of the colonial bureaucratic apparatus with western-trained natives. The civilizing mission rested on the racist assumption of white supremacy, bolstered by the findings of a new crop of scientists determined to find biological reasons for the inferiority of some races vis-à-vis others. It served as powerful legitimization of the western practice of colonialism. Several countries had already established colonial trading posts before the formal acquisition of African territory began in 1880. Among those were the French in Algeria, Senegal, parts of the Ivory Coast and Gabon; the Portuguese in the coastal areas of Angola and Mozambique; the Spanish in Morocco; and the British in the south, on the Gold Coast, and in Lagos. By the 1880s, they engaged in a mad scramble with other European powers over consolidating and expanding their colonial outposts. East Africa became a particularly contested colonial battleground. Italy, France, and Britain sought access to the Nile, the most important waterway in northeast Africa. They fought over the Sudan, which the British eventually wrested from the French. Britain also occupied Egypt in 1882 and eventually established formal control there. The Nile’s strategic importance became vastly exaggerated over the coming years as European countries—Portugal, Britain, Germany, and even Leopold from his Congolese outpost—competed for control of the East African states. The Germans entered the colonial scramble at the urging of Wilhelm II over the objections of his Chancellor Bismarck. In the 1880s, they seized Burundi, Rwanda, and Tanzania, while the British acquired Zanzibar, Kenya, and Uganda. Most of West Africa came under French control. The French actively pushed from the western edge toward the east absorbing what is now Senegal, Chad, and Niger. They eventually connected the west coast to Algeria in the north and to equatorial Africa in the center. The British took only small areas of West Africa, among them Ghana. They instead pushed southward from Egypt and north from South Africa in an attempt to establish a connected imperial corridor running the length of the continent. Germany took control of two areas in West Africa, Togo and Cameroon, and then moved south into what is now Namibia. Southern Africa was of particular interest to the British, especially after the discovery of diamond and gold deposits there. In 1890, British prospector Cecil Rhodes, who had made his fortune in the diamond trade, became prime minister of the now self-governing Cape colony. He quickly extended his control into the adjacent areas and established a new colony, which he named Rhodesia. He was also interested in the Transvaal and Orange Free State, where the Dutch had established outposts and where some of the

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FIGURE 3 Europe’s nineteenth-century colonization, the “Scramble for Africa.” © Facing History.

most valuable gold and diamond deposits had been discovered. Strengthened by a budding sense of nationalism, the Dutch Afrikaners, who themselves had been battling native Zulu forces for some time, repeatedly clashed with the British in what became the Boer wars of 1890 and 1899–1902. They eventually lost both territories to the British, which incorporated them into the Union of South Africa. The Boer wars marked the first instance in which two white colonizers clashed over control of territory in Africa. The wars

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achieved further notoriety for the brutality with which the British acted toward the civilian native and Boer populations, including setting up concentration camps and deliberately starving women and children. Only after the end of apartheid in South Africa in 1994 did scholars begin to write about the brutalization of the native black populations under both British and Dutch rule. Unlike its European counterparts, the United States did not participate in the scramble for Africa. That did not mean that it harbored no imperialist ambitions. In fact, its ideology of manifest destiny and racial superiority, which earlier in the century had driven continental expansion, served to justify its overseas expansionist ventures into Cuba and the Philippines at the turn of the twentieth century. However, American expansionists encountered strong opposition from within. The clash did not occur over the incompatibility between American principles of freedom, democracy, and equality and the practice of colonialism. Anti-imperialists drew on the same racist sentiments to argue against the acquisition of these overseas territories. Sharing the belief that colonial peoples were unfit for self-rule, were of inferior intelligence, and were uncivilized, these anti-imperialists argued for exclusion in order to protect the Anglo-Saxon racial identity of the United States as well as its democratic values. They preferred ensuring cultural purity over embarking on a civilizing mission. Many also objected to the potential high cost of maintaining overseas territories, arguing that the US could just as easily reap the benefits of empire through trade. It demonstrated more than anything else how deeply ingrained racial beliefs were in western political culture. Whether as a justification for the subjugation of other peoples or an argument for exclusion, race factored prominently in social, intellectual, and political debates in the western world. The practice of empire involved more than economic and administrative control over far-flung places. It rested on a set of racial and cultural assumptions that made it possible for Europeans and Americans to justify the subjugation of foreign peoples and expropriation of foreign lands while reserving for themselves adherence to enlightenment principles such as equality, freedom, and self-determination. Yet the native populations in the colonial world were not just passive bystanders in the encounter with Europeans. While the power dynamics clearly favored the militarily and economically stronger intruders, the interactions between metropole and colonies produced resistance as well as accommodation and transformed both cultures in the process.

Colonial Encounters Nineteenth-century accounts of colonialism concentrated on the ways in which colonial powers conquered territories, cultivated land, built

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plantations, subdued the native populations, and turned them into productive laborers. They included little or no depictions of the life of native populations before conquest, or on their ways of resisting or adapting to colonial regimes. This narrative persisted for much of the twentieth century, until the wave of decolonization revealed modes of resistance of native populations against their foreign rulers, as well as long-standing local fissures among native populations. In most Asian and African colonies, power lay in the hands of colonial governors, who served as liaisons with the central colonial office in the metropole. Because of the vast distance between empire and colony, these colonial administrators often governed with great autonomy. They relied on an administrative staff consisting of white bureaucrats from the mainland and indigenous elites, who served as intermediaries with the local population, gaining wealth and privilege in return. Except for this relatively small number of colonial elites, few locals benefited from the presence of the foreign power. African farmers and Indian cotton growers faced terrible working conditions and unequal terms of trade enforced by private monopolies. Their participation in the emerging world economy disrupted their traditional economic and social structures and made them increasingly dependent on economic forces beyond their control. In some areas, men were diverted to work in mines and large farming operations, leaving women, children, and old men to tend the home fields in order to secure enough food for their families. The wages earned from outside employment often did not make up for the labor lost on the homestead. Colonial administrators relied heavily on an indigenous workforce and military-administrative apparatus. They set up schools and religious institutions to educate and convert the sons of the indigenous elites. Some of them went on to higher education at colleges and universities in the metropole. In India, for instance, British rule and the accompanying expansion of the road and rail infrastructure created a more unified and better educated native population, which eventually strengthened nationalist opposition to colonial rule. Jawaharlal Nehru and Mohandas Gandhi, two of India’s most prominent independence leaders, received part of their education in Europe. Nehru went to the elite preparatory school Harrow in England and then studied at Cambridge University, earning a degree in natural science in 1910, followed by legal studies at the prestigious Inner Temple Inn in London. Gandhi also studied law at the Inner Temple, passing the bar in 1891. Afterwards, he worked for an extended period in South Africa as a lawyer and became a civil rights activist before returning to India in 1915. Likewise, Ho Chi Minh, the North Vietnamese revolutionary leader, had worked in the United States and Great Britain and studied in France. The Bengali nationalist poet Rabindranath Tagore, the first non-western recipient of the Nobel Prize in Literature (1913), had also studied in Britain. The fact that many of the nationalist revolutionaries of the twentieth century received a western

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education does not mean that their opposition was a result of that education. Rather, by studying, knowing, and engaging with the western cultural system, they were better able to challenge it on political and intellectual grounds. They were well positioned to hold up the mirror to the western world to show the hypocrisy of their enlightenment ideas in the face of colonial rule. Right from the outset, native populations resisted colonial domination. The nature of resistance varied, as did the intensity and the level of violence involved, but it was ubiquitous from the outset. Evidence of opposition was not always easy to come by since few written records document the colonial experience from the vantage point of the colonized. Nonetheless, sufficient source material exists to show that nearly every colonial authority encountered some form of resistance. Western dominance could be achieved in the colonies only through repeated and sustained acts of violence, making violence endemic to every colonial encounter. The colonized actively negotiated the terms of their subjugation, and thus played an active role in establishing the nature and extent of the colonial empire. Between 1870 and 1914, revolts erupted in almost every part of Africa, among them the Urabi Revolt in Egypt between 1879 and 1882; a Bedouin uprising in Libya, 1912–1931; the Mahdist war in Sudan, 1882–1898; Ethiopia’s pushback against Italy’s colonization efforts in 1896; and Samori Touré’s revolt against the French in West Africa, 1884–1899. Uprisings also occurred in Nigeria, the Gold Coast, the Congo, Uganda, German East Africa (Maji Maji revolt), South West and South Africa. As widespread as resistance to colonial rule was, the reality of engagement between colonizers and colonized was far more complex. Africans neither simply capitulated to Europeans nor did they universally engage in violent resistance. Most managed to negotiate some form of local autonomy in exchange for acquiescing to the colonial system. Furthermore, many African leaders in this period fought both the colonial intruders and internal challengers to their power. Sometimes they formed alliances with Europeans to fight local enemies; at other times they entered into alliances with neighboring tribal leaders to fight the European intruders. Four cases illustrate the culture of resistance and the struggle for self-rule among colonial leaders, three of them ending in the loss of independence. These narratives of resistance rarely surface in histories of European imperialism in the nineteenth century. The almost exclusive focus on the agency of imperial powers in these traditional histories has erased the near constant challenges mounted by indigenous groups. The first concerned resistance to French dominance in the West African region of Senegambia in the early 1860s, where the spiritual Muslim leader Ma Ba formed an alliance of fighters, which included Lat Dior, the leader of the Cayor kingdom in what is now south-central Senegal. According to one scholar, the two represented the spiritual and military side of the Muslim anti-colonial revolution. Ma Ba’s religiously inspired jihad ended with his death in 1867.

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Lat Dior, a recent convert to Islam, had more pragmatic plans to hold on to power in the face of French incursions. When the French made plans to build a railway through his territory in order to link the sprawling port city of Dakar to the old capital of St. Louis in the interior, Lat Dior refused to grant access through his lands. Concerned about losing his autonomy and aware of the French effort to consolidate control over the African hinterland, he colluded with neighboring kings to prevent the building of the railroad. He wrote to the French commander: “As long as I live, be well assured, I shall oppose with all my might the construction of this railway. I will always answer no, no, and I will never make you any other reply.”17 His resistance lasted until his death in battle in 1886. The railroad was completed in 1887. Samori Touré, another West African leader and contemporary of Lat Dior, succeeded resisting European advances by avoiding direct engagement in open battle, where superior European equipment often determined the outcome in their favor. He employed a dual strategy, having one section of his 35,000-man army take over territories not yet conquered by the French, while the other conducted a scorched earth campaign as it retreated, leaving the French with a wasteland but also doing great harm to local farmers. Touré, in fact, was not only intent on fighting the French, but he also sought to establish control over adjacent regions by brutally suppressing neighboring tribes in West Africa. Oral traditions in what is now southern Mali recount violent campaigns involving Touré’s soldiers. In the words of one local village elder, “Samori killed, killed, and killed the people of Basidibé along the banks of this stream [Jaban] There was such massacre and destruction that the refugees who fled came here saying: ‘it is terrible along the banks of Jaban.’ ”18 The same elder added that there was much local opposition to Samori, tarnishing his image as a brave anti-colonial warrior. One might argue that the above examples of Lat Dior and Samori Touré are primarily about power and strategy rather than culture, much like the traditional histories of imperial powers had been about the assertion of control over colonial territories. But such an assessment would be misleading, since it ignores the ways in which culture operates as both a historical agent and as an analytical approach to the history of these encounters. Because leaders such as Samori ultimately found themselves on the losing side of history, their stories have usually been neglected in geopolitical approaches to imperial history focused on power. A cultural approach to international history has created space for the reintegration of these cultures of resistance into the narrative of the colonial era. Furthermore, stories rooted in the cultural foundations of colonial struggles offer a more nuanced understanding of resistance by calling attention to the context of inter-tribal rivalries and regional imperial ambitions. They move the historical record beyond the binary of resistance versus accommodation by showing how the relationship between natives and colonizers was interwoven with and

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affected by indigenous power struggles with unpredictable results. Between 1883 and 1898, Samori simultaneously fought a defensive war of resistance and an offensive war of conquest until he was captured and sent into exile in 1898, where he died two years later. The Maji-Maji uprising in the early twentieth century against the German colonial administration in Tanganyika offers a third instance of cultural resistance to colonial rule. The earliest written depictions of the uprising, produced in the years immediately following Tanzania’s independence in 1961, stressed inter-ethnic unity against the German colonial oppressors. According to those accounts, its instigator Kinjikitile Ngwale, a nationalist in the Matumbi region in southern Tanzania, began to move among the different ethnic groups in the area to galvanize opposition to German rule. He claimed that he could protect his followers from European bullets by anointing them with a special blessed water (Maji in Swahili). Sensing the explosive rhetoric of Ngwale, German colonial officials executed him in 1905. His followers staged a massive revolt, which the Germans brutally struck down, killing between 200,000 and 300,000 Africans. Recent scholarship has cast doubt on important elements of that narrative, however. Oral histories revealed that in addition to the anti-colonial uprising, there existed significant inter-ethnic rivalries between the Luguru and Mbunga peoples of Tanzania, and that Ngwale’s role in the revolt had been exaggerated. They also reveal greater regional diversity, with numerous smaller uprisings in different parts of the colony that could not all be linked directly to the Maji Maji revolt. Thus, rather than one unified revolt, the historical record points to a continuous stream of local challenges to colonial rule throughout the region. More importantly, these conflicts had as much to do with inter-tribal competition over resources, land, and cattle, as with foreign colonial intruders. These local rivalries reveal the existence of vast local and regional cultural and ethnic diversity, an aspect of colonial African history that had long been ignored by imperial historians. Neither the existence of regional cultural diversity nor the decentralized nature of the uprisings diminish the basic fact that opposition to colonial rule was widespread and unrelenting. Menelik II of Ethiopia’s fight against Italian efforts at colonization in the 1890s stands out as the only successful case of resistance against colonial encroachments in Africa. He succeeded in large part because he skillfully played the European rivals off against each other. He procured weapons from the French, British, Russians, and Italians, all to fight the respective other powers. He also had a powerful and well-trained army that was intensely loyal to him and the Ethiopian nation. His 1896 victory over the Italians at the battle of Adwa came after he had consolidated his power over the Ethiopian Empire. Between 1875 and 1889, he had honed his military skills as the leader of the kingdom of Shewa in battles with his neighbors, acceding to the throne of the Ethiopian Empire upon the death of Emperor Yohannes IV. Much like elsewhere in the colonial realms,

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internal power struggles operated side by side and in competition with colonial encounters. Asians also resisted foreign rule repeatedly and violently. The Sepoy rebellion in India in 1857 was one such case, ending with Britain taking formal control over India. The most prominent Chinese example of resistance against foreign dominance occurred with the Boxer rebellion of 1899 and 1900. Young radicals formed a secret society, the “Order of Literary Patriotic Fists,” called Boxers by hostile westerners. Nationalist fervor had strengthened gradually in the aftermath of the unequal treaties of the late 1840s. When economic hardships, droughts, and floods hit the northern province of Shandong, local resentment increased and turned against foreign missionaries who had staged an aggressive Christianization campaign. In 1899, local residents vented their anger against missionaries and Christian converts by attacking them, pulling up railway tracks, killing around 300 foreigners, and pledging their loyalty to the Qing Empire. As the movement spread to other provinces including Beijing, Qing officials themselves struggled to control it. By 1900, European powers and Japan joined in an international coalition of forces to crush the rebellion. They sent more than 20,000 troops and ultimately forced the Empress Dowager Cixi, the de facto ruler of China at the time, to sign the so-called Boxer Protocols, which gave western powers the right to permanently station foreign troops in Beijing. Collectively these rebellions illustrate the complex interplay between the indigenous and transnational struggles for territorial control. Local rivalries sometimes aided colonial leaders in establishing control over a region. At other times local leaders established strategic alliances with Europeans to gain control over rival groups. Few coalitions lasted long enough to create a stable system, allowing for sudden transformations and power realignments. Colonial dominance was brutal and oppressive but never absolute. Colonial subjects and indigenous leaders were not just engaged in negotiations over power and independence, but also over their cultural relationship with colonizers. The instances of resistance revealed the persistence of claims to territorial and cultural autonomy in the face of vastly more powerful colonial intruders. A cultural approach to the history of colonial conquest integrates these moments of resistance without negating the inequalities of power. Attention to this hidden history at the height of the colonial era in the nineteenth century helps uncover the deeper roots of the process of decolonization unfolding decades later. More work remains to be done on how colonizers and colonized interacted with one another, including how the colonial structures of education for the indigenous elites, designed to subjugate and in many instances eliminate local cultural traditions, often served as a springboard for the cultural and political emancipation of those educated within its system. Many of them acquired the cultural literacy of the metropole, which, in turn, empowered them to use the tools of empire to challenge foreign dominance.

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Colonial Culture in the Metropole Despite multiple forms of resistance to colonial rule, the process of colonization permanently changed the culture and the people brought under its control. What is often overlooked in the study of colonialism is the way in which the practice of colonialism also changed the culture of the metropole. Because of colonization, Edward Said has argued, “all cultures are involved in one another; none is single and pure, all are hybrid, heterogeneous, extraordinarily differentiated, and un-monolithic.”19 One of the most far-reaching consequences of colonialism for the West lay in its conceptualization of race. To be sure, racial prejudices existed before the onset of large-scale colonialism, hence racism was both a cause and a consequence of colonialism. But the encounter with colonial subjects hardened conceptions of racial hierarchy in the metropole. For instance, the 1898 annexation of Hawaii and the Spanish-American War reignited in the United States debates about the ability of non-white peoples to become citizens and participate in a democratic system of government. White businessmen in Hawaii had tried since the early 1890s to have Congress ratify an annexation treaty, but their effort faltered over concerns about incorporating a large non-white population into the American polity. It was only after Hawaii was deemed a strategic way station en route to the Philippines in the Pacific during the Spanish-American War that they succeeded. The arguments summoned in this debate mirrored those regarding African American citizenship and voting rights that had erupted during the civil war and had lingered ever since. African Americans, in turn, began to see their own struggle for equal rights in global terms. W.E.B. Du Bois, America’s leading civil rights activist at the time, forcefully argued that the “color line” was a global, not just an American problem. For African Americans the anti-imperialist struggles of the early twentieth century were inextricably intertwined with their own position within the United States and their relationship to their African cultural roots. At the beginning of the twentieth century, African Americans developed a vibrant transnational community that made cultural connections between their own post-slavery identity and African diasporic cultures elsewhere. As historian Frank A. Guridy has demonstrated, African Americans were part of an international network of activists and intellectuals that included anti-colonial activists in Africa as well as the African diaspora in the Americas.20 For instance, Booker T. Washington’s Tuskegee Institute drew students from Cuba and elsewhere in the Caribbean. Marcus Garvey’s United Negro Improvement Association reached beyond the United States in its mission and membership. Finally, the Harlem Renaissance in the United States linked African American writers and poets to a broader cultural network in Europe and the Americas. During the 1920s, a wave of cultural and artistic movements celebrating African cultures swept the transatlantic world. Poets and performers such as Langston Hughes, Zora

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Neale Hurston, Arthur Schomburg, and Josephine Baker traversed the Atlantic and Caribbean, establishing and expanding a diverse network of African diasporic cultures. The emergence of the “New Negro Movement,” as it became known in the 1920s, grew out of the rigid racialized notions of citizenship in the United States, Europe, and the colonial territories in the late nineteenth century. Most European powers refused to grant citizenship to the nonwhite residents of their colonies. These restrictions extended to mixed-race offspring as well. White settlers who resided in the colonies automatically obtained citizenship by birth. However, if they intermarried with the local population, their spouse and children did not automatically acquire citizenship. Germany, which granted citizenship based on bloodlines, implemented new restrictions that limited citizenship rights in the colonies to whites only. They ruled all inter-racial marriages illegitimate, just so they could deny citizenship to the few mixed-race children born of these marriages in the colonies. In German South West Africa there were only around forty such marriages registered at the turn of the twentieth century, out of a total settler population of around 14,000.21 Illegitimate children of German fathers could still claim German citizenship, but German fathers could easily deny paternity, thus keeping German citizenship largely white. The colonial imprint was visible in other aspects of metropolitan culture, most prominently in the primitivist art of late expressionism and cubism. The French painter Paul Gauguin became one of the leading representatives of the primitivist movement. His paintings of scenes on the French colonial island of Tahiti became emblematic of the western fascination with the exotic “other,” in which Tahitian women became one with nature. These paintings both idealized and stigmatized the simple life in the non-western world. Gauguin, by his own admission, tried in his paintings “to put into these desolate figures the savagery that I see in them and which is in me too.” His art gave expression to the desire to escape the pressures of the industrialized world for what he deemed to be a simpler, freer, albeit more “savage” life in the colonial outposts. Pablo Picasso also experimented with colonial art forms. Between1906 and 1909, during what became known as his “African period”, he developed a series of sculptures and paintings, inspired by the African art imported from the colonies as imperial trophies and put on display at the Paris Musée d’Ethnographie du Trocadéro. Picasso later recalled visiting the Trocadéro and feeling at once repulsed and inspired by the objects on display. His earliest African work was Les Demoiselles D’Avignon in 1907. His contemporary Henri Matisse also acknowledged the influence of these African sculptures. He owned several Kuba cloths, woven fabric produced in the Congo. Kuba cloth patterns are said to have inspired his later work with paper cutouts, such as the 1951 Snow Flowers. By the early twentieth century, African art and craft had left a distinctive imprint on European paintings and sculptures.

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The colonial world also became implicated in Europe’s literary culture during this period. The trajectory from realism to naturalism to modernism mirrored the growing engagement with political, social, and cultural difference. While many of the writings within these movements dealt with local themes, several works directly or indirectly referenced the colonial world. It became part of the literature of the era, in poems, such as Rudyard Kipling’s “The White Man’s Burden” and in novels, such as Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. Despite their setting, these works never featured prominently the voices of Africans and Asians who had been subjected to colonial rule. And even though some colonial cultures were endowed with a rich literary tradition of their own, their works were rarely translated into English or other European languages. A rare exception was the Bengali poet Rabindranath Tagore, who remained little known in the West for decades because few of his writings were translated into English or other languages. Only after he won the Nobel Prize for literature in 1913 did he gain widespread recognition in Europe and more of his work was translated into English and other European languages. Empire and colonial possessions often entered into European literary genres in indirect ways. Edward Said has shown that empire was present even in literary works entirely situated on European soil. He found hints of empire in the daily lives of the English rural gentry in Jane Austin’s Mansfield Park, because a significant part of the fortune of Mansfield Park’s master, Sir Thomas Bertram, is linked to a slave plantation on Antigua. Halfway through the novel, Bertram leaves for the Caribbean to manage affairs on the plantation. Though the narrative setting never leaves the English country estate, the plantation plays an integral role in the unfolding of events at Mansfield Park. For Said, the entire genre of the nineteenth-century European novel was informed by the existence of empire. The British conceptualization of themselves as an empire with overseas territory, he argued, shaped bourgeois narratives about their social identity at home.22 Perhaps the most prominent exponent of British imperial literature was Rudyard Kipling, whose writings have often been seen as ideological justifications of imperialism. Born in Bombay, India in 1865, he grew up in a colonial environment, where from early childhood he was accustomed to a sense of moral, mental, and intellectual superiority over the native population around him. His parents sent him and his younger sister to live in England when he was six years old, and he later described that time as filled with the “horror of desolation, abandonment, and realized worthlessness.”23 At age twelve he was reunited with his parents, who had returned to England, and finished his schooling in north Devon. He returned to India in 1882 as an assistant to the main editor of the Civil & Military Gazette, in Lahore. It was during this period, and particularly through his membership of the exclusive Anglo-Indian Punjab Club, that his views on British imperial culture and colonialism were shaped. He left India in 1889 and, after stays in South Africa and the United States, he settled permanently

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in England in 1900. Despite his relatively short stay in India, the experience dominated his writing and made him England’s foremost interpreter of Anglo-Indian imperial culture. Kipling’s fictional works exposed the contradictions of the western engagement with the colonial world. While he never questioned AngloSaxon superiority over Indian culture, he nonetheless acknowledged the inability of colonizers to fully dominate the native population. In his novels, India consistently escaped the controlling dominance of its British rulers. It instead became a place where young men could prove themselves and assert their Anglo-Saxon cultural superiority. Kipling often portrayed India as a defiant place whose cultural identity eluded the foreign intruder, and thus had the potential to break rather than make young white men in search of adventure. According to the literary scholar Zohreh T. Sullivan, Kipling’s attitude toward India was full of contradictions, marked by both love and fear of India, as well as practicing and questioning British imperial ideology. She argued that this ambivalence grew out of his earliest childhood experience in close proximity to Hindu-Indian culture and language.24 As a small child, he had learned to speak Hindi and regularly interacted with the local population, though always conscious of his own ethnic privilege. The native Indians around Kipling both during his childhood and in adulthood were always accorded inferior social positions. Emblematic of Kipling’s take on colonial culture was his 1901 novel Kim. The story at once reflects and challenges what Said has called the European orientalist mindset. The novel tells the story of the relationship between a poor Irish orphan who attaches himself as a chela (student) to a Tibetan Lama in search of redemption at the River of the Arrows. During their journey, the two become entangled in the “Great Game,” which is a euphemism for the battle between Russia and Britain over control of territory in the northern Punjab region. The story is part youthful adventure and part cultural commentary on the intersections between British imperial, Buddhist spiritual, and transnational class culture. As an Irish boy, Kim finds himself on the margins of the British imperial system, part of the racially dominant class but at the same time, as an Irish subject and an orphaned boy, deemed inferior, and just above the colonial castes. Kipling shows great reverence for the spiritual integrity of the Tibetan monk, but never lets the reader doubt the superiority of the British imperial framework. Thus, as Said pointed out, while Kipling exhibited a great deal of nuance in this and his other novels, he never stepped outside the orientalist framework, which rendered British and Indian culture as two-dimensional in a fixed hegemonic matrix. Like Kipling, Joseph Conrad articulated a particular idea of imperial culture in his novel Heart of Darkness. His was a more pessimistic and ambivalent portrayal of colonialism, but it still adopted an exclusively western perspective. The encounter between the two main protagonists, Marlowe and Kurtz, serves as a metaphor for the struggle for the soul of the colonizer without much attention to the Africans who were brutalized by

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the violence of colonial domination. Conrad did not call into question the legitimacy of the white presence in the Congo, and he never accorded agency to the African characters in his novel. The story is instead about exploring the corruption of the white soul when it encounters the darkness of Africa. Thus, rather than a tale of encounter between Africans and Europeans, it is a tale of white civilization encountering the hidden savagery deeply embedded within it. Conrad’s personal biography could not have been more different from Kipling’s. He was born in a part of Poland under Russian control at the time of his birth in 1857. He lost both his parents at an early age and went to live with his maternal uncle when he was twelve years old. Four years later, he joined the French merchant marine, sailing as far as the West Indies and Latin America. He later sailed on British ships and became a British citizen in 1886. He arrived in the Congo in 1890, onboard a Belgian steamer that was to journey up the Congo River into the interior of the colony. The experience of this journey provided the material for Heart of Darkness, including encounters with cruel and corrupt station managers and exposure to disease, abuse, and murder. He wrote to his aunt that “everything here is repellant to me . . . Men and things, but above all men.”25 He left the Congo after only a short stay. Almost a decade went by before he embarked on writing the novel. Published in 1899, it depicts the journey of the British seaman Charles Marlowe, in the service of a Belgian ivory trading company. Marlowe travels up the Congo River, just as Conrad had done, to a trading outpost run by a Mr. Kurtz, whose first name is never given. Marlowe encounters deplorable conditions as he passes through various company trading posts on his way to his final destination. When he finally approaches Kurtz’s post, he is greeted by a row of wooden stakes holding the severed heads of natives. He finds Kurtz weakened by disease, and seemingly gone mad, though still in firm control of a motley collection of natives ready to defend him against any outside threat. They worship him like a deity endowed with mystical powers. Marlowe manages to get Kurtz on the steamer to return him to the outer station, but Kurtz dies on the way. He sees in Kurtz’s demise the corrupting influence of the encounter with the wilderness beyond civilization’s reach. Rather than bringing civilization into the heart of darkness, as King Leopold and other defenders of colonialism had claimed, Marlowe witnesses the opposite: darkness seeping into and unhinging the civilized mind, reducing humanity to brutal savagery. The novel was both product and critique of imperial culture. Conrad had his main protagonist express the horror he himself had felt upon witnessing the brutality of the station managers when he had journeyed up the Congo River in 1890. But he stopped short of questioning the legitimacy of the system of colonialism itself. In fact, he held fast to a belief in the potential benefits of bringing European standards of ethics and morality to the African continent. He served up an operational rather than a systemic critique.

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Conrad’s ideas about the excesses of colonialism were part of a larger body of reform literature that, by the end of the nineteenth century, put the spotlight on the Congo. He became an early supporter of the work of two British reformers, whose business dealings led them to the Congo around the same time Conrad had. One of them was Edmund Dene Morel, a clerk for a Liverpool shipping company, Elder Dempster. Morel’s job took him periodically to Antwerp in Belgium to oversee the loading and unloading of ships to and from the Congo. He noticed that while the ships were full of raw materials and goods when they arrived from Africa, they took very little of value back to the Congo, primarily guns and explosives. The realization of this lopsided trade relationship led him to investigate more closely the conditions in the colony and eventually to a public campaign against Leopold’s management of the Congo. Over the next few years he wrote several articles exposing the inhumane working conditions under Leopold’s rule, equating the forced labor system with slavery. The other was Roger Casement, an Irish clerk also in the employ of Elder Dempster. Casement had worked in the Congo for Henry Morton Stanley, the man who had years earlier orchestrated King Leopold’s personal takeover of the Congo territory. While Casement was appalled by the conditions he witnessed in the Congo, he continued to believe that the British system of colonial rule was essentially humane and justified. He later joined the British Colonial Service and was stationed in several African countries under British rule, still convinced that the British system of colonialism contributed to the moral and educational uplift of native populations, in sharp contrast to his assessment of colonial management in the Congo. In 1904, he published what came to be known as the Casement Report, commissioned by the British government, about conditions in the Congo under Leopold’s rule. That same year Morel and Casement founded the Congo Reform Association, which demanded an end to Leopold’s cruel rule in the Congo. They succeeded in 1908 when the Belgian government wrested control from Leopold and established the colony as the “Belgian Congo.” Casement eventually turned his attention to matters closer to home, advocating for Irish independence. In 1914, he began a campaign against British rule in Ireland and eventually traveled to Germany to seek the Kaiser’s support for arming the Irish against the British. Upon his return to Ireland, he was arrested, tried for treason, and executed in 1916. Even when critical of colonialism, western reformers usually portrayed those suffering under colonial regimes as passive victims. Political and economic agency lay in the West; their fantasies and power games played out on an empty canvass in the hinterlands of the colonial world. The inhabitants of that world appeared without power, without agency, without history or culture. The few western alternatives to this narrative celebrated the confrontation between western civilization and the wilderness of the colonial world as a form of liberation. Those portrayals, too, rested on racist assumptions about native populations. For instance, in Kipling’s Jungle

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Book series, written in the mid-1890s, a young boy, Mowgli, is brought up in the Indian jungle by a pack of wolves. He receives part of his education from a black panther named Bagheera and a bear named Baloo. The Jungle book series represented Kipling’s “white man’s burden” from the perspective of life outside the confines of civilization. It glorified the wilderness as a proving ground for human resilience and courage. And even though Mowgli was only a boy, he acquired important survival skills from the animals living in the jungle; skills that gave him an advantage over the civilized grown men of the British Empire. At the same time, his human intellect placed him above the animals around him. The story embodied the fantasy of civilized men’s liberation from the “burdens” of civilization. Almost two decades later, Edgar Rice Burroughs, delivered a similar message with his novel Tarzan of the Apes. Tarzan, too, epitomized the freedom from civilization that some men craved at the turn of the century, but few acted out, including Burroughs himself. Born in Chicago in 1875, he had aspired to a military career but failed to gain admission to West Point. He then briefly served as an enlisted soldier in the Seventh US Cavalry, until a heart ailment forced his discharge in 1897, shortly before the SpanishAmerican War. He turned to writing after a series of failed jobs and eventually achieved fame with the publication of the Tarzan novels, the first of which was serialized in a pulp fiction magazine. Much like Kipling, Burroughs portrayed the African jungle as a site of unfettered freedom and independence, an escape from the constraints of western industrial society. Burroughs left no doubt about the inherent superiority of the noble-born Lord Greystoke who lost his parents as an infant and was raised by a nurturing ape. Stories like Tarzan provided an outlet for men (and boys) who felt that the well-ordered society and mechanized workplace of the industrial age no longer afforded them an opportunity to demonstrate their manhood. Tarzan’s interactions with the native population of the African hinterland, represented here not by humans but by a tribe of great apes, served as backdrop for his clashes with the civilized world and with modernity. The skills he acquired from his adopted tribe gave him a distinct advantage over the white intruders, epitomized by his ability to rescue and protect a young white American woman named Jane Porter, who has been shipwrecked with her party on the African coast. The plot revolves around the competition between Tarzan and his white male antagonist William Clayton for the love and affection of Jane. Burroughs left no doubt in the reader’s mind that it was Tarzan’s hyper-masculinity, forged in the daily encounter with the dangers of the wild jungle of Africa, that gave him a competitive advantage over Clayton. Clayton, in turn, symbolizes all that is wrong with modern civilization: lack of courage, weakness, duplicity, corruption. The German writer Karl May also produced a series of adventure stories and novels set on the frontiers between civilization and savagery, some of them in the Middle Eastern world, others in the American West. At the turn of the twentieth century, he was one of Germany’s best-known authors, and

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his popularity only increased over the course of the twentieth century, with over 200 million copies sold. His stories often involved friendships between German adventurers and native guides, the German distinguishing himself through superior skills in shooting, horseback riding, and intellect. The German protagonist adopts native sounding names, such as Kara Ben Nemsi (Kara for Karl, Nemsi meaning “the German), or Old Shatterhand, whose friendship with the son of an Apache chief, Winnetou, leads him to shed his work as an engineer and surveyor in the employ of a corrupt railroad company for the garments and life of the native tribe of his friend. May makes clear the superiority of his German hero yet indulges in the fantasy of becoming one with the noble savages of the frontier societies against a collection of villains. Some of these were indigenous characters while others were corrupt individuals from the allegedly civilized world. These novels’ valorization of life in the colonial wilderness revealed deepset fears in Europe and the United States about the potentially weakening impact of modern society. While progressive reformers tried to mitigate the adverse effects of modernity through increased government regulations, others concentrated on preserving the liberties and unfettered opportunities of an earlier age. Even if ideas about the freedoms of a bygone era rested largely on myth, the allure of returning to a simpler society was strong, reflected even in the pronouncements and writings of prominent intellectual and political figures of the age. Teddy Roosevelt, for instance, advocated for the “strenuous life” while serving as governor of New York in 1899.26 He had just returned triumphant from Cuba, where he had led a cavalry regiment known as the “Rough Riders” in the Spanish-American War. Military clashes and violent confrontations on the periphery of civilization became an ideal testing ground for the young elites of the western world. Fourteen years later, the same spirit of bravado led a whole generation of young men into the First World War.

7 Racial Formations

The European practice of colonial subjugation was at odds with the political ideals of liberalism, democracy, and self-determination that were spreading across the continent. The American Declaration of Independence promised natural rights to all citizens, among them life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. The French Revolution proclaimed equality, liberty, and fraternity. The French Declaration of the Rights of Man and of the Citizen enshrined the same rights in a seventeen-point document, that included the pronouncement that “men are born and remain free and equal in rights,” that “the principle of all sovereignty resides essentially with the nation;” and that “liberty consists of the freedom to do everything which injures no one else.” The idea of national self-determination was particularly important to Europeans and Americans, regardless of whether they lived within constitutional monarchies or democracies. How then could they rationalize excluding vast populations within and outside their continental boundaries from the benefits of these rights? By drawing on a racial ideology that classified non-whites as uncivilized and thus exempt from those universal rights they claimed for themselves. Drawing on and distorting scientific theories, such as Darwin’s ideas about evolution, Europeans and Americans built and consolidated their racial empire over the course of the nineteenth century.

America’s Racial Empire Racist ideology became a major justification for the US interventions in Latin America and the Philippines at the turn of the twentieth century. Americans consistently portrayed the populations in both areas as incapable of governing themselves and thus in need of firm guidance. At the same time, they derided Spanish rule in these areas as inhumane, un-enlightened, and in violation of the principles of good governance. These attitudes exposed the internal contradictions in American thinking about democracy and selfdetermination. Americans accused the Spanish of not adhering to enlightenment principles, which they themselves suspended when it came to 113

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dealing with the very objects of Spanish oppression. But rather than resolving those contradictions, they embedded their racist ideology within a rhetoric of democracy, liberty, and paternalism. The Spanish-American War cannot be explained exclusively through geopolitical arguments. It requires a cultural approach to expose the racial, ideological, and cultural roots of that military intervention. The beginnings of America’s overseas expansionism were inauspicious. The island of Cuba, only eighty miles off the coast of the United States, had been under Spanish rule since the sixteenth century. In the 1890s, a group around the Cuban poet José Martí, a long-time activist for Cuban independence, waged an increasingly militant battle against Spanish rule. The brutal nature of Spanish suppression of the movement ensured near universal anti-Spanish sentiment within Cuba. Americans portrayed unrest on the island as a freedom struggle of an oppressed people against their brutal European colonial rulers. Because of the American support for independence, loyalists on the island began an anti-American campaign, which in turn prompted the US government to send the battleship Maine to the island to protect its citizens and to help with their evacuation if necessary. The conflict escalated when on the night of February 15, 1898, an explosion ripped through the Maine, killing all 268 sailors onboard. American newspapers sensationalized the incident, charging that the Spanish had caused the explosion and demanding retribution. The public call for vengeance ultimately resulted in a Congressional War resolution on April 19. Instead of engaging the Spanish in Cuba, however, the US military decided to attack first in the Philippines, another Spanish colony halfway around the globe. The American naval commander in the Pacific, Commodore George Dewey, swiftly destroyed the Spanish fleet in Manila Bay. He then facilitated the return of the Filipino rebel leader Emilio Aguinaldo from his exile in Hong Kong, to lead the land war against the Spanish colonial government. The close cooperation between Filipino rebels and American liberators came to an abrupt end, however, when American forces entered Manila on August 13, 1898, and established direct control over the Philippines. American forces invaded Cuba over a month later. The Spanish surrendered in mid-July, after suffering between 55,000 and 60,000 casualties, many of them from disease. American casualties were minor in comparison: 345 combat deaths and 2,565 deaths from disease. A particular threat was yellow fever, which had rendered the majority of American troops incapacitated by the middle of the summer. Despite those setbacks, American Secretary of State John Hay was pleased with the speedy conclusion of the conflict in America’s favor. He called the Cuban invasion a “splendid little war,” and most Americans agreed. Throughout the military campaign American policy-makers insisted on calling the invasion a liberation from colonial oppression. As proof of America’s altruistic intentions, the Congressional declaration of war included a provision, the Teller Amendment, which denied “any disposition

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or intention to exercise sovereignty, jurisdiction, or control over said island [Cuba] except for the pacification thereof.” Nevertheless, once Americans had successfully driven the Spanish out of Cuba, they took a more assertive approach with respect to the governance of the island. During the SpanishAmerican peace negotiations in Paris, no Cuban representatives were present. The Spanish relinquished control over Cuba, Puerto Rico, Guam, and the Philippines. The United States immediately occupied the island and stayed until 1902. Even after the official US withdrawal, Cuban independence remained fragile. Its sovereignty was curtailed by the Platt Amendment, which stipulated that the United States could intervene to preserve Cuban independence or maintain order there whenever it deemed necessary. This of course left the Cubans vulnerable to repeated interventions from the north, the first of which came only four years later in 1906. In 1903, the United States “leased” land at Guantanamo Bay where it had established a naval base in 1898, giving Americans a permanent foothold in Cuba, which remains active until this day. Filipino nationalists were not invited to the Paris peace negotiations either. Soon after the Americans had liberated the islands from the Spanish oppressor, Filipinos discovered that their ideas about independence differed significantly from those of the Americans. In 1899, a skirmish occurred between Filipino and American troops, which sparked the PhilippineAmerican War. This conflict lasted for three years and involved the deployment of more than 126,000 American soldiers to the islands. Filipino casualties were estimated between 16,000 and 20,000 soldiers and about 200,000 civilians. The American side listed 4,234 casualties, demonstrating the vast imbalance in the forces. The Philippines would remain under American control until 1946. Americans insisted that their control over the Philippines was motivated by the altruistic protection of liberty and civilization in stark contrast to Spanish rule. To the native population, the differences between old and new rulers were difficult to discern. The transformation of American attitudes toward empire was swift and striking. They had entered the war with Spain condemning the latter’s extreme brutality and rejecting the idea of colonial oppression. A year later they were engaged in their own brutal, and at times genocidal war and ultimately dictated the terms of Filipino independence. Worse still, Americans had turned their ideas about liberty and self-determination upside down, epitomized in Teddy Roosevelt’s 1904 proclamation of the Roosevelt Corollary to the Monroe Doctrine. The corollary claimed to fulfill the spirit of the Monroe Doctrine, while, in fact, turning it on its head. Whereas the Doctrine had warned European powers not to interfere further in the western hemisphere, the corollary now asserted that power to interfere for the United States wherever it detected disorder. It stated that “chronic wrongdoing, or an impotence which results in a general loosening of the ties of civilized society, may in America, as elsewhere, ultimately require intervention by some civilized nation, and in the Western Hemisphere the

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adherence of the United States to the Monroe Doctrine may force the United States, however reluctantly, in flagrant cases of such wrongdoing or impotence, to the exercise of an international police power.” Convinced that their empire was an empire of liberty and thus fundamentally different from the repressive colonial regimes established by old Europe, the United States prepared to assert its power overseas. Americans at home were divided over the move toward an overseas empire. Few had objected to westward expansion, but the rush to acquire overseas territory was a different matter and required a new rationale. Supporters used economic, political, and ideological arguments to justify an expansionist foreign policy. They believed that America’s new economic power required participation in the imperial scramble, and that a first step toward asserting that power was to expel the old colonialists from the western hemisphere. Furthermore, they believed that economic growth required trading posts in the Pacific and an opening toward China and Japan. That rationale also prompted Secretary of State John Hay to send a series of diplomatic notes to the imperial governments of several European powers, proposing that no single country should gain exclusive trade rights in China. Instead, all should follow the principle of an open door with respect to China, giving everyone equal access to the Chinese market. Hay received no response to his Open Door note, an indication both of the still relatively marginal position occupied by the United States in world affairs and of the fluidity of imperial ventures in the Pacific region. There were also non-economic reasons for supporting America’s move toward an overseas empire. One was the belief that Americans could and should export their model of liberty and democracy to the world and engage in a civilizing mission. In a campaign speech for re-election in 1898, Senator Albert J. Beveridge of Indiana asked rhetorically, “Would not the people of the Philippines prefer the just, humane, civilizing government of this Republic to the savage, bloody rule of pillage and extortion from which we have rescued them?”27 Those beliefs rested on the conviction of racial superiority over non-white people. American political cartoons regularly depicted Cubans and Filipinos as savage children in need of parental guidance. Images of Uncle Sam towering over the diminutive figures of nonwhite people or teaching them how to read, write, and mind their manners in a classroom became a standard feature in American newspapers at the turn of the century. There was no doubt in the minds of politicians that their motivations were noble, and that their foray into overseas imperial ventures had little to do with the traditional forms of European colonialism. Some jingoists, as the annexationists were often called, had more personal reasons to support imperial expansion. Teddy Roosevelt used his battle experience in Cuba to boost his credentials as a tough and decisive president. He shared the concerns of many progressives at the time that technological advances and an over-regulated work life had sapped the strength and initiative of American men, weakening the country as whole. A speech he

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FIGURE 4 Puck Magazine: “School Begins.” A typical depiction of American colonization as an educational mission, 1899. © Public domain.

gave in Chicago in 1898 has often been seen as a ringing endorsement of war and imperial conquest. In it he declared that the “highest form of success . . . comes, not to the man who desires mere easy peace, but to the man who does not shrink from danger, from hardship, or from bitter toil, and who out of these wins the splendid ultimate triumph.” He extended the call to action to the nation in a barely veiled call to engage in overseas expansion: “In this world the nation that has trained itself to a career of unwarlike and isolated ease is bound, in the end, to go down before other nations which have not lost the manly and adventurous qualities. If we are to be a really great people, we must strive in good faith to play a great part in the world.” Imperial ambitions for the nation became intimately tied to personal notions of masculinity. On the other side of the debate stood an anti-imperialist lobby vigorously opposed to annexation. Its approach to international relations was grounded in the prominent pronouncements of Washington and Jefferson a century earlier, namely that the United States should lead by example and avoid entangling alliances with foreign nations. Anti-imperialists shared with jingoists the conceptions of American exceptionalism and racism but used them to argue the opposite: competition with European powers for overseas territory increased the potential for armed conflict—as had already happened with Spain—for dubious benefits. They also dismissed the argument for economic expansion, stating that there existed abundant natural resources

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and abundant territory for settlement still within the continental borders of the United States. Racist assumptions about the inclusion of non-white peoples in the American Commonwealth also fueled anti-imperialist sentiment. Carl Schurz, immigrant to the United Sates, civil war veteran, and senator from Missouri, expressed concern that annexation of the Philippines and territories to the south would undermine the basic ideals upon which the American republic was built. He had no objection to forming a consensual union with areas like Canada to the north, a country he regarded as similar in culture and conducive to the spirit of democracy. The territories to the south, however, lacked those capacities in his estimation. Many others shared his logic. In order to stay true to the principle of self-government, Americans would have to allow those they annexed full participation in the American polity. But taking in Cubans, Puerto Ricans, or Filipinos as fullfledged political subjects would weaken the dominance of Anglo-Saxons in the United States. It would mean giving a political voice to many more nonwhite people whom most anti-imperialists regarded as incapable of democratic governance. This was their most compelling argument against overseas expansion. There did exist a notable few who objected to the acquisition of foreign territory on the basis of a humanistic spirit of anti-colonialism. One of them was Richard Pettigrew, senator from South Dakota, who leveled a stark condemnation of manifest destiny when the Senate debated the annexation of Hawaii. In a speech in June 1898, he declared that “throughout all recorded time manifest destiny has been the murder of men. Manifest destiny has caused the strong to rob the weak and has reduced the weak to slavery. Manifest destiny is simply the cry of the strong in justification of their plunder of the weak.”28 Though a lonely voice, Pettigrew’s speech demonstrated that even within an environment of increasing political centralization and imperial aspiration, principles of equality, democracy, and self-determination endured.

The Science of Race and Culture Nineteenth-century colonialism catapulted race relations to the center of Euro-American intellectual debates. European scholars became interested in exploring the nature and organization of non-western, so-called primitive societies as their governments established colonial outposts in Asia, Africa, and the Americas. The increasingly common encounters between Europeans and the native populations of other continents gave rise to new scientific inquiries into the nature of ethnic, cultural, and racial difference. These inquiries eventually led to the founding of the new academic discipline of anthropology, as scholars began to study systematically the physiology and brain size of various ethnic groups. Some of them attempted to develop a

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scientific theory that justified a racial hierarchy with caucasian ethnic groups at the top and darker peoples near the bottom, while others sought cultural classifications that de-emphasized physical attributes. World fairs became major venues for anthropological displays of nonwestern cultures. Enjoying increasing popularity since the mid-nineteenth century, these fairs not only displayed the latest technological and industrial achievements but also included pavilions showcasing the life of indigenous populations in the colonies, thereby magnifying the contrast between the industrial powers’ latest inventions and the backward primitivism of colonial peoples. These exhibitions incorporated race into the narratives of progress, and they brought those narratives to the capitals of the industrialized world. The 1889 World’s Fair in Paris, for instance, featured several colonial habitats, including a Javanese and an African village, where several hundred people lived and staged community life for the duration of the exhibition, on display for white visitors, much like exotic animals in a zoo. Colonial artifacts were shown alongside its people, as proof of western progress and justification for the continued subjugation of non-white peoples. Anthropologists also expanded on theories of race purity and eugenics. Drawing on the ideas of the eighteenth-century German physician Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, considered the founder of physical anthropology, they argued that Europeans stood at the pinnacle of human evolution. Other

FIGURE 5 Paris 1889 World’s Fair. Native Javanese were housed in a replica of an indigenous village and put on display for the duration of the exhibit. © Photo by ND/Roger Viollet via Getty Images.

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races evolved because of migration, adaptation to different physical environments, and were thus degenerative versions of the original white race. These theories had practical consequences, among them discouraging and in some cases prohibiting miscegenation, ordering the forced sterilization of those deemed unfit for reproduction, and giving rise to the Eugenics movement. Among the unfit were not only inferior races but also those with hereditary illness, mental illness, or deemed to have low intelligence. Eugenics rose to prominence in the late nineteenth century and continued to receive widespread support until well into the twentieth century, achieving its murderous apogee with scientific experiments and genocide in Nazi Germany. The first International Eugenics Conference was held in London in 1912, presided over by Charles Darwin’s son Leonard, president of the Eugenics Education Society of Great Britain. The Society had been founded five years earlier by Sybil Grotto, a social hygienist, and Sir Francis Galton, a prolific scientist and writer who had coined the term eugenics in the 1880s. In 1921, a second conference convened in New York, followed shortly thereafter by the founding of the American Eugenics Society. The Society staged lectures, exhibits, and even competitions for families at state fairs, called the “Fitter Families Contest.” Contestants would enter their family trees, medical records, and submit to intelligence tests. As some anthropologists veered increasingly toward a racialized understanding of the human condition in the late nineteenth century, others moved away from race toward culture. Most prominent among them was the German-born American anthropologist Franz Boas, who is widely seen as the founder of the modern field of cultural anthropology. Born into a middle-class Jewish family in northern Germany, he studied in Heidelberg, Bonn, and Kiel, where he received his PhD in maritime physics. His interest in physical geography ultimately led him to the field of anthropology. In 1883, he embarked on an expedition to the Arctic circle to study the migration patterns of the Inuit on Baffin Island. There he developed a new understanding of ethnographic difference, which overturned the long-held belief in biologically determined racial hierarchies. During his stay on Baffin Island, Boas came to rely on the Inuit’s superior survival skills in the harsh environment of the Arctic, including navigating the physical terrain in the near constant darkness of the winter season. He began to question the alleged superiority of the industrialized world over savage cultures in these remote areas. Of the Inuit he wrote, “[I] find, the more I see of their customs, that we have no right to look down upon them . . . We have no right to blame them for their forms and superstitions which may seem ridiculous to us.”29 He came to believe that no culture was more advanced than any other, developing the germ of a theory that would later be called cultural relativism. Boas explicitly rejected the kind of ethnocentrism that favored western cultural practices. He proposed to study each society on its own terms, without comparing it to an abstract and artificial standard of civilization, determined by the western world.

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At Columbia, he created the first American PhD program in anthropology and educated many students who became influential scholars in their own right. Boas argued that racial inequality was rooted not in biological differences but in social and cultural assumptions. Initially presenting his findings exclusively to academic audiences, he eventually took on a more public role in support of racial equality. In 1905, he published an article on African Americans in the popular magazine Charities. Part of an issue devoted exclusively to African American migration, it also included articles by W.E.B. Du Bois, Booker T. Washington, and Mary White Ovington. In his 1911 book The Mind of Primitive Man, Boas laid out in more detail his theory of the basic equality of all human races and dismissed all biological explanations for racial inferiorities as unscientific, thus directly contradicting the theories of the leading physiologists within his field. He remained an outspoken critic of racial discrimination throughout the rest of his life. His students continued both his academic work and his activism, becoming prominent contributors to the post-war international efforts to eradicate racism and colonialism. They included Alfred Kroeber, Ruth Benedict, Melville Herskovits, and Margaret Mead, all of whom spoke out publicly against using physical anthropology as a justification for racial discrimination. Herskovits founded the first department of African Studies at Northwestern University. Kroeber, whose work focused on native American tribes, served as director of research in a land claim case that California’s Indian tribes brought against the United States government under the Indian Claims Act of 1946. Ruth Benedict and Gene Weltfish wrote an informational pamphlet advocating for racial equality among American troops during the Second World War entitled The Races of Mankind. Margaret Mead’s first book, Coming of Age in Samoa, published in 1928, led to a lifetime of research on family relations and attitudes toward sex in different cultures. The advocacy of these scholars did not silence racialized notions of human potential, but it did by the middle of the twentieth century furnish intellectuals and supporters of global human rights with a scientific vocabulary to argue for universal racial equality in international relations. That vocabulary became enshrined in the Charter of the United Nations and the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, as well as in the first official declaration on racism by the UN Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) in 1950. In the early twentieth century, however, cultural anthropologists were still fighting an uphill battle against racial bigotry and racially motivated policies. Their major contributions to the field of international relations lay not so much in changing policies, much less transforming the international discourse on cultural difference and equity, than in exposing its racial undercurrents. Boas in particular did not shy from inserting himself in the major public debates about international relations and utilizing his academic findings to debunk racial and ethnic prejudice. His theory of cultural

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relativism was likely on his mind when in a 1916 New York Times editorial, he publicly criticized America’s ultra-nationalism in the face of war in Europe. Two years into the Great War, public opinion had turned radically anti-German, even though the United States was still officially neutral in the conflict. He called into question Americans’ strong sense of moral superiority over Germany and compared it to American policy in the aftermath of the Spanish-American War. He condemned the United States’ seizure of Cuba, the Philippines, Puerto Rico, and Hawaii as a betrayal of the fundamental American ideals of liberty and self-determination. With respect to Germany, he feared that America’s reflexive nationalism could drag it into the European war. He did not go as far as making a special plea for the United States to take the side of Germany but urged the United States to stay neutral and make an effort to understand both sides of the conflict. He recognized that while racial and ethnic bigotry were not the sole cause of the conflict in Europe, they nonetheless fueled the passions on both sides, and thus helped shape the conduct and ultimate outcome of the war. The impulse to articulate cultural difference in racial scientific terms did not disappear in 1920. On the contrary, despite the increasing influence of scholars like Boas and an expanding body of literature arguing for human rights and cultural internationalism, characterizations of the other in racial terms and virulent racism persisted. They became primary justifications for genocide in the twentieth century, beginning with the Herero and Nama genocide in German-controlled Southwest Africa in 1904–1907, followed by the Armenian genocide at the hands of the Ottoman Army during the First World War, and culminating in the Holocaust of the Second World War.

8 Cultural Internationalism

Despite the increasing prevalence of race politics and nationalism in international politics, the spirit of internationalism remained strong in many non-governmental settings. From its inception, cultural internationalism was closely tied to economic, political, and personal connections across national boundaries. It was both an idealistic and pragmatic movement and a product of imperial expansion deeply rooted in western values. Idealistic internationalists rarely if ever challenged the idea of western superiority over non-western cultures. They became accomplices in the civilizing and modernizing mission that accompanied the imperial expansion of the European powers. Cultural internationalists belonged to an elite group of highly educated people, well versed in several languages, and with the financial means to travel abroad. They were social scientists, political activists, and cultural leaders who sought to reorder societies in line with their social and political theories. They aimed to reduce the threat of war, develop universal modes of governance, and promote the exchange of goods, people, and ideas. They included political radicals and cultural conservatives, Christian missionaries and economic entrepreneurs. The idea and ideology of modernism was central to their mission. Even though these late nineteenthand early twentieth-century internationalists could not step outside the western imperial environment in which they had been schooled, they laid the foundation for later networks that challenged that very narrative.

Knowledge Networks Knowledge was a key factor in the development and expansion of cultural internationalism. Knowledge-sharing across regional and national boundaries had been central to the development of the modern sciences and humanities for a long time, but toward the end of the nineteenth century knowledge spread more rapidly and networks became more expansive. Technological advances facilitated the movement of information across nations and continents. Higher education became internationalized, not just through the exchange of faculty and students, but through the adoption of 123

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the European model of university education in many parts of the world, particularly where Europeans had established colonial outposts. States and empires adopted international standards of measurement, including time, distance, and weight, which in turn eased travel, trade, and other forms of exchange. Much of the impetus toward internationalization came from political and economic leaders, but cultural internationalists also drove and benefited from these increasingly standardized networks. They were able to develop relationships with individuals and groups abroad and form intellectual communities around particular issues, among them social reform, health, women’s rights, and human rights. The laying of telegraphic cables across the Atlantic and Pacific in the last quarter of the nineteenth century further accelerated the global exchange of information. The first transatlantic cable link was completed in August 1858 between Great Britain and North America, though it broke down after only a few weeks. A new and more robust cable connection was completed six years later. By the end of the nineteenth century, the British Empire stood at the nexus of thirteen different cable lines linking its colonies to the motherland and greatly enhancing both speed and volume of communication. In this early phase of global exchange, information was tightly controlled by those at the imperial core. British officials used the telegraph to assert more direct control over what was happening in the outer reaches of the empire and to gather information about local governance. But as communication networks gradually expanded, they also afforded non-governmental interest groups the opportunity to connect to one another in transnational networks. Education networks also expanded, shaped in part by the international expansion of the German university system. By the end of the nineteenth century, Johns Hopkins and Harvard universities in the United States and University College, London in Britain had adopted the German model, which had evolved based on the ideas of Wilhelm von Humboldt, philosopher, humanist, and founder of Berlin’s first university in 1809. The Humboldtian system adopted a holistic approach to university education that combined teaching with active research. That model spread throughout the German lands and expanded dramatically after 1860 as laboratory-based research in the sciences, above all in medicine and technology, became widely accepted. Universities competed with each other for students as well as faculty. According to one account, the number of lecturers tripled between 1870 and 1900.30 This period also saw the founding of independent institutes that housed groups of professors and student researchers under one roof conducting research on similar subjects. The British university system had traditionally followed the Oxbridge model, with a few professorial chairs of great privilege and a system of tutors. Critics of the system charged that professorships were awarded based on patronage rather than merit, reducing intellectual competition and stifling innovation. By the late 1860s, British universities, too, began setting up research laboratories, albeit with less state support than in Germany. The

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reforms were at least in part spurred by the tremendous success of German academic research, which was on prominent display at the International Exhibition in Paris in 1867. British scientists feared that they had fallen behind their Prussian counterparts in all areas of technological innovation. They increasingly came to recognize that knowledge meant power. France experienced a similar crisis of intellectual confidence, magnified by its devastating loss to Germany in the Franco-Prussian War of 1870– 1871. Leading scholars blamed the French bureaucracy for the military failures and began advocating for the adoption of aspects of the German system of research at French universities. Even as they conjured up a “German Specter” of large research “factories” where hundreds of students labored under the autocratic leadership of a single professor, they acknowledged its efficiency and the quality of its results. American universities began to adopt a version of the German system in the 1880s. Johns Hopkins in Baltimore, Maryland, became the first American university founded entirely on the German model. Other universities, including Harvard, Columbia, and the University of Chicago, incorporated some German aspects, including the systematic development of graduate schools and an increase in research-oriented training. Even as the transformations got underway, however, American students, by some estimates almost 10,000 by the end of the nineteenth century, continued to flock to German universities for part of their academic training.31 The flow dried up and eventually reversed in the early twentieth century as American students and academics concluded that the American system had caught up with, and at some universities even surpassed, the quality of education and research in Germany. Soon, American universities began to attract prominent European intellectuals. The German political theorist Max Weber found himself greatly impressed by the advances in American academic research. He had joined a group of German academics on a trip to the World Scientific Congress in St. Louis, Missouri, in 1904. He noted that American universities were both more egalitarian and more capitalistic. Their egalitarianism, he observed, stemmed from the establishment of departments that allowed professors of various ranks to conduct research and teach side by side, in contrast to the German system of named chairs with staff, funds, and understudies who were dependent on the chair. It was more capitalistic because assistant professors did not have tenure and could therefore be dismissed if their work did not measure up to the expectations of the department or university. This created greater internal and external competition for academic accolades, as well as higher turnover at universities with new talent entering all the time. Weber came away with a growing sense that the United States was overtaking Germany as a bastion of scientific innovation and groundbreaking research. Based on this experience he later wrote an essay about the “Americanization of Academia.” Adolf von Harnack, a theology professor

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from Berlin, who had accompanied Weber to St. Louis, agreed that the future of knowledge production lay in the American system of what he called “academia as big business” (Grossbetrieb der Wissenschaften). Whether scholars liked it or not, he stated, they had to contend with and harness this big business. Universities such as Harvard and Johns Hopkins had a competitive advantage over the state-funded German universities because they could draw on private funds and a growing endowment to fund independent research. In order to tap into that private wealth, Harnack developed an exchange program between Harvard and the University of Berlin. The American model also inspired Harnack to propose the establishment of independent research centers built around scholars who showed the greatest promise. The Kaiser Wilhelm Institutes, as they became known, provided star scholars with space and funds to create a program of research tailored to their interests. They operated independently of universities and were funded by the German state as well as by private donations. Harnack himself never headed an institute but instead became the first president of the Kaiser-Wilhelm Society, which oversaw the establishment and operation of these institutes. The first two were the Institute for Chemistry under the leadership of Ernst Beckmann and the Institute for Physical Chemistry and Electrochemistry headed by Fritz Haber. The latter achieved notoriety during the First World War as the institute that developed chemical weapons. By 1930 the Society had established thirty-four such research institutes. Transnational knowledge networks had to negotiate the tension between national political and international scientific interests. Scholars and scientists benefited greatly from sharing research results with colleagues regardless of their national identity. But their accomplishments were embedded within the national structures of scientific and intellectual production. Researchers were acutely aware that they were part of their nation’s intellectual capital and that their accomplishments as scholars not only counted as their own individual triumphs but also functioned as a representation of their nation’s intellectual power. National governments, in turn, increasingly came to understand that the scientific research produced under their tutelage greatly enhanced the nation’s political, cultural, and military standing in the world. They were willing to support the production of scientific knowledge through state funds but insisted on keeping the fruits of that knowledge within the bounds of the state. Knowledge production became a tool in international power relations. Researchers depended on the financial support from state and corporate sponsors, putting them in a bind when their interests did not align with the interests of state and industry. The Kaiser Wilhelm Gesellschaft was at its core a nationalist project. It fulfilled its namesake Emperor William II’s ambition to reclaim Germany’s competitive advantage vis-à-vis the increasingly well-funded private American research apparatus. However, nationalist thinking generally impedes rather than fosters scientific

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knowledge production. Transnational networks were both necessary for the success of research projects and increasingly difficult to achieve in the nationalist atmosphere of the early twentieth century.

Women’s Networks Women were among the strongest advocates for the establishment of transnational social and cultural networks. As noted earlier, they had begun to forge transnational networks around the abolition of slavery as early as the 1840s. In the US women had forged a coalition with African Americans hoping that they could aid one another in gaining the right to vote. However, while African American men succeeded in this endeavor after the American Civil War, women did not. Only a limited number of women actually supported universal suffrage at the time. More women were willing to rally around temperance. In 1873, a group of them founded the Woman’s Christian Temperance Movement (WCTU) in the United States. The organization soon developed international connections, becoming the first transnational women’s organization. The WCTU was at once a women’s, religious, and reform organization. Furthermore, as the historian Ian Tyrrell noted, the WCTU’s international work formed an integral part of America’s moral empire.32 It shared a lot of similarities with international missionary organizations and thus helped spread America’s cultural influence abroad at the turn of the twentieth century. Even though the WCTU was exclusively made up of women, it did not regard itself as a feminist movement. Rather, its members thought of themselves as contributing to the larger cause of making society healthier and more virtuous. They believed that women had a special role to play in that endeavor, and suffrage was not part of their agenda until much later. The beginnings of WCTU’s international outreach were modest. Three years after its inception in Cleveland, Ohio, British reformers founded the British Women’s Temperance Association in Newcastle upon Tyne. That same year, Frances Willard, the WCTU’s first secretary, suggested the formation of a World WCTU. She helped organize the first Woman’s International Temperance Convention in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, to coincide with the Centennial Exposition in 1876. The actual meeting fell far short of its internationalist ambitions, though. Only the United States, Britain, and Canada sent delegates. A single American missionary, claiming to represent Japan because she was stationed there, also attended. International outreach did not improve much over the next few years. The WCTU simply lacked the funds and connections to mount a genuinely internationalist network. In 1885, however, the group’s efforts began to bear fruit when it launched the Polyglot Petition Campaign, which called on “men of the world” to enact a complete prohibition of all alcohol and opium products. Still, despite the increase in international visibility, the World

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WCTU struggled to gather the seven million signatures Willard had promised. The WCTU’s mission at home and abroad was closely tied to American cultural imperialism. Americanization at home meant to “teach” abstinence from alcohol and other social vices particularly to new immigrants from Central and Southern Europe. Its international outreach flowed from that same concern about the assimilation of immigrants from European countries like Ireland, Germany, and Italy, but also from Latin America, who seemed to have a more liberal attitude toward alcohol consumption. The gospel of prohibition was thus constantly delivered with a healthy dose of American moral high-mindedness, self-importance, and protestant self-restraint. WCTU internationalists firmly believed not only that evangelical Christians had achieved the highest stage of moral conduct, but also that, in Willard’s own words, “only Christian countries treat women kindly.”33 Reform, temperance, and women’s emancipation thus all combined to form a sense of cultural superiority of Anglo-American protestant civilization over others. At the turn of the twentieth century, other American women’s organizations pushed into the international realm. One of them, the Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA), established a world organization in 1894, with Sweden, Norway, the US, and Britain as its first members. While the WCTU and the YWCA pursued relatively focused reformist objectives based on Christian values, politically more engaged women sought a broader network centered around the goal of political equality. Among those pushing the idea were Elizabeth Cady Stanton and Susan B. Anthony of the National Women’s Suffrage Association (NWSA). They helped organize the first international Women’s Conference in Washington, D.C., in 1888, to mark the fortieth anniversary of Seneca Falls. Delegates from the United States, Britain, and France established the International Council of Women (ICW). In its early years the group was funded mostly by private individuals in the United States and Canada, and represented a conservative approach to women’s rights, excluding, for instance, the demand for universal suffrage. While membership grew steadily over the next two decades, its core constituency remained in Europe and the Anglophone world, espousing a strong Christian identity, and, much like the WCTU, advocating for establishing western cultural values and gender norms in the world. It was also among the most elitist women’s organizations. For most of its first forty years, the Scottish aristocrat Ishbel Maria Hamilton-Gordon, Marchioness of Aberdeen and Temair, led the organization. Her successor was Marthe Boël, a Belgian baroness. Alienated by the conservative nature of the ICW, especially their refusal to take up the cause of women’s vote, more radical feminists founded the International Woman Suffrage Alliance (IWSA) in Berlin in 1904. One of the group’s co-founders was the British suffragist Millicent Garrett Fawcett, and its first president was the American women’s rights activist Carrie Chapman Catt. Fawcett had been offered the first presidency of the ICW but turned it

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down. While politically more radical and more international in outlook, the IWSA remained largely Euro-centric, ignoring the significant advances toward women’s political involvement in places such as India, China, and Japan, even though the arguments women used in favor of the vote were remarkably similar. All framed their demand within the traditional parameters of the women’s sphere, including specific concerns about women’s education, health, reproduction, and community welfare. European and American women added peacekeeping to their list of causes after the outbreak of the First World War. In 1915, they gathered in The Hague at an international congress to demand peace, which led to the formation of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), whose first president was the American social reformer Jane Addams. For many women peace work was the natural extension of their work as wives, mothers, and reformers. It also added urgency to the international call for women’s right to vote. Though few women articulated it outright, many were convinced that war could have been averted had women been allowed to vote and participate in the affairs of state. They now felt compelled to steer the world toward peace. WILPF members were determined to continue and even expand international cooperation at a moment when other organizations, such as the ICW and IWSA, turned their back on internationalism. For the duration of the war at least, suffrage took a back seat to the larger objective of peace. When women across Europe and the United States finally gained the vote at the end of the First World War, it seemed almost insignificant in relation to the larger questions women’s organizations now pondered: peace, women’s work, and equality in the workplace. Women gained the vote in all Russian republics, Poland, Germany, Sweden, Austria, Great Britain, Ireland, the Benelux countries, Canada, and the United States. The Scandinavian countries, Australia, and New Zealand had already granted women the vote earlier in the twentieth century. The notable European exceptions were France, where women did not gain the vote until the end of the Second World War, and Switzerland, where women had to wait until 1971. Suffrage was part of a larger struggle for women’s rights, a struggle in which women often stopped short of demanding complete equality. They instead insisted that they had a special role to play within the public sphere. As a result, the idea of a women’s sphere as a separate cultural and social space survived for several more decades until a new challenge arose in the form of the women’s liberation movements beginning in the late 1960s.

Internationalism Redux The outbreak of war in Europe in 1914 swept away much of the spirit of internationalism that had flourished at the turn of the century. Most disappointing to socialist internationalists, it swept away all hope of

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international working-class unity in opposition to the war-mongering economic and political elites. Nationalist sentiment swept across the capitals of Europe in July, gripping working- and middle-class men alike, while some political leaders desperately tried to keep control over the fallout from the assassination of the Austro-Hungarian crown Prince Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife. The assassination itself was an act of nationalist passion and thus rooted in cultural rather than geopolitical motives. Tensions had been rising in the Balkans since the 1870s, when a pan-Slavic movement began challenging Austro-Hungarian rule. Serbian nationalists repeatedly failed to wrest control of Slavic areas from the empire. They enjoyed widespread support among their Russian and pan-Slavic brethren in Central Europe. Then, on June 28, 1914, a Serbian member of a secret nationalist organization called “the Black Hand” shot and killed the royal couple as they paid an official visit to Sarajevo, the Bosnian capital. Outraged by the assassination, the Austrians demanded retribution and turned to Germany for support. The Serbians, in turn, called on Russia for support. When the Austrians issued an ultimatum to Serbia to hand over the perpetrators of the terrorist attack, the latter refused, prompting the former to declare war on Serbia on July 28. The declaration set in motion the alliance system that eventually drew six European powers into war. Though geopolitical alliances determined the sides in the conflict, geopolitical gain was not the primary motivation behind the outbreak of war. Instead, political leaders and diplomats became swept up in their own visions of a heroic nationalist military struggle against their adversaries, convinced of a quick and decisive victory. They were spurred on by a huge groundswell of popular euphoria, demanding retribution for perceived slights that offended the national sense of pride. In short, emotions more than rational calculations of national interest led Europe into war. Few people could define the nature of the conflict during the month leading up to the war, yet nationalist fervor ran high. Throughout July, there were huge patriotic demonstrations in all major European cities, and young men eagerly signed up to test their martial skill and prove their manhood in battle. Most also expected this to be a very short war, providing added incentive to enlist early so as to not miss the action and, as many expected, the glory of victory. The fateful alliance system put in place in the 1890s became the Achilles heel of the European concert of nations. It bound together Germany, Austria-Hungary, and Italy in the Triple Alliance, and Britain, France, and Russia in the Triple Entente. These were not alliances built on shared cultural values but forged purely out of geopolitical power calculations. The rivalry between the two groups simmered at a low temperature for a long time before the assassination delivered the spark that lit the continent on fire. Those who expected a short war and decisive victory were quickly proven wrong. The war was neither short, nor did it provide much opportunity for heroic fighting. Rather, it became a battle of machines, the first industrial

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war decided less by skill and superior military strategy than by technology. By the beginning of 1915, the hostile parties had dug themselves into trenches and neither the western nor the eastern front lines changed much for the duration of the war. The average daily death toll was 2,000, most of them from disease, on days with no military action, of which there were many. These deaths were dispassionately called “wastage.” Trenches were damp and infested with lice, rats, and other rodents. The German writer Erich Maria Remarque, who had served in the war, captured perfectly the sense of hopelessness and absurdity in his novel All Quiet on the Western Front, which appeared ten years after the end of the war. In it Remarque wanted to “try simply to tell of a generation of men who, even though they may have escaped shells, were destroyed by the war.” The most devastating expression of this senselessness came when Remarque described the moment of death of his main protagonist Paul Bäumer, just weeks before the end of the war: “He fell in October 1918, on a day that was so quiet and still on the whole front, that the army report confined itself to the single sentence: All quiet on the Western Front.”34 The novel became an instant bestseller and was soon translated into several other languages. Within two years, Hollywood produced a movie, which won Oscars for best picture and best director in 1930. Even though Remarque documented German soldiers’ experience during the war, the sentiments he expressed struck a universal chord. Through an epic act of carnage and destruction, the war ushered in the global age of modernity, characterized by technology, mechanization, and mass movements. It was the first war of global proportions, with military conflicts spreading far beyond Europe’s borders to Turkey, Egypt, Syria, and sub-Saharan Africa. The fading Ottoman Empire sided with the Triple Alliance and fought Britain and Russia in Egypt and the Middle East. Japan declared war on Germany and took control of German outposts in China. In addition, the British and French recruited troops from commonwealth and colonial nations. More than one million each from African colonies, India, Canada, New Zealand, and Australia participated in combat. The last shots of the war were fired in East Africa the day after the signing of the armistice on November 11, 1918. It had taken a full day for news of the armistice to reach the German colony of South West Africa, where Britishled colonial troops were battling a much smaller force of German-trained Africans. The outbreak of war in Europe in 1914 did not entirely destroy the spirit of internationalism. Rather, its supporters reoriented their activism toward the pursuit of peace, as did the newly formed WILPF, or toward humanitarian and medical aid, as did the International Committee of the Red Cross (ICRC) and the American Friends Services Committee (AFSC). The ICRC had been founded in 1863 by a group of men in Geneva, one of whom, Henry Dunant, had just published a book on the need for a medical organization that could operate freely in war zones to care for wounded

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soldiers regardless of which side they fought on. Dunant also helped pass the first Geneva Convention in 1864. This and later revised versions of the convention stipulated the terms under which medical and humanitarian aid should be given to the wounded in war, as well as how prisoners of war should be treated. Under the terms, those who carried the Red Cross symbol would be immune from capture regardless of their nationality. In addition, all combatants would be treated impartially as well, as would civilians who aided the wounded. By 1914 the International Red Cross had grown into a large international organization and the Geneva Convention had expanded to account for the changing nature of warfare. The Hague conventions of 1899 and 1907 included additional humanitarian regulations, including conduct of maritime warfare, protection of civilians in war zones, and treatment of prisoners of war. Despite those updates, the conventions continued to lag behind the latest technologies that made warfare ever more unpredictable and indiscriminate. For instance, there were no provisions against the use of chlorine, tear, and mustard gas, first used by Germans against Russians in 1915. Submarines, too, represented a new technology for which there existed no international rules of warfare. The results were charges and countercharges of violations of international law. Tensions escalated after a German submarine had sunk the British ocean liner RMS Lusitania, en route from New York to Liverpool, carrying around 2,000 passengers and, as was later revealed, a secret cache of munitions. Close to 1,200 passengers died, causing an international outcry and calls for the United States to enter the war to avenge the atrocity against innocent civilians, including 124 Americans. The Wilson administration, however, resisted pressures and decided to continue its official policy of neutrality if Germany agreed to suspend unrestricted submarine warfare. Wilson himself was a firm believer in the spirit of internationalism and insisted on the right of neutral nations, including the United States, to continue their non-combatant trade with European countries, even belligerents. The stalemate was broken in 1917 with the outbreak of the Russian Revolution, precipitated by a severe food shortage, which led to food riots in Petrograd on March 8, 1917. Within days, the riots had escalated into a political insurrection. Workers and soldiers organized independent councils. The Petrograd soviet soon competed with the reformed Duma for control of the city. The army eventually sided with the revolutionaries after army commanders failed to stop mass desertions. Nine days after the first food riots, the Czar abdicated, and Russia officially became a republic. The groundswell of workers’ and soldiers’ discontent had offered fertile ground for more radical political ideas. Between March and November 1917, various political groupings within Russia struggled to gain the upper hand in the revolution. During this time the revolutionary momentum shifted from liberal-bourgeois to radicalcommunist, particularly after Vladimir Ilyich Lenin had returned from exile

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in Switzerland, helped by the Germans, who provided safe passage. He developed a four-point platform that appealed particularly to deserting soldiers and war-weary citizens and centered around the slogan “peace, land, and bread.” The platform consisted of immediate peace; redistribution of land to peasants; the transfer of factories and mines to workers; and the transfer of all political power to the soviets. The measures reflected the adaptation of Marxist ideology to the particular social and economic circumstances of the Russian people and the experience of war. Lenin’s ability to implement them depended on his powers of persuasion as well as his command over his cohort of revolutionary partisans. He succeeded by channeling the general mood of despair into a mass movement for radical change. Under Lenin, the Bolsheviks gradually assumed control over the soviets, eventually staging a coup in November that forced the liberal provisional government to disband. By January 1918, the Bolsheviks had dismantled the constituent assembly and eliminated the last vestiges of the parliamentary system. That summer they assassinated Czar Nicholas and his family. Revolutionary fervor was fueled by the growing frustration among workingclass people not just in Russia but across Europe, who felt deceived by the continent’s elites. Industrialists and capitalists, it seemed, were reaping the benefits from the war while the working poor paid the price. When the Soviet revolutionaries founded the Comintern in 1919, they hoped to finally build the kind of international class solidarity that had eluded them in 1914, one that could prevent future wars from happening. That hope would soon prove to be illusory. One of the first official acts of the Russian communist government was to sign a peace treaty as promised, ending the war with Germany in March 1918. The Treaty of Brest Litovsk gave huge concessions to the Germans. Russia agreed to pay reparations and ceded large swaths of territory to the German and Ottoman empires, including Belarus, Ukraine, and the Baltic States of Lithuania, Estonia, and Latvia. The German victory over Russia was short-lived, however, and the agreement rendered obsolete by November 1918 when Germany became itself the object of unfavorable peace negotiations at Versailles. However, in March 1918 the new Bolshevik government wanted peace at all cost and was willing to give up territory in order to focus on building the Soviet communist state. America’s entry into the war coincided with Russia’s withdrawal. For three years President Wilson had adamantly proclaimed American neutrality. At the same time, he had insisted on the American right to free trade and open seas, which the Germans did not honor, since much of America’s trade was with Great Britain. Between 1914 and 1917, Wilson’s insistence on international rights only thinly masked his sympathies for the British. While the Lusitania incident was not yet enough to tip the administration and the national mood toward war, the British interception of the Zimmermann telegram and subsequent German resumption of unrestricted submarine

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warfare in early 1917 was. The telegram, sent by the German foreign secretary Arthur Zimmermann to Mexico, asked for its support in the event of America’s entry into war. In return, Germany promised to help Mexico regain some of its territories lost to the US in 1848. Wilson delivered America’s war message to Congress in April 1917, yet US soldiers did not see combat until the summer of 1918. The Americans came with new equipment and a seemingly unlimited supply of men, which combined to overwhelm the depleted and exhausted German forces. When the central powers agreed to an armistice in November, their home fronts, like Russia’s twenty months earlier, were on the verge of revolution. Wilson translated America’s role in ending the war into diplomatic leverage at Versailles. He had articulated his vision of the post-war international order to Congress on January 8, 1918, in what came to be known as the Fourteen Points, nine months after the United States had declared war on Germany and ten months before its surrender. The Fourteen Points included provisions for a new order committed to international law, freedom of trade, support for the principle of self-determination, and a proposal for the creation of an international forum of nations designed to keep the peace among its members. To the internationalists of the pre-war era, whose hopes and aspirations had been crushed by the outbreak of war, it appeared as though their vision could now be realized. Wilson’s support for national self-determination was also welcome news to colonial leaders who had travelled to Paris to petition for independence. Based on the Fourteen Points, they assumed that the American president would be sympathetic to their requests for independence from colonial rule. One of them was the young Ho Chi Minh, who was advocating for Vietnam’s independence from France. Colonial representatives sensed a unique opportunity to apply the Wilsonian spirit of internationalism to their own people. But Wilson backed away from the principle during the Versailles negotiations, bitterly disappointing anti-colonial advocates. The major colonial empires stayed largely intact with the exception of Germany, whose colonies were placed under a “Mandate System,” administered by other colonial powers, primarily France and Great Britain, and under the tutelage of the newly established League of Nations. The rationale, according to Article 22 of the Peace Treaty, was that these territories were “inhabited by peoples not yet able to stand by themselves under the strenuous conditions of the modern world.” Further, “the tutelage of such peoples should be entrusted to advanced nations who by reason of their resources, their experience or their geographical position can best undertake this responsibility, and who are willing to accept it, and that this tutelage should be exercised by them as Mandatories on behalf of the League.”35 The article upheld the European powers’ self-serving justification of colonialism as a civilizing mission. It made the idea of self-determination contingent upon a standard of civilization judged exclusively by western powers.

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Internationalism survived the war years and in fact emerged from it stronger with the establishment of the League of Nations, which formed the centerpiece of Wilson’s post-war internationalist vision. Articles 1 through 26 of the Peace Treaty laid out the specifics of the new League. Wilson’s hope was that the League would replace the alliance systems of the nineteenth century, which he believed had helped bring about the war. It would mediate disputes among its members or between member states and an outside power without recourse to war. It would act as a collective power against any aggression by individual states. It also contained a clause for the establishment of a permanent Court of International Justice, reflecting Wilson’s preoccupation with the primacy of international law. Germany and Russia were excluded from the League of Nations, though Germany became a member in the mid-1920s. The general terms of the Versailles Peace Treaty were harsh for Germany, much harsher than Wilson had anticipated and more draconian than Germany could shoulder. Apart from being stripped of its colonies, which was economically insignificant, it also had to pay large reparations ($33 billion), accept sole responsibility for the war, and agree to the demilitarization of the Rhineland, the coal-rich region which bordered France and Belgium. Germany had no choice but to sign the treaty, yet the harshness of the terms fostered much resentment against its neighbors. Most historians agree that the severe terms significantly weakened the viability of the Weimar Republic, both politically and economically. Worse for Wilson, his internationalist vision failed to gain support at home. The US Congress rejected the Peace Agreement and membership in the League of Nations. Opponents feared that Americans could be called upon to fight wars they had no stake in. Another concern related to the League’s effect on the terms of the 1823 Monroe Doctrine, which had stipulated that no foreign power should intervene in the affairs of the states in the western hemisphere. And even though the treaty specifically stated that existing regional agreements were not affected by the covenant of the League—even mentioning the Monroe Doctrine by name—fears persisted among American lawmakers that European powers could potentially use the League mandate to interfere militarily in the western hemisphere. All it had to do was to interpret a US intervention in Latin America as an act of aggression. The American rejection of the League of Nations did not destroy Wilson’s vision of a post-war internationalist order, however flawed it might have been. It just ensured that the United States did not play a formal part in shaping that new internationalist order in the 1920s. Informally, though, policy-makers in the 1920s and 1930s found numerous ways to shape international politics, hence keeping the United States firmly within the arena of international relations. Africans and Asians were also disappointed with the outcome of the peace negotiations, but for different reasons. They had hoped that Wilson’s post-war vision would translate into colonial liberation. Disillusioned by his

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failure to live up to his own ideals, they began to build a separate transnational network of support. This work got underway even as the peace conference was still in session in Paris. Africans and African Americans convened a separate Pan African Congress with the aim of establishing a formal anticolonial coalition. The executive committee was headed by Blaise Diagne, the mayor of Dakar and the Senegalese representative in the French Chamber of Deputies. He served as president of the organization. He was joined by W.E.B. Du Bois, American historian, leader of a recently founded civil rights organization, the National Association for the Advancement of Colored People (NAACP), and editor of its journal, The Crisis; Ida Gibbs Hunt, a Canadian-born American teacher and civil rights advocate, who together with her diplomat husband had worked in France, Liberia, and elsewhere; and M.E.F. Fredericks, a barrister and civil rights advocate from British Guyana, who worked with the African Progress Union (APU) in London. Du Bois had come to Paris as a reporter for The Crisis. As an African American intellectual with connections to the American political establishment, he also felt confident that he could wield a measure of influence on behalf of colonized Africans. And while he was able to set up a meeting with Wilson’s closest adviser at the conference, Colonel House, he did not get to speak directly with the president. Even though he was unable to secure a favorable outcome for the colonial nations, Du Bois nonetheless judged his trip a success, largely because of his participation in the PanAfrican Congress. The Congress reconvened several times between 1919 and 1927, strengthening ties between black African and diasporic cultures in the United States and the Caribbean. However, its main goal, achieving an end to colonialism, remained elusive until the 1960s. Once Wilson’s version of liberal internationalism had failed them, Africans and Asians searched for support elsewhere. Some found it in the newly established Soviet Union, whose internationalist arm, the Comintern, took up the cause of national liberation. At an international conference in Baku, Azerbaijan, in 1920, delegates from Europe and Asia created a permanent “Council for Propaganda and Action of the Peoples of the East.” However, the congress suffered from two serious shortcomings: first, it ignored the large number of African nationalist groups fighting for independence; and second, despite good intentions, the Council failed to establish itself as a permanent fixture. It organized no follow-up meetings, effectively abandoning its advocacy for decolonization. The refusal of the European and American political elites to deal fairly and openly with the injustices of racism and colonialism at the end of the First World War was perhaps their greatest moral failure. Particularly Wilson, who in every other respect developed a new model of international justice based on equality, democracy, and international cooperation, was caught in his own racist worldview, blinding him to its internal contradictions. It was a worldview he shared with the vast majority of white citizens in the US and Europe. Drawing on the promise of equality enshrined in the US

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Constitution, African Americans had begun to step up their struggle for racial equality with the founding of the NAACP in 1911. But they decided to postpone that struggle in favor of national unity, when the United States declared war on Germany. Prominent black leaders had felt just as optimistic as their African and Asian counterparts about Wilson’s support for selfdetermination and hoped that African American men’s service in the armed forces could lead to greater equality at home. And even though their hopes were quickly dashed by race riots in major northern industrial cities in the immediate aftermath of the war, their overseas service brought them into contact with Africans who had been pressed into fighting on behalf of their French and British colonial masters. That experience contributed to the formation of the Pan-African movement and laid the foundation for a transnational push toward decolonization and the African American civil rights movement in the second half of the twentieth century. When the futurist manifesto appeared on the European cultural stage in 1909, technology, modernity, speed, and youth seemed to hold great promise for the coming century. Four years later, on the eve of the First World War, the ballet Rite of Spring, composed by Igor Stravinsky, and performed by the Ballets Russes under Sergei Diaghilev, presented a much darker image: a dystopian scenario of sacrifice, death, and destruction. When the ballet was first performed in Paris in 1913, it caused an uproar. The audience was not prepared for the avant-garde theme, music, and choreography. The ballet consists of a pagan Russian ritual celebrating the arrival of spring. It deteriorates into tragedy as a young girl is chosen to perform a sacrificial dance, in which she dances herself to death. Even though the ballet was intensely unpopular and shut down after only a few performances, it was later seen as a cultural harbinger of the destruction and disillusionment that was to descend on Europe during the First World War. It represented as well as challenged the futurist vision of the world with its emphasis on ancient Russian rites, its dissonant musical score, its frantic movement and energy, and its depiction of death and destruction. The euphoria among Europe’s youth over the impending war a year later seemed to mirror those ancient pagan rituals with their delirious “war-dance.” And much like the girl chosen in the ballet, Europe’s young men became the chosen ones to be sacrificed on the altar of nationalist ideology. Texts such as the Rite of Spring help make visible the cultural foundations of the great geopolitical crises of an era. They crystalize the euphoria, fears, and hopes of a generation of historical actors. By 1919, the promises of modernity lay shattered in the trenches and on the battlefields of Europe’s first modern war. Gone was the optimism that had fueled the literary and artistic expressions of the early years of the twentieth century. Gone also was the euphoria of the summer of 1914 that had spurred so many young men into war. Many ordinary citizens emerged from the war with a sense of resentment against the continent’s aristocratic elites as well as its political and financial leaders for driving them into war. The resentment led to

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revolutions in Russia and Germany at the end of the war. It produced a communist system of government in the Soviet Union and a liberal republic in Germany, whose democratic foundations were so weak that it lasted only for a decade and a half. Across the continent, political extremism on the far ends of the political spectrum grew, indicating a search for more radical solutions to the social and political upheavals of the age. Among those most susceptible to extremist political causes were the young men who had served in the war and became known collectively as the “lost generation.” Some grew intensely disillusioned, looking at the war as a total waste, and translating their experience into an anti-militarist stance. And here, too, cultural texts illustrate the nature and extent of the disillusionment better than the political archives of a state. In Germany, Erich Maria Remarque captured this sentiment in his All Quiet on the Western Front. This sentiment, as already indicated earlier, was shared by a transnational community of warriors who participated in the war and felt a similar kind of loss. Others glorified war as the fulfillment of male purpose and a chance to prove their virility and heroism. Ernst Jünger’s book The Storm of Steel captured that sentiment. Like Remarque, he saw an unbridgeable divide between those who fought and those who stayed home. But in contrast to Remarque, he celebrated a culture of martial camaraderie that gave soldiers an intense feeling of being more alive in the presence of death than in the safety of a peacetime environment. Many saw in Jünger’s depiction a glorification of war and violence that served as an inspiration for the budding fascist movements of the 1920s. Germany and Italy were full of aimless young men of the “lost generation” who saw in the militarist structures of Mussolini’s fascists and Hitler’s Nazis an outlet for their anger and resentment. The war exposed deep fissures among the peoples of Europe and the world, but it also forged new connections across national boundaries. One of them was the emergence of a pan-African anti-colonial network, which strengthened the voices of the oppressed vis-à-vis the imperialist powers. Another was the realization of common suffering during the war, which bound the peoples of Europe closer together. The political elites meanwhile embraced the League of Nations and the spirit of internationalism, not so much out of a profound sense of idealism for an imagined international community, but as a way to hold on to their power within the new international system. Inter-war internationalism for them worked primarily as an economic and financial system that benefitted the expansion of the western industrialized capitalist nations. It continued to exclude the nonwhite populations of the Global South as well as the poor in the industrialized world. This exclusionary understanding of internationalism failed to resolve the global tensions that had led to the First World War and perpetuated class and ethnic divisions. It took another war of even greater destructive force before the international community made a serious effort to address those exclusions.

PART THREE

Global Cultures Norman Cousins was deeply disturbed by what had transpired on August 6, 1945. “It should not be necessary to prove that on August 6, 1945, a new age was born,” the editor of the Saturday Review of Literature wrote, days after the dropping of two atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. He was among the first to articulate publicly what many Americans felt and feared. In his lengthy editorial, entitled “Modern Man is Obsolete,” he pondered the larger implications of atomic bombs for the future of humanity: “When on that day a parachute containing a small object floated to earth over Japan, it marked the violent death of one stage in man’s history and the beginning of another. Nor should it be necessary to prove the saturating effect of the new age, permeating every aspect of man’s activities, from machines to morals, from physics to philosophy, from politics to poetry; in sum, it is an effect creating a blanket of obsolescence not only over the methods and the products of man but over man himself.”36 He wondered whether people could ever feel safe and secure again knowing of the existence of such a powerful weapon, ready to be deployed at a moment’s notice. How long before human beings would turn such a destructive weapon on themselves? Cousins was convinced that nothing less than the survival of humanity was at stake. The dropping of the atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki marked a horrific end to the Second World War. The bombs killed close to 100,000 people instantly. Within weeks, tens of thousands more died of burns, radiation sickness, and other injuries. To this day, the total number of casualties remains unknown with estimates ranging from 130,000 to a quarter million. At the time, not even the scientists who had developed the atomic bomb could fathom the full extent of its destructive power. They did know, however, that with its development came a heavy responsibility to 139

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safeguard its future use. Japan surrendered within days of the dropping of the second bomb, bringing the war to an end. The peace that followed was an uneasy one. It was overshadowed by the uncertainty and insecurity that marked the dawn of the atomic age. The staggering display of destructive force profoundly altered the way people thought about war, peace, and technological progress. There was little security in the knowledge that the United States was the only country in possession of the bomb. Other countries would soon catch up, turning the United States into a target of the very force it had unleashed. Even though the atom bomb introduced a scale of destruction never seen before, the questions it generated were not new. Scientists and intellectuals had long debated the effects of the latest technological advances on human society. While they acknowledged the potential benefits of scientific progress, they debated human beings’ capacity to harness the products of such advances for the greater benefit of society. These debates formed part of a larger discussion about modernity’s role in human progress in the twentieth century. The invention of new weaponry, including the introduction of submarine and gas warfare earlier in the century, had already shown that modern technology was not always a force for good, and could be used to destroy life on a mass scale. The dawn of the atomic age further complicated that association between modernity and progress and challenged the positivist narrative of history. There was palpable disillusionment with modern science and a great sense of insecurity about the future survival of the human species. The end of the Second World War and the dawn of the atomic age marked a caesura of sorts in these debates about modernity and human progress. Between the 1920s and 1960s, competing visions of modernity affected all aspects of human interactions, from the political to the cultural and personal realm. The chapters in this section will examine the momentous transformations of the mid-twentieth century with a particular emphasis on their cultural manifestations. A central feature of this era was the constantly evolving debate about modernity and progress in a transnational context. The following chapters will chart the trajectory of those debates beginning with the competing visions that emerged in the 1920s; the crisis moment of the 1930s and 1940s; the Cold War cultural narratives about modernity in the aftermath of the Second World War, and ultimately the transnational challenge to those narratives in the 1960s. The middle decades of the twentieth century represented both the triumph of and critical engagement with the age of modernity.

9 Visions of Modernity

The First World War and the Russian Revolution substantially transformed the international order. The Age of Empire had gone up in flames on the battlefields of Flanders and in the Russian heartland. In its place emerged what some scholars have called the Age of the Masses. The war had created resentment against Europe’s aristocratic leaders, particularly among the lower classes who had borne most of the cost of the war: they had sacrificed lives, limbs, health, and their livelihoods, while Europe’s aristocratic elites clung to traditional structures of power. As the war dragged on and conditions on the home front deteriorated, it became ever harder to define the war’s objective. Populist parties rose all over Europe on the socialist left as well as the extreme right. Russia’s revolution was the most successful in a string of political upheavals that rocked Central Europe in the immediate aftermath of the war. Germans overthrew the monarchy at the end of the war forcing Emperor Wilhelm II into exile. After a brief unsuccessful socialist revolution, a more moderate coalition of social democratic and nationalist parties prevailed and established the Weimar Republic. This coalition saved Germany from a protracted civil war, but it also allowed nationalist anti-democratic parties to share in the governance of the republic. Often referred to as a “republic without republicans,” Weimar’s numerous political parties constantly reconstituted themselves in changing coalitions throughout the 1920s, gradually hollowing out the moderate center and driving more and more voters to either the far left or right. Throughout Europe and North America, the political struggles between the internationalist communist left and the nationalist conservative right reflected widely divergent cultural visions of modernity.

Capitalist and Communist Modernities The political, social, and cultural contours of the inter-war international system took on specific forms within the industrialized and industrializing world. For the next two decades, competing visions of modernity existed 141

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side by side, and occasionally came into conflict with one another. These conflicts played out first in the cultural and political arena but beginning in the 1930s they turned violent and eventually led to another global war. According to the historian Modris Eksteins, Germany stood at the center of the cultural battles over modernity. He argued that Germany by 1914 had become “the modernist nation par excellence.”37 It had industrialized late but rapidly, and it had fostered a culture of technological innovation by the turn of the twentieth century. After Germany suffered a crushing defeat in the First World War, its successor, the Weimar Republic, continued to support technological and cultural modernism. Germany’s capital Berlin became known for its openness toward cultural experimentation and support for avant-garde art. It also became a hotbed of competing political ideologies with strong socialist parties as well as a growing radical-conservative movement, battling each other verbally in the city’s beer halls and physically in the streets. The very impulses that encouraged radical cultural experimentation also laid the foundation for the radical political expressions of the inter-war period. Both were products of modernity. These opposing models of modernity also competed on the world stage in the aftermath of the First World War. One was advanced by the Soviet communist system governed by a revolutionary intelligentsia. Modernity in the Soviet system promised the rule of the proletariat, communal ownership of the means of production, and true equality—including that of women. The reality was less progressive: the Soviets implemented above all centralized economic planning and authoritarian rule. The alternative model of modernity was the capitalist system of democratic liberalism as practiced in its most orthodox form in the United States. It advocated free trade, political pluralism, limited government, and economic and social competition. Despite their differences both enjoyed mass appeal, and both attracted the attention of other countries. Europeans as well as political and intellectual leaders in the colonial world were in awe of America’s economic and technological achievements but skeptical of the gospel of cut-throat capitalist competition and individualism. They saw the Soviet system as a social, economic, and political experiment worth a closer look, but remained wary of its forced communalism and feared its policy of expropriating private property. Intellectuals and political theorists across Europe and the Americas engaged in heated debates about the benefits and disadvantages of both systems. Modernity was a frequently used term in the inter-war period, but people disagreed on what it meant. Most focused on its economic aspects, particularly the triumph of mass production and mass consumption. Modernity also referred to new technologies and new gadgets, including automobiles, and more efficient production mechanisms, such as the assembly line developed by Henry Ford. Greater efficiency in production made goods more affordable, which in turn stimulated consumption. In the inter-war period, the United States proved much more adept than the Soviet

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Union at developing consumer goods for a mass market, made possible by rapid advances in technology. The Soviets laid claim to an anti-capitalist interpretation of modernity, in which technology and efficiency also mattered, but where the fruits of labor were distributed differently among the population. Soviet leaders were more interested in social engineering than their American counterparts. Ford’s production philosophy, known as Fordism, encompassed several elements that were attractive in both the American and Soviet iterations of modernity. His innovative method of production led to standardization, affordability, and greater efficiency, primarily through the break-up of the complex assembly process of an automobile into a myriad of small steps. Workers received instruction to complete only their assigned tasks in the process. Ford then moved production along an assembly line running at fixed speed, forcing workers to perform their assigned tasks within a specific timeframe and repeat those tasks over and over again. This system significantly accelerated production of manufactured goods but turned workers into machine-like automatons. Ford also paid attention to the consumer side of his corporation. His objective was to produce a motor vehicle his own workers could afford, reasoning that there was little benefit in increasing production without creating new consumers at the same time. Ford thus not only produced cars, he also produced customers who could afford his cars. Fordism was part of a larger development within industrial production management, called scientific management or Taylorism, after the American engineer Frederick Winslow Taylor. In a 1911 book, The Principles of Scientific Management, Taylor laid out his plan to better train workers to perform specific tasks that promised the greatest efficiency toward outcome. He had conducted complex time-motion studies to develop the most efficient ways for humans to perform certain repetitive tasks. Scientific managers broke down the motions for workers, separating the mental from the manual aspects of labor. The idea behind scientific management was to align human mechanics as closely as possible with the operation of machines. Capitalist economists embraced scientific management as the key toward perpetual growth. The Soviet Union also embraced Taylorism after initially rejecting it as a tool of capitalist exploitation. In 1918, Lenin himself advocated for its adoption within Soviet manufacturing, albeit toward different macroeconomic ends. He argued that the Soviet Union should apply Taylorism by combining it “with a reduction in working time, with the application of new methods of production and work organization undetrimental to the labour power of the working population.” Lenin saw in the Taylor system a promise to realize the Soviet idea of the workers’ state: “six hours of physical work daily for every adult citizen and four hours of work in running the state.”38 Among the most outspoken Soviet advocates of Taylorism and Fordism was the founder and first director of the Central Institute of Labor (CIT),

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Aleksei Gastev, who had begun his working life as a factory worker and had participated in both the 1905 and the 1917 revolutions. CIT became a center for the development of scientific management and a liaison between intellectuals and workers. Called “The Soviet Taylor” by his compatriots, Gastev idealized the benefits of the machine age for the advancement of Russian culture, industry, and worker productivity. Taylorism, he felt, could be adapted to communist economic ideologies, even if it was developed within the capitalist system. Beyond its scientific and rational attributes, Taylorism also offered a moral component that fit well with Russian religious and spiritual traditions, according to the historian Julia Vaingurt: the effort to discipline the body and exercise bodily chastisement.39 Russians looked to America as a futuristic model for their own industrial development. “Americanization” became synonymous with industrialization, modernization, and progress. Lenin had determined in the aftermath of the First World War that the countries with the most advanced technology had come out ahead. Until the United States entered the war, he had considered Germany to be that country, but America’s victory over Germany had convinced him otherwise. He now actively fostered economic ties to the United States: “We will need American industrial goods—locomotives, automobiles, etc. more than those of any other country,” he declared in the early 1920s.40 Despite similar goals of mass industrial production, the two countries obviously differed significantly on how they managed their economies. From the outset the Soviet Union defined its own economic system in opposition to that of the West, seeking to establish an alternative to the global dominance of capitalism. The antagonism in the economic realm that came to define the Cold War era was already visible in the 1920s, and thus gives an indication of a significant degree of continuity before and after the Second World War. The Soviet Union set up a centralized system controlled directly by state authorities. It abolished private banking, independent entrepreneurship, and private ownership of land and factories. These measures fit remarkably well within the framework of Taylorism, putting the management of the economy under the control of a centralized body of experts who could coordinate supply, production, and labor in the most efficient way. In practice, though, it produced very different results. Lenin himself realized the shortcomings of direct state control over the economy. He abruptly changed course in 1921 to allow for limited free trade, providing incentives for entrepreneurs to increase production. However, free enterprise remained limited in scope and did not extend to foreign trade. After Stalin came to power in the mid1920s, he devised a new system of economic reform carried out through a series of five-year plans. It called for an increase in industrial and agricultural output and the collectivization of farms across the country. When he encountered resistance from wealthier land-owning peasants, he responded with brutal force, deporting an estimated two million independent farmers to labor camps in Siberia and confiscating their property.

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The US and western European economic systems, by contrast, championed open competition and free markets, as enshrined in Wilson’s Fourteen Points and the League of Nations. Even though the US Congress had rejected the League and appeared to champion an isolationist foreign policy, it supported economic ties to foreign countries and championed free and open markets. Throughout the 1920s, the US government regularly promoted the expansion of private US financial and industrial entrepreneurship abroad. The most prominent demonstration of this private-public partnership was the Dawes Plan of 1924, a renegotiation of Germany’s reparation payments, spearheaded by the Chicago banker Charles Dawes, who had close ties to then commerce secretary Herbert Hoover. Putting such momentous programs as reparations and debt relief in the hands of private individuals did not necessary signal the retreat of the state in international affairs, but it did reveal an understanding of the practice of international affairs that went beyond the state. US policy-makers made use of corporate and private agents to conduct the “business” of international relations, whenever it appeared to suit the national interest. In that, too, the American model diverged significantly from the Soviet one, which utilized the state in all matters of economic planning. The Dawes Plan proved a success in the short term, ushering in a brief period of economic recovery. It came to a sudden end when the American stock market crashed in 1929, bringing about the collapse of the international financial system and a global depression. In socio-political terms, the Soviet and American models of modernity diverged significantly as well. Political modernity in the United States meant mass participation through universal suffrage, liberal democracy, and individual freedoms. In practice, however, inequality persisted, particularly in the treatment of African Americans and other minorities. In the South, Jim Crow laws effectively shut out African Americans from voting. Public facilities were segregated, including public restrooms, restaurants, swimming pools, and schools. Schools for blacks received significantly less funding than schools for whites. One of the few freedoms African Americans did enjoy and took advantage of was the freedom of movement. Between 1915 and the 1920s, thousands of black Southerners left behind the oppressive system of segregation in the South for greater opportunities in northern cities. The white population in places like Chicago, New York, Detroit, and Cleveland reacted with hostility to what came to be called the Great Migration. In the summer of 1919, race riots erupted in several northern cities as tensions mounted. In Chicago alone, thirty-eight people were killed, twenty-three of them African Americans. The disconnect between America’s global rhetoric of freedom and equality and its domestic practice of discrimination seriously undermined its credibility in Africa and Asia, yet did not prevent the United States from continuing to portray itself in the international arena as a beacon of democracy and freedom. The Soviet system faced a similar disconnect between rhetoric and practice. It claimed to represent the masses through the organ of the party.

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Communists implemented key welfare measures, like free education, free healthcare, and old-age pensions. They promoted full equality of the sexes, including the inclusion of women in the workforce. They had numbers to prove it. By 1935, 42 percent of Soviet women worked outside the home, compared to 24 percent in the United States. Feminists and progressive women in Europe and the United States observed with great interest the pronouncements of gender equality within the Soviet Union. As promising as those numbers sounded, Soviet women were far from achieving equality with men. They continued to shoulder most of the household duties and childcare, and they rarely rose to economic and political leadership positions in the state apparatus. Observers in Europe and the non-western world carefully weighed the advantages and disadvantages of the American and Soviet systems. European conservatives were alienated by America’s mass culture, the showmanship of American politics, and the excesses of American capitalism. They were, however, even more alarmed by the anti-bourgeois and anti-capitalist tirades emanating from Soviet Russia. Anti-Americanism was a favorite sport among Europe’s conservative elite, but anti-communism was a deeply ingrained political conviction. Socialists and social democrats, on the other hand, observed with great interest the Soviet Union’s efforts toward a more egalitarian society. Their support increased in the 1930s when the western capitalist economies seemed on the verge of collapse, while the Soviet economy suffered no unemployment and even managed to increase its global market share from 5 to 18 percent by 1938. Yet concern grew as evidence of the brutal excesses of Stalin’s rule and the mass deportations of dissidents to the gulags mounted.

Cultural Modernities Ideas about modernity also shaped the artistic and literary movements of the 1920s and artistic trends spread transnationally with increasing speed. Its aesthetics were often pessimistic, nihilistic, dark, and cold. Cultural modernity engaged directly with the machine age and human beings’ place within it. The Swiss Dadaist movement influenced many of the international artistic trends of the 1920s and was the first to incorporate the war experience into its artistic productions. Many German artists had fled to Switzerland to escape the war, among them Hugo Ball, Hans Richter, Hans Arp, and Hanna Höch. They were joined by Sophie Taeuber from Switzerland, Tristan Tzara from Hungary, Marcel Duchamps from France, and other exiles. Dadaists expressed their disillusionment with violence, bourgeois rationality, and technology by producing art that was deliberately chaotic, non-rational, and non-sensical. Though highly critical of modern technology, Dadaism focused its art on the opposition to war, a shared experience among Europeans.

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In the inter-war period, Dadaism merged with the German New Objectivity (Neue Sachlichkeit) movement. Reeling from the effects of the war both economically and psychologically, Germans embraced modernity more than did their neighbors. In art, architecture, and literature, New Objectivity featured straight lines and brutal objectivity. Otto Dix and George Grosz, two prominent Dadaists, bridged the gap between Dadaism and New Objectivity by combining their realist styles with absurdist and often cynical features that presented scenes of poverty, decay, and death in dilapidated urban environments. New Objectivity soon seeped into mainstream European culture. For instance, it inspired the blurring of gender distinctions in the world of fashion. The 1920s New Woman adopted boyish hairstyles and wore pants and dresses with shorter hemlines and boxy shapes designed to hide feminine curves. Mostly an aesthetic phenomenon among the upper middle-class, the flapper, as she was called, shattered several taboos, including smoking cigarettes in public and driving a car. This expression of cultural liberation appeared to complement the political liberation enshrined in the newly won right to vote. The reality was, of course, far less liberating and egalitarian. Few married women worked outside the home or gained economic independence, and most refrained from fully adopting the flapper look. New Objectivity also affected architectural styles and home design. The Bauhaus School, formed in Weimar in 1919, exhibited a style of modernism focused on straight lines and unadorned functionality. Under the leadership of Walter Gropius, Hannes Meyer, and Ludwig Mies van der Rohe, the school developed an internationally renowned art and design program. The school included a pottery studio that produced household ceramics with clean lines and plain glazes. When the school moved from Weimar to nearby Dessau in 1925, it expanded into teaching architecture. Design innovation came to an abrupt end when the Nazi regime shut down the school in 1933, prompting most Bauhaus designers to leave Germany. But its influence in the world of design continued well into the post-war period, in part because of the continued work of its former prominent teachers and students abroad. Van der Rohe, for instance, moved to the United States and became director of the Chicago School of Architecture, later renamed the Illinois Institute of Technology. 1920s Berlin became a hub for social and cultural experimentation. The city attracted an international cast of writers, journalists, and artists, among them the American journalist Dorothy Thompson, the British novelist Christopher Isherwood, and the Russian writer Ilya Ehrenburg. Isherwood recorded his impressions of the city during the Weimar years in the 1939 novel Goodbye Berlin, in which he described the decline of the creative and politically liberal class in Germany under the Nazi regime. His close British friend and occasional romantic partner W.H. Auden also spent time in Berlin in the late 1920s. He, too, recorded the growing polarization between the political left and right. German playwright Berthold Brecht staged several

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avant-garde plays in Berlin before going into exile after the rise to power of the National Socialists in January 1933. Musical trends in Europe and the Americas increasingly incorporated transnational influences. This was particularly true for jazz, which became a transatlantic phenomenon in the inter-war period. Originally performed by African American musicians in New Orleans, jazz moved north during America’s great migration and then spread to Europe in the 1920s. Soon after the First World War, the New Orleans-based Original Dixieland Jazz Band performed its first European concert at the London Hippodrome. The band had become popular in the United States with several compositions, most famous among them the “Tiger Rag.” Other bands followed in a steady transatlantic stream, among them the Southern Syncopated Orchestra and the Duke Ellington Band. American writers and entertainers followed jazz to Europe, many of them settling in Paris in the inter-war period. Josephine Baker became a sensation in Paris shortly after she arrived there in 1925 at the age of nineteen. She capitalized on racial stereotypes by performing as an exotic dancer, often scantily dressed in a banana skirt. She became the highest paid dance performer in Paris, enabling her to wield considerable influence. Baker was also closely connected to a group of American artists and journalists who had settled in Paris in the early 1920s. They included Ernest Hemingway, who had come to Paris in 1921 as a foreign correspondent for the Toronto Star, Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sinclair Lewis, and the Irish writer James Joyce. Creative talent flowed freely between Europe and the United States. The French singer and actor Maurice Chevalier performed regularly in the United States, where he met American composers George Gershwin and Irving Berlin. He also worked with Charlie Chaplin, who had himself emigrated from England in 1912 and had roles in several movies once they included sound. Hollywood in the 1920s was just beginning to make its mark as an international hub of filmmaking, competing with the British, French, and German silent film industry. By the end of the 1920s, however, it had firmly established its predominance, attracting several European filmmakers and actors, among them the German film director Ernst Lubitsch, who joined Warner Brothers Studio in 1922. Lubitsch’s compatriot Fritz Lang came to Hollywood in 1934 after the Nazis had made it impossible for him to continue working in Germany. In 1927, he had won international acclaim for his production of Metropolis, at the time the most expensive film ever made. Metropolis, though deeply flawed in its narrative structure—not helped by the fact that several sections of the film were later lost—expressed the inter-war fascination with and anxiety about modernity. The film portrayed a dystopian city of the future, in which a robot doppelgänger of a compassionate and caring young woman, Maria, incites workers to revolt against the industrial elite of the city. The movie depicts a futuristic model of class struggle mapped onto a vertical urban architecture. The wealthy industrial elite idles away its time with games and

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FIGURE 6 Metropolis, poster, 1927. The movie depicted a dystopian vision of a futuristic urban society. © Photo by LMPC via Getty Images.

entertainment in the aboveground city, while workers labor as automatons underground. The executive office of the city’s chief industrialist Joh Fredersen, an example of stark modernist industrial design, hovers above the city in one of the numerous skyscrapers. The film also features futuristic technology, such as a video screen monitoring the underground machine floor, an intercom system, remote-controlled machine operation, and a giant clock divided into ten rather than twelve time segments. Metropolis captured the contemporary unease with industrial modernity, technological efficiency, economic inequality, and political extremism. Early in the movie, Joh’s son, Freder, accidentally wanders underground and sees for the first time the giant machine that provides the energy for the city’s upper levels. Dozens of workers mindlessly perform the same mechanical task over and over again, while an operator remotely controls the speed of the machines. As the speed increases, the machine heats up and erupts in a tremendous explosion, killing and injuring many of the workers. Freder witnesses the explosion as well as the efficient removal of the casualties by

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emergency workers when suddenly out of nowhere new workers appear to replace those who perished. None of the workers display any sign of empathy, sorrow, or other human emotion, in stark contrast to Freder, who is overcome with horror. He resolves to become a mediator between the two worlds, embodying the movie’s central message: “the mediator between the head and the hands must be the heart.” He finds an accomplice in the angelic figure of Maria, whose compassion and care for the children of the underground city stands in polar opposition to the harsh mechanized environment of the machine floor. But before Freder and Maria can succeed they have to confront Maria’s sinister robotic alter ego, who incites the workers toward a revolutionary uprising that threatens to destroy the underground city and kill the workers’ children. Metropolis can be read as a critique of both capitalism and totalitarianism. It also reflected the political polarization of the mid-1920s between communism and fascism. The revolutionary rhetoric of the robotic Maria mirrored the anti-capitalist propaganda of the Soviet state and the communist parties of Western Europe. But it also gave voice to a deeply conservative critique of modern society, portraying the upper class as hedonistic, decadent, and narcissistic. That critique of modern society’s moral corruption and the excesses of unfettered capitalism proved particularly appealing to National Socialists in the late 1920s, many of whom praised the movie. Because the screenwriter Thea von Harbou later joined the Nazi party, some film scholars attributed a fascist message to Metropolis. That judgment is based on an incomplete reading of the film, however, ignoring the pervasive display of concerns about the excesses of modern industrial society, growing class divisions, and the detrimental consequences of populist demagoguery. Those attributes could be assigned to both communism and fascism. It reflected Europe’s ambivalence toward modernity. America’s embrace of modernity stood in marked contrast to Europe’s ambivalence. Less burdened by the vestiges of a highly stratified social order and more willing to embrace mass culture, mass production, technical innovation, and mass consumption, Americans took the lead in building modernity. This leadership in the cultural realm became increasingly associated with American economic and political clout in the international arena. And the United States’ economic and political clout, in turn, paved the way for the spread of American cultural products. Two areas in particular epitomized America’s growing cultural power. One was the rise of movies as a dominant form of popular entertainment. In the inter-war period, Hollywood became the hub of the American and, by the early 1930s, international movie industry, with many European directors and filmmakers moving to California to advance their career. The industry was dominated by five large studios, which established long-term contracts with actors and directors. Together with smaller studios, these dream factories churned out a steady stream of movies, around 800 per year by the mid-1920s. They also controlled distribution across the country and limited releases abroad.

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Movie-going was cheap entertainment in the US, and many lower-class neighborhoods featured theaters that became centers of social life. A movie ticket was affordable for working-class families, and in any given week about half of America’s urban population attended film screenings. Movies of the 1920s delivered a mix of romance, adventure, and comedy. Newly-minted film stars like Mary Pickford, Rudolph Valentino, Douglas Fairbanks, and Charlie Chaplin delivered escapist features that played to each actor’s strengths. Fairbanks starred in several adventure pictures during the silent film era, playing swashbuckling pirates, sword-wielding fighters, and daring vigilantes like Robin Hood. Mary Pickford, who was married to Fairbanks, starred in hundreds of romantic films, usually playing an innocent sweet girl, often opposite Charlie Chaplin, whose comedies quickly gained international fame. By the early 1920s, both Pickford and Chaplin became their own producers. As Europe descended into depression and political chaos, Hollywood offered refuge for actors, directors, and producers from all over the world, many of them escaping the volatile political and cultural climate in Europe. The United States also took the lead in its embrace of mass consumption as it experienced an economic boom in the 1920s. Advertisements for consumer goods flooded newspapers, magazines, and public billboards. Mass consumption was further increased by the advent of installment buying and the easy availability of credit. Department stores, such as Woolworth’s and Filene’s, opened branches in many American cities. Advertisements increasingly appealed to women, even if men still made most of the purchasing decisions, particularly when it came to large items such as homes or cars. Consumption of quality goods became a hallmark of social status for families, and thus advertisers lured consumers with suggestions of higher status, or, conversely, with the threat of the loss of status, if they lacked a particular item on display. The 1928 advertising campaign for the mouthwash Listerine illustrates the aggressive use of social status anxieties to sell a product. The ad warned in bold letters: “Hallitosis makes you unpopular.” It featured a woman sitting by herself while another man and woman were dancing in a close embrace in the background. The caption below reads, “No matter how charming you may be or how fond of you your friends are, you cannot expect them to put up with halitosis (unpleasant breath) forever.” Another featured a young woman covering her face, clutching a handkerchief next to a bouquet of flowers. The title read, “often a bridesmaid, never a bride,” followed by the suggestion that poor oral hygiene was keeping her from finding a man.41 Luckily the solution to the problem appeared to be just around the corner at the local drug store. Advertisements in the 1920s were not just ways to sell a particular product, they also established and reinforced the social and cultural norms of modern society. Advertisers capitalized on women in part because they recognized their influence in the marketplace. The buying choices they made influenced the

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direction of the market economy. Consumption also provided women a measure of independence. One 1924 ad featured a woman dressed in boyish knickerbockers and a short haircut in front of a Ford automobile. With the caption “Freedom for the woman who owns a Ford,” the ad sought to appeal to the New Woman who embraced her newfound mobility and freedom to consume. Advertisements thus served both as prescriptions for social norms and indicators of changes in those social norms. American advertising became a model for Europeans as well, though the development of a consumer culture occurred at a slower pace and on a more modest scale. The slower pace was in large part the result of economic and demographic conditions within Europe. Europe’s population grew more slowly than in the United States in the first decades of the twentieth century. In addition, it took Europeans until the mid-1920s to recover from the ravages of the First World War. They also fell behind the United States in their standard of living. Americans’ purchasing power rose a remarkable 23 percent between 1913 and 1929, Western Europeans’ by only 5.5 percent.42 Yet there was a cultural aspect to the laggard nature of consumerism in 1920s Europe as well: a disdain for conspicuous consumption that ran through every social class from the working poor to the upper middle class and cut across the political spectrum from conservatives to socialists. Many Europeans saw the pursuit of material possession as superficial and decadent. Even though socialists fought hard for higher wages, they argued not for increasing the purchasing power of workers, but rather for guaranteeing a living wage for working-class families. Their demand for reducing working hours signaled the preference for leisure time over higher pay, or what the French writer and socialist Paul Lafargue had identified decades earlier, in 1887, as The Right to Laziness.43 Leisure time, he argued, was ultimately more valuable to human beings than the means to consume more goods. The broader concern uniting European critics of the American system was the latter’s apparent embrace of materialism and its attendant paucity of aesthetics and muse. The fast pace of production, labor, and capitalist transactions in the United States seemed to leave little time for the pursuit of culture, art, and leisure. One of the fiercest critics, the German author and conservative culture critic Adolf Halfeld, saw in the American conception of work a “grotesque reversal” of the original purpose: “not its [work’s] objective, social utility, but what it weighs in hard cash determines the value of creativity.” He detected a worrisome lack of diversity in American interests. “If in other cultures [by which he meant European cultures] the variety of interests, heritage, and character propels people along different paths, the American always departs from a single question that guides all thinking and overshadows all activity: how can I get rich the quickest? That is the origin of the undeniable monotony of American life.”44 Such harsh judgments were quite common among Europe’s conservative cultural elite. They only thinly masked an underlying fear that America with its materialist ideology was overpowering Europe.

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Those fears were not entirely misplaced. The United States had become a global economic powerhouse by the early twentieth century. And even though the American Congress rejected membership in the League of Nations, the United States was well on its way to wielding enormous power in international politics, sometimes directly, as demonstrated by its repeated interventions in Latin American countries, but more often indirectly, through its economic leverage. As historian Emily Rosenberg has shown, America’s foreign policy in the early decades of the twentieth century was guided by and prioritized the financial benefits of its economic elites. These “financial missionaries,” as Rosenberg called them, intervened in European affairs whenever they saw fit to stabilize the US economy in the mid-1920s.45 One of them was Charles Dawes, the private banker, who in 1924 became chairman of the committee to resolve the reparations problem between Germany and its debtors. The private stewardship of the Dawes Plan became a model for American foreign policy in the 1920s. As long as business and political interests aligned, the partnership functioned seamlessly.

Colonial Modernities Cultures of modernity spread to colonial territories as well, though in the inter-war period they remained largely confined to urban centers and to the colonial elites. The Versailles Peace Agreement had left many independence advocates disillusioned with the western democracies. Buoyed by Wilson’s promise of self-determination they had come to Paris ready to embrace the western idea of liberal democracy. They left empty-handed and disappointed by the racist nature of western political culture. Ultimately, colonial leaders had to recognize that the western powers applied the Wilsonian idea of selfdetermination to white nations only. This included Wilson himself, who refused to advocate for a universal understanding of self-determination, which would have ushered in the process of decolonization. Anti-colonialists found a sympathetic ear in the new revolutionary government of Russia. Lenin’s 1917 treatise on imperialism as an outgrowth of world capitalism made sense in many parts of the colonized world. Colonial leaders, such a Jawaharlal Nehru of India, Mao Zedong of China, and Ho Chi Minh of Vietnam found some redeeming qualities in his message. They combined homegrown nationalism with elements of socialism and communism. The Soviet Union actively fostered those relations with the colonial world through its Third Communist International founded in 1919. Lenin structured the new organization along the lines of his own successful vanguard party. With the creation of the Comintern he sought to establish communist party outposts across the globe fully committed to bringing about world revolution and willing to take their directive from Moscow. While the Comintern had only limited success in Western Europe, where communists competed with more moderate social democratic parties on the

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political left, it was more successful in Asia, particularly in China, where the leading Kuomintang Party under Sun Yat-sen entered into a coalition with the communists in 1924. However, when Chiang Kai-shek took over as leader of the party shortly after Sun Yat-sen’s death in 1925, he forged a more independent course and eventually broke with the communists. In 1927, he carried out widespread purges, drove communists into the rural hinterland, and killed an estimated 300,000 people. Chiang succeeded in bringing the country under one rule, but through his brutal crackdown on dissidents he unleashed a civil war that would last until 1949, interrupted only by a quasi-truce during the Second World War. Colonial independence advocates elsewhere began to turn their back on western-dominated international organizations in the inter-war period. They saw the League of Nations increasingly as a conglomerate of states determined to maintain the privileged position of white peoples; an organization safeguarding colonial rule rather than overcoming it; and thus,

FIGURE 7 The League Against Imperialism’s Honorary Presidium and Executive Committee in 1929. Members included colonial leaders as well as their western supporters. Among those pictured here are Song Qingling (Madam Sun Yat-sen), Albert Einstein, Upton Sinclair, Henri Barbusse, Maxim Gorki, Willi Münzenberg, Mohammed Hatta (later Vice President of Indonesia), Diego Rivera, Josiah Gumede, Lamine Senghor (Senegalese anti-colonial activist), Dr. Helene Stöcker (German feminist and pacifist), and Jawaharlal Nehru (later prime Minister of India). © Photo by Universal History Archive/Universal Images Group via Getty Images.

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an institution hostile to the idea of universal self-determination. They instead began to rely more heavily on alternative networks to organize a transnational opposition movement against the imperial powers. One of these was the Comintern, which in 1927 underwrote a gathering in Brussels of indigenous leaders from the colonial world and their western leftist supporters. At the meeting, delegates founded the League Against Imperialism to act as a counterweight to the League of Nations and to make advocacy for colonial independence its main objective. The German communist publisher and film producer Willi Münzenberg was instrumental in setting up the Brussels meeting. A year earlier in Berlin he had founded the League Against Colonial Cruelty and Oppression (Liga gegen Kolonialgreuel und Unterdrückung). Almost all European supporters of the League were affiliated with the Communist Party, though no official Soviet delegates were in attendance. Münzenberg himself served as a direct liaison with the Soviet leadership, which prompted many critics to deride the organization as a front for Soviet interests. Accusations like these often exaggerated the extent of the Soviet Union’s global influence. Many of its non-western delegates took an instrumentalist view of the Soviet Union’s internationalist meddling and the Comintern. They reasoned that if the Comintern was willing to support the cause of decolonization, then its help in forging a strong lobby should be appreciated. Nehru, who served as General Secretary of the Indian National Congress in the mid-1920s, adopted just such an attitude when he attended the Brussels conference as India’s official delegate. He had briefly flirted with communism earlier in his political career, but by 1927 he had rejected it as an unacceptable form of government for his own country. Nonetheless, he found many of Lenin’s ideas about imperialism compelling and developed for himself a hybrid economic ideology that blended socialist ideas with modern forms of capitalism. His compatriot and fellow activist Gandhi declined an invitation to attend but sent a written greeting. By the early 1930s, even Nehru had become disillusioned with the League, when it increasingly adhered to the foreign policy goals of the Soviet Union. He remained a lifelong supporter of socialist causes but never joined the Communist Party. He was therefore not too disappointed when in 1931 he was expelled from the League. He believed that India should develop its own path toward political and economic modernity and advocated for a hybrid system between the Sovietstyle planned economy and the liberal democratic idea of free trade and open competition. He firmly believed in the power of modern science and technology, and, as India’s first prime minister after independence in 1947, actively fostered state support in these areas. Even though the Brussels conference brought together over one hundred delegates from countries under colonial rule, it generated little momentum going forward. The League’s long-term impact on decolonization was minor, in part because of significant internal strife among political factions on the left, in part because it failed to create sufficient momentum among

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anti-colonial groups in Africa and Asia. The organization withered during the 1930s when the Great Depression focused national attention inward and the political threat of fascism in Europe loomed. The increasingly heavy hand of the Stalinist regime in the affairs of the League further alienated anti-colonial activists, not just Nehru. Communism did not take root in most independence movements, with a few notable exceptions. One of those exceptions was the communist revolutionary movement in China under the leadership of Mao Zedong. He was one of the founding members of the Chinese Communist Party and followed a Marxist-Leninist path. After Chiang Kai-shek and the ruling Kuomintang Party had purged communists from government, the latter began a decades-long guerilla war against the Nationalist Party, which ended in the ousting of the nationalist government and the proclamation of the Communist People’s Republic of China in 1949. Another exception was Vietnam, whose revolutionary leader Ho Chi Minh took a more circuitous route toward communism. Between 1913 and the early 1920s, he had lived and studied in France and had already become a committed socialist by the time the Versailles Peace Conference got underway. For the next twenty years, Ho Chi Minh lived in the Soviet Union, China, India, and Thailand before returning to Vietnam in 1941, where he joined the guerilla movement against Japanese rule. At the end of the Second World War, he paid homage to American principles of freedom and independence by drafting a “Vietnamese Declaration of Independence,” modeled on the American original, even though by then he had already become a committed communist. He staked much hope on President Roosevelt’s support for decolonization, much like he had done earlier with Wilson, only to be disappointed yet again. The American government supported the French reassertion of control over Indochina. A third exception was Korea, where communists succeeded in gaining control over the northern part of the country. Throughout the war they had remained a weak political force until the Soviet Union liberated the northern part, which had been under Japanese occupation. Their leader, Kim Il-Sung, had founded the “Down with Imperialism Union” in 1926, whose aim was to fight against Japanese colonial rule. Unsuccessful, he went into exile and joined the Soviet Red Army, returning to Korea at the end of the war as a member of the Red Army and establishing a communist regime in North Korea soon after. Despite these successes and the Soviet Union’s active support, communists struggled to establish a political foothold in most parts of the colonial world. Considering the reluctance of the western imperial powers to relinquish control over their colonies, it seems surprising that communism found so few adherents among the colonial independence movements. However, the relationship between colony and metropole in the inter-war period involved more than the question of independence, though that question increased in importance over the course of the twentieth century. It also involved the question of the shape and future of colonial modernity. Just as Nehru had

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with respect to India, many colonial leaders carefully considered the best path toward modernity for their colonial state. And that meant that political independence was one step in the broader project of establishing an economically viable modern state and society. Colonial leaders in Asia and Africa actively explored the ideological and cultural aspects of the communist and liberal-capitalist models and many of them came to similar conclusions: a hybrid form between the two promised the greatest chance of success. As the League Against Imperialism showed, these states and colonies were embarking on a course of non-alignment long before the Cold War gave that course a name, and long before many of them achieved political independence.

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If the 1920s revealed the progressive side of cultural and political modernity, the 1930s exposed its ugly underbelly. Cultural and political experimentation created a general atmosphere of transience when everything seemed possible, yet nothing was permanent. Every breach of a social, cultural, and political taboo created a conservative backlash, which gradually increased in strength. When the Great Depression plunged industrialized countries into a deep economic crisis, liberal capitalism came under attack just as nationalist conservatism had come under attack at the end of the First World War. Populations turned to the political fringes for solutions. Socialism, communism, and fascism all gained supporters while the political center became hollowed out. The fringe parties of the left and right were populist in nature and rejected the status quo promulgated by the liberal parties of the middle. While liberal and conservative political parties in Europe had identified the radical left as the greatest threat to democracy for much of the 1920s, it was the rise of far right parties, first in Italy, then in Germany and Spain, that destroyed democracy in Europe and set the stage for another war.

The Rise of Fascism Fascism remains a rather ill-defined ideology most commonly identified with political leaders rather than political theories. Scholars have debated whether one should examine fascism as a single political movement; whether fascism exists as an ideology on its own terms, like communism, liberalism, socialism, or is bound instead by time, place, and personality; and finally, whether it is possible to fix fascism on the political spectrum between left and right. Certain elements of fascism resemble ideologies on the far left, others are deeply conservative. The best way to define fascism remains through the actions of its political practitioners. Fascism emerged as a major political movement in the aftermath of the First World War. Fascist movements drew on all classes, making it difficult to anchor it on the political spectrum. Though most theorists identify it as a 159

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movement of the extreme right, it shared some ideological elements with the extreme left. Its vehement anti-communism and nationalism positioned it ideologically in the conservative camp. But it just as vehemently opposed key conservative interests, such as the desire for the return to power of social, economic, and military elites. Fascists were populist in their efforts to shatter traditions as well as traditional power structures. In this respect, they shared important convictions with the far left. Fascist movements both embraced and rejected modernism. Anti-modern elements included the fascination with rituals and symbols, drawn from ancient Germanic or Roman myths and practices. The main architect of these rituals was the Italian poet and politician Gabriele d’Annunzio, who invented the fascist hand signal (based on his idea of the Roman salute), the black shirts, the balcony oratory, and other symbols. But fascist movements were distinctly modern in other ways, such as their successful efforts at mass communication and their embrace of modern technology, mass production, and mass consumption. Fascists strove to perfect rationalization, both in industrial production and in the management of their followers. They were secular in their drive to suppress religious organizations or bring them under party control. In political terms, fascist parties developed centrally-controlled mass organizations, operating in an efficient top-down structure with clear hierarchies that nonetheless appealed to the masses. Fascism was modern also in its exultation of youth. It utilized modern forms of organizing the masses and manipulated public opinion through the broadcasting of misinformation and modern propaganda campaigns. It utilized modern tools to achieve distinctly anti-modern aims. Lacking a clearly identifiable common economic or political program, fascism was more about form and ritual than about substantive policies. Certain elements, however, were distinct to only one or a few national movements. One of those was the idea of Aryan supremacy, which was a defining element of Nazism but mattered little in Italian and other fascist movements. Fascists also developed nationally specific approaches to imperialism. Mussolini led Italy into a bloody war of conquest against Ethiopia, Somalia, Libya, and Eritrea. Hitler, by contrast, was not interested in reclaiming Germany’s lost colonies. Instead, he pursued a policy of European imperialism eastward in search of what he called “Lebensraum,” living space. His objective was to expand into the agrarian regions of Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. In Italy, the fascist movement originated on the political left. Mussolini rose to prominence in the Socialist Party before the First World War, and for a while worked as the main editor of the party newspaper Avanti. His political transformation occurred during the war. Initially a strong advocate for neutrality, he changed his mind in support of intervention. Part of his change of heart came from his association with F.T. Marinetti, the artist and founder of the futurist movement, which touted a hyper-masculine political philosophy, nurtured by the nihilism of the wartime era. Marinetti’s

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futurist political party eventually became absorbed into Mussolini’s Fasci di Combattimento. The Fasci di Combattimento consisted of a motley collection of nationalists, socialists, war veterans, women suffragists, artists (from the futurist movement), trade unionists, syndicalists, and anarchists. It became a party defined more by what it was against than what it was for. Fasci means bundle or league in Italian, and different types of fasci or leagues had existed since the latter part of the nineteenth century. Two years after their founding in 1919, the fascists renamed themselves the Italian National Fascist Party (Partito Nazionale Fascista; PNF). Unable to gain significant support in national elections, they formed paramilitary groups, called squadristi, which engaged in aggressive altercations, including violent street fights, with political opponents. In the early 1920s in Italy alone, over 2,000 people died in violent clashes, either provoked by the fascists, or with fascist involvement. Mussolini meanwhile presented himself to the public as the only person who could control the violence, and thus as the acceptable face of fascism. The fascists were still a minority party when they took political control of Italy through the spectacular March on Rome in October 1922. The party at the time held only thirty-five out of 500 seats in parliament, but the threat of violence and fear that the army would refuse to confront the fascists prompted King Victor Emmanuel III to invite Mussolini to form a new government. Two years later the fascists won 65 percent of the vote, in an election marked by fraud and intimidation. Between 1924 and 1926, Mussolini repeatedly utilized the police, the army, and his squadristi to further intimidate opponents and push through a series of decrees that effectively established a dictatorship. Yet Mussolini never established the kind of total control over Italian society that Hitler would in Germany a few years later, or that Lenin and Stalin commanded in Soviet Russia. Rather, he came to a tacit power-sharing agreement with other influential groups within Italian society, including the Catholic Church and big business. Mussolini’s fascist state was first and foremost a corporatist state, with the suppression of parliamentary democracy in favor of a state-managed bureaucracy. It was held together by a nationalist culture of political radicalism that was becoming increasingly common in Europe in the interwar period. The reorganization of the domestic affairs of state along fascist lines was complemented by a foreign policy built on violence and territorial expansion. In 1932, Mussolini defined that aspect of fascism this way: “Fascism, the more it considers and observes the future and the development of humanity quite apart from political considerations of the moment, believes neither in the possibility nor the utility of perpetual peace. It thus repudiates the doctrine of Pacifism—born of a renunciation of the struggle and an act of cowardice in the face of sacrifice. War alone brings up to its highest tension all human energy and puts the stamp of nobility upon the peoples who have

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courage to meet it.”46 Mussolini’s ambition was to recreate the Roman Empire, an objective that the nineteenth-century nationalist Giuseppe Mazzini had dreamed of but failed to achieve. In 1934, just before embarking on his imperialist conquest of Ethiopia, Mussolini drew on Machiavelli’s dictum that Italians should aspire to be feared rather than loved and proclaimed that Italians should replace the image of the mandolin player with that of the grenade thrower. Though grandiose ideas of a new Roman Empire were present in Mussolini’s speeches as early as the end of the First World War, he did not act on them until the mid-1930s, in the midst of the global economic depression. In October 1935 he invaded Ethiopia, bringing it under Italian colonial control in the spring of 1936. Adolf Hitler was still a marginal political figure when Mussolini was consolidating his fascist state in the 1920s. Born in 1889 in a small Austrian town, he was a mediocre student and left school at age sixteen. He failed twice to gain acceptance to the Academy of Graphic Arts in Vienna. In 1913, he fled to Munich to escape compulsory military service, but then cheered the outbreak of the First World War with enthusiasm. He later volunteered for the German army, was wounded, and rewarded twice for bravery. The war experience proved formative for the development of his political views, much like it had been for Mussolini. After the war, he continued to work for the army conducting surveillance of extremist groups, which is how he came to know members of the newly created far-right German Workers Party. Hitler soon joined and was instrumental in renaming it the National Socialist Workers’ Party (NSDAP). In 1923, while he was imprisoned for his participation in a coup attempt in Munich, the so-called beer-hall putsch, Hitler wrote his political manifesto Mein Kampf, in which he laid out his racialized worldview. The book appealed to the ultra-nationalist militarist wing of the German political spectrum: anti-Versailles, anti-Weimar, and anti-democratic. His worldview rested on three key pillars that would guide his actions for the remainder of his life. Most important was his belief that all history was determined by racial struggle. This was the foundation for his visceral anti-Semitism. The second pillar was anti-communism: the belief that Germany had to act as a bulwark against the onslaught of Soviet bolshevism. He often conflated anti-communism and anti-Semitism, referring to Soviet communism as “Jewish Bolshevism.” The third pillar was the idea of Lebensraum: the belief that Germany’s future could be secured only through the conquest of living space in Eastern Europe. The conflation between racial and political ideologies turned out to be a potent mix that attracted a diverse group of conservative elites as well as petit-bourgeois workers, disillusioned by their lack of economic progress and ready to blame perceived outsiders for their economic misfortunes. In the mid-1920s, few people paid attention to his diatribes because his views were as yet of little political consequence. They revealed much of the personal resentments, prejudices, and hatreds that drove his political ambitions. These prejudices and hatreds would have been

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of little consequence had Hitler’s political fortunes not changed dramatically with the onset of the Great Depression, which plunged Germany into economic chaos.

Global Depression Neither the causes nor the consequences of the Great Depression could be attributed to one country alone, and neither could the depression be solved by domestic policies alone. Yet when the economic crisis spread from the United States to Europe, Latin America, and Asia in 1929, countries did just that: they blamed the depression on foreign influences and sought solutions in new protectionist economic policies. Most international histories of the Great Depression understandably focus on the economic and political aspects of the global crisis. Yet the subject deserves to be treated as a cultural watershed moment as well. During the 1930s, countries affected by the crisis retreated from internationalism as they tried to solve their economic woes internally, blamed outsiders for the malaise, and instituted protectionist policies. Cultural assumptions colored the experience of the global depression, shaped economic and political decisions, and prevented a transnational solution to a transnational problem. Most politicians at the time blamed foreign countries for the economic malaise. US president Herbert Hoover blamed Europeans’ mismanagement of the economy in the aftermath of the Great War, arguing that they failed to muster the resolve required for fiscal frugality. He was a fervent advocate of orthodox economics and preferred to rely on sound money rather than deficit spending. British prime minister Ramsey MacDonald of the Labour Party blamed capitalism, more specifically the United States as the foremost proponent of capitalism. The Germans, in turn, blamed the signatories of the Versailles Treaty who had imposed harsh reparations, which had stifled Germany’s economic recovery. France prided itself on escaping the worst of the global depression, in part because its economy was not tied as closely to the US market as was Britain’s and Germany’s. Unemployment rates never passed the 5 percent mark, compared to 25 percent in Germany and the United States and 20 percent in Britain in the early 1930s. The Soviet Union also remained largely unaffected by the global depression because of the relative isolation of its domestic market. While the New York stock market crash of 1929 triggered the economic collapse, it was not its root cause. Rather, the root lay in an artificial bubble of lending and debt that had begun earlier in the decade and had tied national economies together in a global network of financial transactions and trade. Global interconnectedness meant that problems in one national economy created ripple effects in every other country economically tied to it. National governments were quick to issue new protective tariffs in a futile effort to insulate themselves from the economic problems of their

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neighbors. The consequence was a sudden and dramatic reduction in international trade. The US Congress passed the protectionist SmootHawley Tariff Act in 1930; other governments followed suit. Overall, world trade fell by 66 percent between 1929 and 1934. Efforts to act collectively to reduce tariffs proved fruitless despite general agreement among state leaders and economists that they did more harm than good. The 1933 London Economic Conference, the last international gathering of nations before the Second World War, failed to overcome the protectionist mood. The spirit of internationalism seemed to have succumbed to the doctrine of economic nationalism. After its failure, each country followed its own path toward economic recovery. After the Democrat Franklin Roosevelt took office in 1933, he immediately set up a massive government-funded public welfare program, which included works programs, a new system of social security, and other measures that significantly increased the state’s involvement in the economy. The New Deal was only moderately successful, though. While it succeeded in alleviating economic hardships among the populace and keeping at bay the more radical political movements that threatened democratic governments in Europe, it did not alleviate the root causes of the global depression. Roosevelt’s New Deal programs fundamentally restructured people’s relationship with the state. Until the 1930s, both Democrats and Republicans had viewed poverty as a personal shortcoming of individuals who failed to take advantage of the opportunities considered readily available to everyone. They agreed that mitigating personal hardship was a private responsibility rather than the responsibility of the state. Ethnically based benevolent societies and local private insurance cooperatives had traditionally taken on such public welfare measures, but their provisions of old-age pensions, healthcare, and unemployment insurance had never offered adequate protection. The Great Depression overwhelmed private and local charities; they were unable to shoulder the burden alone. The New Deal stepped in, above all through the Social Security Act of 1935. Such measures signaled a shift in popular and political attitudes toward the role of the state in the welfare of its people. Poverty was no longer seen as a personal failure of individuals but a social and economic ill that required the intervention of the state. The United States and Europe faced significant political challenges from the far right and far left. A large part of the success of fascists everywhere was the ability of charismatic figures to mobilize mass support. In the United States, Father Charles Coughlin, a midwestern Irish Catholic priest and popular radio show host, tapped into the widespread discontent among his listeners and turned it into resentment against Jews and the moneyed elites. In Great Britain, Sir Oswald Ernald Mosley achieved notoriety as the founder and leader of the British Union of Fascists. But he, too, lacked a national following and his party disbanded during the Second World War. Ultimately, the Anglo-American democratic systems weathered those challenges. France’s fascists were decentralized and lacked a clear figurehead

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until Germany invaded and occupied France in 1940, when Marshal Philippe Pétain was installed as a figurehead of the unoccupied “free” territory in central and southern France. For the rest of the war Pétain headed the protofascist authoritarian Vichy regime. Anti-Semitism and anti-communism became its hallmarks in direct collusion with the German Nazi state. In each of these countries, material hardships pushed citizens toward more radical political and cultural positions, polarizing each nation’s citizens and obstructing a clear path toward recovery. Nowhere was this political and cultural transformation more radical than in Germany. As parties at the extreme ends of the political spectrum gained votes, the moderate center grew weaker, and Germany’s fragile political stability was upended by the repeated collapse of one coalition government after another. In January 1933, Paul von Hindenburg, the aging president of Germany, granted Hitler the power to form a government, when chancellor Kurt von Schleicher resigned after only fifty-six days in office. The National Socialists had twice won a plurality of the votes in national elections, but never a majority. Within weeks, Hitler had disbanded parliament, imprisoned most of its leftist parliamentary delegates, and neutralized all non-governmental organizations, effectively dismantling the Weimar Republic. By spring there remained no public sphere beyond the control of the Nazi Party. Once he had silenced his opposition, Hitler went about implementing his plan of a militarist, anti-communist, racial state, as he had outlined in Mein Kampf a decade earlier.

Race and Culture Wars Racial ideology stood at the center of the Nazi belief system and guided Germany’s domestic and foreign policy for the next twelve years. Hitler’s almost visceral anti-Semitism colored his views of capitalism as well as communism. He saw Jews as powerful members of the business elite and blamed them for the current economic malaise. At the same time, he saw them as parasites and racial inferiors who infiltrated other “races” in order to undermine and weaken them. Jews, in his worldview, also were the masterminds behind communism, a contradiction that he never bothered to resolve. He devised policies to exclude Jews from most professions, such as the civil service, teaching, law, and medicine. In 1935, Germany passed the Nuremberg Laws, which deprived Jews of all citizenship rights, prohibited sexual relations and intermarriage between Jews and non-Jews, and forced Jews to wear a yellow Star of David in public. Nazis also instituted close surveillance of all public life, establishing a brutal secret police force, the Gestapo, which rounded up dissidents and other undesirable citizens, sowing fear and widespread mistrust among the population. Anti-Semitism reached a new level of terror on the night of November 9, 1938, when Nazi storm troopers, by then an official arm of the state military

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apparatus, went on a rampage smashing windows of Jewish homes and stores, looting their contents, and setting them on fire. That night alone, they rounded up, beat, and deported 30,000 Jews to concentration camps. The pretext for the riot was the killing of a German diplomat at the Paris embassy by a Polish Jewish student, distraught over the treatment of his parents by Germans. After the Night of the Broken Glass or Reichskristallnacht, as it came to be known, many Jews left Germany, but they struggled to find countries willing to take them. While expressing grave concern, few outside Germany anticipated a state-organized systematic annihilation of Jews that was yet to unfold after the outbreak of war. To many, Reichskristallnacht resembled the ad hoc anti-Semitic pogroms that had been occurring regularly all over Europe since the Middle Ages. Racial ideology did not play a significant role in Italian fascism until Mussolini entered into an alliance with Germany in 1936. Italian Jews were among the fascist party’s earliest supporters. Racial ideology entered Italian fascist politics in 1938 when Mussolini issued his fascist doctrine of racism. This doctrine was partly a consequence of the extension of the Italian Empire into Africa and partly a strategy to carve out a space for Italy in the German conception of “Aryan Europe.” The National Socialist state built on the anti-Semitism already prevalent in much of Central and Eastern Europe and expanded it into an ideology of annihilation. In fact, in the late nineteenth century, Eastern European Jews had flocked to Germany because of its reputation as a country with a comparatively high level of tolerance toward Jews, unlike Poland, Russia, Romania, and Hungary, where anti-Semitism was more common. In the 1930s, the Polish government implemented restrictions on Jewish businesses and barred many Jews from attending university. The percentage of Jews among Poland’s university students fell from 25 to 8 percent between 1920 and 1938. In Russia, pogroms occurred frequently during the revolutionary upheavals between 1917 and 1921, even though many revolutionary leaders were Jewish. In 1903, Russian anti-Semites published what became the most infamous anti-Semitic hoax in history, the so-called Protocols of the Elders of Zion. The fabricated text alleged to be the recordings of a meeting of Jewish leaders in which they devised a blueprint for world domination. The false original was translated into several languages and gained international notoriety. Henry Ford, perhaps America’s most influential anti-Semite, popularized the Protocols in the United States by republishing them in his newspaper, The Dearborn Independent, in the 1920s. After the outbreak of the Second World War, the extermination of Europe’s Jews became a central element of the Nazi regime. Jews were forced into camps and ghettoes, and murdered in the towns and villages of Poland, Ukraine, and western Russia. After 1942, the killings in concentration camps accelerated, particularly in Eastern Europe. At Auschwitz in Poland, the Nazi regime’s most murderous camp, as many as 12,000 inmates a day were murdered toward the end of the war. More than six million Jews,

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220,000 Sinti and Roma, thousands of homosexuals, political dissidents, and an unknown number of mentally and physically handicapped people perished at the hands of the Nazis and their allies across Europe. For Nazi Germany, the conflict was no longer just about gaining territories in the East; it had become a race war. Racism also fueled Japan’s war in Asia. Much like Hitler’s quest for Lebensraum in Eastern Europe, the Japanese searched for more living space in East Asia, calling their expansionist aspirations the Greater East Asia CoProsperity Sphere. Official Japanese accounts of its relationship with other ethnic groups established a racial hierarchy based on skin color. Japanese nationalists sought to preserve the purity of the Yamato race in an effort to maintain its place at the top of the racial hierarchy. These racist ideas, fully articulated in the early 1930s, bore a distinct resemblance to the Nazi idea of Aryan supremacy and served as justification for Japan’s territorial expansion into Manchuria in 1931. The Mukden incident, in which Chinese saboteurs exploded a section of the Japanese controlled South Manchurian railway, became the catalyst for Japan’s annexation of Manchuria. Racial hatred also contributed to the massacre in Nanjing in December 1937 in the aftermath of a military clash between the two countries in July 1937 at the Marco Polo Bridge near Beijing. The Chinese government relocated from Beijing to Nanjing, where the Japanese attacked in December. After the fall of the city, Japanese troops engaged in large-scale looting and murder, killing an estimated 200,000 to 300,000 civilians. The attack marked the beginning of the Second World War in the Pacific. Americans’ approach to the Pacific theater of war was fueled by racism as well. Anti-Japanese sentiment reached fever pitch after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor on December 7, 1941. Because the Roosevelt administration’s attention had been focused on the war in Europe and not on Japan, Americans were unprepared. They had always regarded Nazi Germany as the more formidable threat, ignoring Japanese capabilities. Resentment against the Japanese soon turned against America’s own ethnically Japanese citizens. In February 1942, two and a half months after the attack on Pearl Harbor, President Roosevelt issued an executive order that forced all first- and second-generation Japanese Americans living on the West Coast into relocation camps. Those living farther inland and in Hawaii were spared, although they were closely monitored. About 122,000 Japanese Americans were sent to the camps, more than half of them American citizens. The camps were located mostly in the American West, with the exception of two camps in Arkansas. Nisei (second-generation Japanese Americans) eventually had the option of leaving the camps if they enlisted in the armed forces; 30,000 did, serving in segregated units in the Pacific and European theater of war. No similar action was taken against German Americans or Italian Americans. Pearl Harbor capped years of maneuvering by the Roosevelt administration to erode the culture of isolationism that had governed political and popular

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sentiment for most of the 1930s. Congress had followed an official policy of neutrality observing the German and Japanese militarist policies from a safe distance, responding to popular isolationist sentiment fueled by charges about big business’s involvement in maneuvering the United States into the last war. These charges were leveled in a bestselling book, The Merchants of Death, in 1934. Its two authors, H.C. Engelbrecht and Frank C. Hanighen, argued that America’s involvement in the Great War was the result of successful lobbying efforts by weapons manufacturers in the US The publication led to a Senate investigation into connections between the Wilson administration and the armaments industry. Though no direct evidence was found regarding a conspiracy between manufactures and the White House, the Nye Committee, named for its chairman Gerald Nye (R-North Dakota), proposed a series of laws to restrict the power of the president to enter into agreements with belligerents. The Neutrality Acts prohibited arms exports or any other war implements to belligerent countries and the transport of war material on US vessels. Furthermore, the first of the acts in 1935 called for the registration and licensing of manufacturers of war material, restricted travel by American citizens on belligerent ships during the war, banned loans, and implemented an arms embargo against all belligerents in war. Following the depression era model of economic protectionism, Congress hoped to protect the US politically as well from foreign conflicts. Throughout the late 1930s, President Roosevelt developed policies to circumvent these provisions in order to provide war materials to those fighting against Germany, paying little attention to Japan. In 1937, he secured an amendment to the Neutrality Acts that included a “cash and carry” provision: belligerents could now buy war material in the US provided they paid up front and in cash and brought their own vessels to carry the goods back to Europe. A separate provision, which passed in 1939, became known as “destroyers for bases.” It offered decommissioned destroyers to Britain in return for access to British military bases. Included in the deal were coastal areas of Newfoundland in Canada, Bermuda, the Bahamas, Jamaica, Trinidad, and British Guiana. It set the stage for America’s postwar naval dominance in the world. A third measure was the Lend Lease Act of 1941, which overturned the so-called “cash and carry” provision of 1937 and provided material aid, munitions, and war machinery to Britain as a loan. In defense of the act, FDR offered the so-called garden hose analogy: if your neighbor’s house is on fire, you will lend him your garden hose, before the fire catches on to your house. Unlike Wilson twenty years earlier, Roosevelt made no attempt to hide where his sympathies lay in the conflict. The neighbor analogy had a pragmatic as well as an emotional component, hinting at the close cultural affinity between the United States and Britain, an affinity that would be on full display later that year when FDR and Churchill signed the Atlantic Charter. Over the course of the war the US would lend over $50 billion to its allies, including $11 billion to the Soviet Union.

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A final measure was the extension of the American sphere of protection in the Atlantic Ocean in the fall of 1941, making a military confrontation with Germany inevitable since American warships were sure to encounter German submarines. FDR was hoping to provoke an incident in the Atlantic that would make it possible to justify America’s entry into the war. The Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor rendered that strategy moot. The United States fought a different kind of war against the Japanese in the Pacific. Strategically, the battle terrain was different, consisting of remote islands in the Pacific. Most enemy encounters occurred through naval and air campaigns, punctured by occasional bloody battles on islands, such as Wake, Midway, Iwo Jima, and Okinawa. But Americans also treated the Japanese enemy differently. They committed more atrocities in the Pacific theater of war than in Europe. Race played a central role in the conception and implementation of America’s war in the Pacific as well as its propaganda campaign against Japan. The US domestic propaganda campaign in particular, revealed the racial undercurrents that drove the war effort against the Japanese. Domestic propaganda efforts fell under the direction of the Office of War Information. It employed a venerable cast of communications specialists, writers, directors, and artists, among them the Hollywood director Frank Capra. Capra produced seven documentaries in the Why We Fight Series, showcasing Germany’s and Japan’s aggressive plans for world domination and its military expansion, making extensive use of footage from enemy sources. For instance, he showed Nazi Germany’s drive for power by relying heavily on the German filmmaker Leni Riefenstahl’s documentary Triumph of the Will about the 1935 Nazi national party congress in Nuremberg. His portrayal of the German threat was focused primarily on its expansionist policies. Capra produced a propaganda film about Japan, Know your Enemy: Japan, only toward the end of the war. Its release date came only days before Japan’s surrender, and was withdrawn from public view shortly thereafter. According to the historian John Dower, the film relied heavily on common cultural stereotypes of the Japanese but refrained from using the openly racist depictions used by other propagandists.47 One of those was the children’s book author and illustrator Theodore Seuss Geisel, known as Dr. Seuss. Throughout the war he produced openly racist wartime cartoons, often featuring the Japanese as either super- or subhuman, as gorillas or roaches. He also insinuated in several cartoons that the Japanese chief military commander and prime minister, Hideki Tojo, was a puppet of Hitler’s Nazi empire. One Seuss cartoon had Tojo sitting on a stool reading Hitler’s Mein Kampf with a curious expression on his face. Behind him on the wall is a portrait of the Führer with a dedication that reads “your old pal Adolf.” Another showed a diminutive ape on a long leash with a cup in his hand at the doorstep to a house. The leash leads around the corner to Hitler playing a music box emblazoned with a swastika. The ape whose facial features resembled Tojo’s, yells in his direction:

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“Master, what do I do when they won’t come across?” Seuss portrayed the American as a friendly big bird with an American-flag decorated top hat poking his head out the door with a benevolent smile on his face. Cartoons such as these depicted Japanese aggression as mimicry of the much bigger threat emanating from Nazi Germany. Japanese wartime propaganda followed its own racialized imagery of demonizing their enemies as monsters and fiends. The purity of the Japanese race demanded adherence to strict Japanese cultural rituals, including the willingness to sacrifice one’s life for the greater good of the nation. These assumptions led to a vicious cycle of atrocities on both sides. Japanese soldiers had no expectation of being treated humanely once captured by Americans and thus often preferred suicide over capture. Their fears seemed vindicated by evidence of mass killings on the Allied side as well as evidence showing American soldiers’ collecting body parts, such as skulls and teeth, as battle trophies. The Japanese army for its part tortured, executed, and otherwise mistreated Allied prisoners of war with impunity, most notoriously during the Bataan death march in the spring of 1942, when the Japanese army captured, abused, and killed several thousand Filipino and about five hundred American prisoners of war. The global nature of the war generated racial conflict on multiple fronts. The peoples in the Global South were drawn into the war by virtue of their colonial connections to the belligerent countries. Colonial troops were drafted into imperial armies, and their territories became battlegrounds in the conflict. The Japanese took over French, Dutch, and other colonial possessions in Asia and the Pacific. The Germans moved into North Africa where they battled British and French colonial forces in Egypt, Tunisia, Morocco, and Algeria. The British also mobilized indigenous colonial troops from Asia and Africa to fight against Japan, Italy, and Germany. Racial hierarchies were central to these encounters, whether they faced each other as enemies or cooperated as allies. They permeated domestic settings as well. In the United States, African Americans contributed to the war effort in significant ways but continued to serve in segregated units throughout the war. On the home front, they experienced racial discrimination, including limited job opportunities, lower wages, and the denial of the vote in several parts of the country. Colonial troops were no mere pawns in the imperial battles of the great colonial empires. For them the war represented not just a struggle against the totalitarian regimes of Japan, Germany, and Italy, it also helped set the stage for the ultimate defeat of colonialism itself. The case of Vietnam illustrates those dynamics. Even though the Vietnamese suffered as much under Japanese domination as they had under French, they initially welcomed the defeat of the French as an opening toward independence. India, too, used the war as a springboard toward independence. In 1942, a dissident faction within the Indian National Congress demanded Indian independence before it agreed to support Britain in its fight against Nazi

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Germany. Congress party members launched the “Quit India” campaign, which British authorities struck down by imprisoning its supporters for the duration of the war. While most of India’s armed forces joined the war effort against the Japanese in Southeast Asia, a sizeable contingent under the leadership of the leftist Congress leader Subhas Chandra Bose defected and joined the Japanese side, after the Japanese promised Indian independence in return for their support. In 1943, Bose and his defectors joined pro-Japanese political leaders from China, Thailand, Burma, and Manchuria for an “Assembly of Greater East Asiatic Nations,” convened by the Japanese imperial government in Tokyo. The delegates at the assembly had no illusions about Japan’s own imperialist aspirations in the region. Many of them had already experienced Japanese brutality and racial discrimination in their own countries. The Burmese, for instance, had rejoiced when the Japanese had driven the British out in 1942, but subsequently suffered years of abuse at the hands of the Japanese, including forced labor on construction sites for a railway between Bangkok and Rangoon. The Japanese also used forced labor from other parts of Southeast Asia for the project. Many thousands died during the construction project. Despite ample evidence of Japanese atrocities in the region, assembly delegates hoped to gain leverage against the much more entrenched system of western colonial rule. A year later, however, when British forces began to drive the Japanese out of the region, most countries had turned against the Japanese. The brutal nature of their occupation had strengthened the momentum for independence, while the war had weakened the resolve of the former imperial powers. The end of the war thus presented a unique opportunity for the colonial peoples to push for independence. It would take another decade and a half before that momentum produced tangible results. When examining the patterns of race hatred before and during the Second World War, multiple and at times contradictory layers of impact begin to emerge. Racism lay at the foundation of Hitler’s worldview. It informed the Japanese war in East Asia, the American war against Japan, and the use of colonial troops in the Allied war efforts against the Axis powers. At the same time, international awareness of the brutal excesses of race hatred increased and became the subject of an international debate that for the first time in history offered the prospect of a global policy on racial justice and equality. That debate led to a new international consensus around the moral wrongs of colonialism and racial discrimination, and a renewed resolve to enshrine the rights of ethnic and racial minorities in a universal declaration. The concerns found at least partial recognition within the United Nations Charter, which made racial equality a cornerstone of global governance. It also laid the foundation for the Universal Declaration of Human Rights three years later, which, though largely aspirational, nonetheless codified an international bill of rights. And finally, it provided the momentum for the eventual liberation from colonial dominance of most countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America.

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The war also upset gender relations within each of the belligerent countries and across enemy lines. Within the domestic arena, women were increasingly pressured into working outside the home. They filled vital positions in war production, and became the main breadwinners for their families as their husbands, brothers, and sons went off to fight in the war. Women also increasingly joined active-duty auxiliary forces as nurses, secretaries, and in other supporting roles at or near the battlefront. While the level of participation in the war effort differed from country to country, women everywhere gained a measure of independence and empowerment as a result of their contributions to the war effort. Yet they also often bore the brunt of the hardships on the home front as they struggled to feed their families, lived in constant fear of air raids, and, in the case of invasion of foreign troops, became victims of sexual violence. Sexuality and sexual violence became a near constant preoccupation of soldiers during the war. The American philosopher and writer J. Glenn Gray noted in his 1958 wartime collections that “anyone entering military service for the first time can only be astonished by soldiers’ concentration upon the subject of women and, more especially, upon the sexual act.”48 Gray had served with the American Army in Europe, as part of its Counter-Intelligence Corps and witnessed firsthand the transition from wartime to occupation army at the end of the war. That soldiers in time of war would fixate on sex was not a surprising phenomenon. But in the Second World War more than ever before, sexual encounters, rape, and sexual imagery became integral elements of the soldiers’ experience of and discourse on war. Soldiers often unleashed their hatred of the enemy in a wave of sexual assaults on women in enemy territory, as was the case with German soldiers in the Soviet Union during the Russian campaign, Russian troops in Berlin, and US forces in southwestern Germany at the end of the war. Rapes in Berlin alone were estimated to have run upwards of 100,000 over a period of several days during the final phase of the war in April 1945. Rape also served a symbolic function both as an expression of the emasculation of the male enemy, and as motivation for soldiers to fight to protect their women at home from the invasion of enemy sexual predators. Propagandists in both the European and Pacific theaters of war often created pamphlets that played on soldiers’ desires and fears concerning male and female sexuality as they sought to motivate their own soldiers and demoralize their enemies. Displays of sexual imagery in the form of cartoons, drawings, and pin-up girls were also often touted by soldiers as evidence of their own sexual prowess, masculinity, and heterosexuality. The latter became particularly important as symbolic markers of heterosexuality in homosocial environments that were largely devoid of women. In the absence of female companionship soldiers often sought and found among their male compatriots close friendships and emotional comfort, some of which became sexual. The experience of war rendered gender norms and gender relations more fluid than during peacetime in

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environments that were tightly regulated by social conventions. Reigning in these expressions of sexual liberation and imposing new forms of gender conformity became a major project of post-war societies in Europe and the United States.

Post-war Visions Planning for the post-imperial order got underway in August 1941, when Franklin Roosevelt and Winston Churchill met secretly on a British battleship off the coast of Newfoundland. Even though the United States had not yet entered the war, Roosevelt had clear ideas about the kind of geopolitical order he wanted after the war. The meeting produced the Atlantic Charter, which served as a blueprint for the post-war international system. It reaffirmed Wilsonian principles, including free trade, national selfdetermination, and a system of collective security. Churchill had hoped to convince Roosevelt to enter the war on the side of the western allies but had to settle for an aspirational statement that listed goals but lacked concrete steps toward achieving them. He was particularly concerned about the third provision in the charter, which stated that the United States and the United Kingdom would “respect the right of all peoples to choose the form of government under which they will live; and they wish to see sovereign rights and self-government restored to those who have been forcibly deprived of them.”49 If implemented, it could mean the end of Britain’s claim to its colonial possessions, since presumably all people in territories under British rule would have the right to self-determination. Ultimately, Churchill had no choice but to agree in light of the precarious international threat and Britain’s need for a strong alliance with the United States. The charter set the stage for the creation of “a wider and permanent system of general security.” Roosevelt returned to that idea throughout the war, first by building a broad coalition of countries united against Nazi Germany and Japan and then by moving that coalition toward the creation of the United Nations. Acutely aware of the shortcomings of the League of Nations, FDR not only worked to gain sufficient bipartisan support at home, but he also made sure that the world’s leading powers retained control over the organization. More specifically, he proposed the establishment of a core council, consisting of the United States, Great Britain, China, and the Soviet Union, who would have veto power. Each was considered the dominant power within its geographic sphere. The Atlantic meeting cemented one of the closest wartime alliances of all time. When the United States entered the war on the side of the Allies less than four months later, Britain and the US coordinated their military strategies, created joint commands, and planned joint military campaigns. Their close alliance stood in contrast to the rather fickle relationship both had with the Soviet Union. Stalin remained deeply suspicious of his western

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allies, particularly during times when Roosevelt and Churchill met without him. He constantly feared that the two might turn their combined forces against the Soviet Union or arrange a separate ceasefire with Germany leaving the Soviets to fend for themselves on the eastern front. His fears were not entirely unfounded. Why, for instance, did American and British military commanders repeatedly postpone the opening of a second front in Western Europe? In order to allay Stalin’s unease, Roosevelt went out of his way to develop a positive rapport with him, sometimes at Churchill’s expense. Historians have credited that personal investment on the part of FDR for the success of the wartime alliance, leading some to speculate that he might have averted the Cold War had he not suddenly died in office in April 1945. For Roosevelt, the political was personal. Though their alliance was extremely close, Churchill and FDR did not always see eye to eye regarding their visions for the post-war world. In fact, Churchill was much closer to Stalin than Roosevelt in his views on spheres of influence as a post-war geopolitical arrangement. He remained skeptical of Roosevelt’s ideas about internationalism and collective security. The European leaders’ penchant for spheres of influence was on display at the Moscow meeting in the fall of 1944, which produced the Percentages Agreement in a haphazard kind of way. During one of their negotiations, Churchill and Stalin casually passed a piece of paper back and forth on which they drew up percentages next to territories in Eastern Europe: Romania 90 percent Soviet, Greece 90 percent Anglo-American, Yugoslavia and Hungary each 50 percent Soviet, Bulgaria 75 percent Soviet. The almost off-hand assignation of percentages to territories and populations signaled a symbolic reassertion of the traditional model of spheres of influence, a flagrant disregard for the internationalist principles FDR and Churchill had agreed on in the Atlantic Charter. The final conference on post-war planning, the Yalta Conference in February 1945, created a hybrid between the new internationalism and the traditional spheres of influence model. Germany’s defeat was all but assured, forcing the allied powers to make concrete arrangements for the post-war international system. The first section of the final protocol stipulated the structure and timeline for the United Nations. It set the date for the founding meeting in the spring of 1945 in San Francisco and proposed invitations to all nations who had by March 1 declared war on “the common enemy.” The charge for the delegates would be “to prepare a charter for a general international organization for the maintenance of international peace and security.” The protocol further affirmed the principles laid out in the Atlantic Charter, most prominently “the right of all people to choose the form of government under which they will live—the restoration of sovereign rights and self-government to those peoples who have been forcibly deprived of them by the aggressor nations.”50 This provision immediately created a conflict for both Churchill and Stalin. The British government was not yet ready to relinquish control over its colonial possessions, and Stalin, in turn, insisted on

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maintaining a cordon of buffer states friendly to the Soviet regime surrounding the Soviet Union. Neither was ready to part with the old system. The remainder of the Yalta Protocol undermined the very spirit of internationalism laid out in the first section and thus appeased Stalin and Churchill. In it the three leaders agreed to jointly occupy Germany, adding France, which had been liberated the previous summer, as a fourth occupying power. FDR also yielded to Soviet demands for reparations from Germany. The protocol further included specific provisions regarding the Polish state—its form of government, the promise of free elections, and specific instructions regarding its post-war boundaries. However, the reality on the ground already looked far different, making the implementation of those provisions all but impossible. The Red Army had established full control over the “liberated” territory of Poland and other Eastern European states bordering on the Soviet Union. It had begun the process of establishing proSoviet governments in Poland, Romania, and Bulgaria. While Yalta was reaffirming the spirit of internationalism and collective security on paper, it provided no enforcement mechanism for preventing the establishment of the spheres of influence agreed upon in the Percentages Agreement of the previous fall. As a result, much of the implementation of the Yalta Agreement fell to subsequent meetings and left a lot of leeway for each of the signatories to act unilaterally. When the three allied powers met at Potsdam six months later for the first post-war international conference, the mood had changed drastically. FDR had died suddenly on April 12, leaving his vice president Harry S. Truman in charge. Winston Churchill lost his bid for re-election while in Potsdam and was replaced by Clement Attlee of the British Labour Party. Germany had surrendered on May 8 and allied troops were moving into their assigned territories of occupation. They still had to work out the details of the joint occupation and confer on the war in the Pacific, where the Japanese were not yet willing to surrender. Even though the participants agreed on most issues, the general mood was fraught with suspicion. Stalin was now the only one left of the wartime triumvirate, and he knew little about Truman and Attlee. Truman, in turn, still inexperienced in international diplomacy, mistrusted Stalin and lacked the charm and openness that FDR had mustered to establish a personal rapport. He further unsettled Stalin by casually revealing that the United States had successfully detonated its first prototype of an atomic bomb. While the Potsdsam delegates reaffirmed their commitment to jointly administer Germany’s occupation, eradicate Nazism, and foster democratization and demilitarization, and to defeat the Japanese in the Pacific, it was the last time they cooperated. As Europe and Asia transitioned into peacetime their differences and mutual suspicions increased, leading to a cold war that lasted for over forty years. The war’s racial, gender, and ideological undercurrents played a significant role in its conduct and outcome. It also shaped the experience of those who

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fought and those who stayed home. Each country had to find a way to mobilize its population to sacrifice life and livelihood in the fight against an imagined enemy, and thus resorted to propaganda and racial stereotyping to conjure up a distorted image of the adversary. While the images were false, the consequences were real, leading to mass exterminations and atrocities against soldiers and civilians. Cultural assumptions also guided political leaders in their approach to allies and adversaries. The US-Soviet-British alliance cannot be fully explained by looking only at geopolitical factors. Personal diplomacy, emotional investments, and an ephemeral sense of unity in the fight against a common enemy, contributed much to holding the alliance together for the duration of the war. Those same cultural undercurrents also help explain why that alliance broke apart so soon after the war.

11 Cold War Cultures

The end of the Second World War came suddenly in August 1945 after the dropping of two atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. But what followed did not feel like peace to most former belligerents. In fact, within two years of the end of the war the former allies were becoming increasingly embroiled in a Cold War, a confrontation between the United States and the Soviet Union and their respective allies that was characterized by the continuous threat of war between them without ever erupting into an actual war. The Cold War dominated international relations for over four decades, and while its history is predominantly told through the lens of geopolitical events, including diplomatic crises, high-powered summitry, and military confrontations on the periphery, it was as much a story of cultural confrontations, including ideological battles, and cultural challenges to political and social conventions. These stories of cultural conformity, confrontation, and challenges played an important role in how people experienced the Cold War. They deserve to be integrated into the broader framework of the history of that era.

Atomic Age On August 6, 1945, with a force of approximately fifteen kilotons of TNT, the United States dropped its first atomic bomb on the Japanese city of Hiroshima, killing around 70,000 people. Three days later the US dropped a second bomb on Nagasaki with a force of approximately twenty kilotons of TNT, killing between 45,000 and 60,000 people. The casualties, traumatic as they were to those who suffered them, were not considered out of the ordinary in the context of the war. Yet still, people sensed that the bombs signaled an unprecedented scale of destruction requiring a new kind of moral reckoning that went beyond any single nation’s capacity to manage and control. Even though the advent of the atomic age did not lead immediately, or even inevitably, to the Cold War that followed, its existence deeply affected the nature of the Cold War for decades to come. It made people feel threatened in many parts of the world regardless of where they lived or whether their own country was in possession of nuclear weapons. 177

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For many, the mere existence of the bomb raised serious questions of moral accountability as soon as the extent of the destruction was made known. To be sure, the realization of the enormous destructive capacity of the bomb sunk in only gradually during the first days and weeks of peace. Just as gradually, the initial euphoria over the bomb became overshadowed by a sense of dread, as scientists, politicians, and pundits realized the farreaching consequences of the bombs for Americans’ sense of their own security. Commentaries from political representatives, newspaper editors, and public intellectuals pointed to the potential dangers of this new weapon for the United States itself. New Mexico’s democratic senator Carl A. Hatch proposed an expansion of the legislative powers of the General Assembly of the United Nations so that “a code of international law can be adopted and be as binding upon this and other nations as is our own domestic law.” Robert Maynard Hutchins, chancellor of the University of Chicago, strongly advocated placing control over all atomic weapons and research in the hands of a world organization. Likewise, Freda Kirchwey, editor of The Nation, wrote on August 18, 1945 that the United Nations must be replaced by a new organization “to set up a world government,” which would control all atomic weapons. Norman Cousins, editor of The Saturday Review of Literature, echoed Kirchwey’s proposal in his lengthy editorial “Modern Man is Obsolete,” mentioned earlier, in which he argued that only a world government could protect humanity from this new destructive force. The New Yorker likewise chimed in, arguing that “nuclear energy insists on global government, on law, on order and the willingness of the community to take the responsibility for the acts of the individual.”51 Scientists with intimate knowledge of the destructive potential of nuclear weapons as well as other countries’ capacity to develop them became the most ardent advocates for international control. They pushed the idea of internationalism beyond the currently existing scope of the United Nations. Albert Einstein, though not personally involved in the development of the bomb, predicted that since the advent of the atomic bomb war would be more destructive than mankind had ever known. He estimated that about two-thirds of the world’s population could be killed in a future atomic war. Einstein knew that Soviet scientists were close to developing their own nuclear weapons, potentially setting off a costly nuclear arms race. The only way to prevent such an arms race, he argued, was if the leading countries agreed to a world constitution. He joined a growing coalition of scientists advocating for international control of the bomb. The US Congress moved in the opposite direction, proposing the MayJohnson Bill in the fall of 1945, which would place all atomic research under US military control. Alarmed by this proposal, scientists formed the Federation of Atomic Scientists and lobbied against the bill. They eventually endorsed an alternative, the MacMahon Act. Passed in 1946, it established civilian control over atomic research under the auspices of the Atomic Energy Commission. The act, however, made no provision for

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internationalization as many scientists had hoped. To the contrary, the bill prohibited all sharing of information regarding atomic research, even with America’s allies. Despite the congressional setback in the United States, atomic scientists continued their efforts toward internationalization. Led by the world’s most prominent scientists, among them Einstein and Leo Szilard, who worked on the Manhattan Project, a group of 500 international scientists signed a statement that laid out the rationale for international control. It declared first that other nations would soon have the bomb; second, that no effective defense against an atomic bomb was possible; third, that there existed no security in mere numerical superiority of atomic weapons; fourth, that atomic war would destroy a large portion of civilization; and fifth, that, as a consequence of these four tenets, international cooperation was necessary for survival. Despite the international prominence of its signatories, the statement failed to mobilize legislators. The idea of international control of atomic weapons faded into oblivion as the Cold War heated up. The refusal of the American government to share the secret of the bomb with other nations, above all with the Soviet Union, fueled Soviet suspicion and significantly contributed to the emergence of the Cold War. Meanwhile, scientists proved remarkably accurate about Soviet scientific capabilities. Marginally aided by its espionage, the Soviet Union detonated its first nuclear bomb in 1949, four years after Hiroshima and Nagasaki. From then until 1963, Americans and Russians were involved in a vast and costly arms race that led to the development of nuclear bombs with a destructive capacity between 500 and 3,000 times larger than the original ones dropped on Japan. The atmosphere of mutual distrust between the United States and the Soviet Union remained strong throughout the Cold War. As early as October 1945, the writer George Orwell speculated that possession of the atomic bomb created a state “at once unconquerable and in a permanent state of ‘cold war’ with its neighbors.” While Orwell supposed that the high cost and overwhelming power of the atomic bomb would make large-scale wars less likely in the future, he also predicted an indefinite era of “peace that is no peace.”52 Others soon shared his assessment. Within a year of Orwell’s publication, former British prime minister Winston Churchill spoke of an “iron curtain” descending across Central Europe, separating the West from Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. Even though no formal state of war existed between the United States and the Soviet Union, all agreed that the two wartime allies were not at peace with each other.

International Justice The spirit of internationalism remained alive for a little longer with regard to the Allies’ administration of post-war Germany and Japan. There was

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general agreement on the parameters of the joint occupation; the precise boundaries of the occupation zones in Germany and Austria; the division of Berlin and Vienna into four occupation sectors; joint measures toward denazification, demilitarization, and democratization in Germany and Austria; and, most remarkably, the convening of the first ever international war crimes tribunal to bring leading Nazis to justice. The Nuremberg trials set a precedent that would shape the contours of international law and human rights adjudication for decades to come. The war crimes tribunal convened in the fall of 1945 in Nuremberg, the city that had lent its name to the notorious racial laws that had excluded German Jews from all public life a decade earlier. Allied prosecutors indicted twenty-four high Nazi officials. The tribunal consisted of four judges, one from each of the victorious powers. The prosecutors brought four counts of indictment against the defendants. They consisted of first, planning, preparing, initiating, or waging wars of aggression; second, participating in a common plan or conspiracy to accomplish any of the foregoing; third, war crimes, such as crimes against civilians and prisoners of war, slave labor, hostages, torture, plunder, destruction (everything not justified by military means); and lastly, crimes against humanity, such as inhuman acts committed against civilians before or during the war on racial, political, and religious grounds. Never before had the international community determined that starting war was a crime, punishable by law. Never before had crimes against humanity been prosecuted. Never before had an entire country, represented by its leaders, been put on trial. Following the American lead, the prosecution decided to place the greatest emphasis on the second count and ignored the third and fourth counts almost entirely, a glaring misjudgment in light of the later revelations of the extent of the Nazi atrocities. But at the time, the victorious powers were concerned that drawing attention to crimes against humanity could establish an opening for later indictments against allied powers’ violations, among them the Soviet massacre of around 22,000 Poles in the forests of Katyn in the spring of 1940, the British and American bombing raids on German cities, including Dresden and Hamburg, the American bombing of Tokyo in the spring of 1945, and most likely the dropping of atomic bombs at the end of the war. Prosecutors faced another legal problem, namely, whether it was possible to try individuals on charges that had not been considered crimes under international law at the time they were committed. This was particularly relevant for the first two counts summarized as “crimes against peace.” Prosecutors referred to the 1928 Kellogg-Briand Pact, which had outlawed war as justification for the counts. But the agreement had included no provision for enforcement through an international criminal court. Nuremberg prosecutors thus ventured into uncharted territory and technically lacked the authority under international law they were claiming. Critics later referred to Nuremberg as victor’s justice, because the trials

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focused exclusively on German perpetrators and laid all blame for aggression and atrocities on the ruling party of one nation. This focus cut short a broader reckoning with collaborators in countries under German occupation and ignored atrocities committed by other belligerents. A similar effort was underway in Japan, where justices from eleven allied countries prosecuted Japan’s political and military leaders, resulting in a far higher rate of convictions and executions. Even though the trials were flawed, they established an important precedent for later adjudications of international justice, most notably the International Criminal Tribunals on Yugoslavia and Rwanda in the 1990s. Nuremberg also established for the first time in history the principle that the “planning, preparing, initiating, or waging wars of aggression” constituted a crime under international law. Furthermore, it established “crimes against humanity” as a legal precedent, even though prosecutors neglected it at the time. The precedent became instrumental in the establishment in 2002 of the International Criminal Court in The Hague. The Nuremberg trials held together an uneasy alliance among the former wartime allies. Over the next few years, Soviet-American cooperation declined with every new decision that had to be made. By 1946, fissures between the Soviet Union and the western allies were readily apparent. Even before the first Nuremberg trial had officially concluded, Winston Churchill, no longer prime minister of Britain, articulated in his March 1946 “iron curtain” speech what most leading policy-makers were already sensing, a rigid divide between East and West. This was not the first time he had used the term, nor was he the only one to use it. But in the spring of 1946, suspicions among the former allies had risen to a point where a public articulation of this separation resonated with people in Europe and the United States. Discord was also growing over economic cooperation, rooted in the diametrically opposed ideologies of the capitalist western powers and the communist Soviet Union. In 1946, the United States and Britain decided to combine their zones of occupation in Germany into a single economic unit. The French declined to join, because they feared that an economically strengthened Germany might again become a threat to France. The Soviets also opposed economic unification, even though they had agreed to it at Potsdam. Their objections had as much to do with what kind of economic system the British and Americans sought to establish as concern about a possible resurgence of a German economic behemoth. Since the end of the war, they had actively relocated German industrial equipment to the Soviet Union as stipulated in the Yalta reparations agreement. They would have happily endorsed the plan put forth by US secretary of the treasury Henry Morgenthau in 1944, which proposed to return Germany to a pastoral state. Roosevelt initially endorsed it, but then he reconsidered. The American announcement of the Marshall Plan in 1947 further deepened the US-Soviet rift. The plan was the biggest foreign aid package

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the US had ever approved, allocating about $13 billion toward Europe’s economic recovery. The aid was offered to Eastern European nations as well but came with significant ideological strings attached. Only countries that demonstrated a commitment to democracy would be eligible to receive aid from the United States. The US thus used its financial leverage to firmly impose its liberal democratic worldview on Central Europe. Facing pressure from the Soviet Union, Eastern European states declined to participate in the plan. Any vestiges of allied cooperation regarding Germany’s future disappeared when the British and Americans introduced a new currency in their own zones and the western sectors of Berlin in 1948. The French again declined to participate before yielding to pressure from the other western allies. The action led to a Soviet blockade of all water, rail, and land traffic between the western sectors of Berlin and the western zones of occupation. Though governed jointly by the four occupation powers, Berlin was physically located deep inside the Soviet zone of occupation, and thus dependent on the surrounding areas for food and material supplies. American and British occupation officials responded with an airlift of goods to Berlin from West Germany, upending Soviet efforts to absorb the entire city into the Soviet zone. Within a few weeks, the airlift had become so successful that Berliners’ living standard in the western sectors actually improved compared to the period before the blockade. After eleven months and several sessions at the United Nations, where Americans charged the Soviet Union with violating the basic human rights of the citizens of Berlin, the Soviets ended the blockade. Within weeks, East and West Germany formed separate states, one based on socialist the other on liberal-capitalist principles. The division of Germany into two separate states sealed Europe’s cold war battle lines for the next forty years. If there was any internationalist sentiment left, it would have to play out through non-governmental or clandestine back channels that were able to pierce the iron curtain. Some of those channels succeeded in transcending the harsh ideological and physical barriers separating the two sides. Different interest groups set up organizations and meetings to facilitate dialogue across the cold war divide, among them most prominently religious groups, scientists, and political leftists. What united them was the strong desire to eliminate the threat of war and ensure peaceful cooperation among the states, particularly in light of the devastating consequences for all of humanity if atomic weapons were ever used. Within the religious camp, the Quakers were most active, setting up regular conferences that brought religious and political leaders from both cold war blocs together in informal meetings. Most of their meetings occurred either in neutral Switzerland or in Eastern Europe, since the western nations regularly denied visas to guests from socialist and communist countries. Beginning in 1957, scientists from East and West began convening regularly at Pugwash, a small town in Nova Scotia, Canada, to discuss ways

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in which they could help reduce the threat of nuclear war. They had been inspired by a manifesto composed by Albert Einstein and Bertrand Russell two years earlier, which had called on the world’s governments to abolish war and seek peaceful solutions to all conflicts. The gatherings were financed by the industrialist Cyrus Eaton, one of several private philanthropic efforts to overcome the cold war divide and foster transnational dialogue on international issues. At their first meeting, the scientists agreed to help increase public awareness of the dangers of radiation as a result of nuclear weapons testing. They also discussed ways to establish international control of nuclear weapons and the social responsibilities they had as the scientists who helped develop these deadly instruments of war, though no final agreement on these issues was reached. Another cluster of non-governmental organizations converged around the issue of peace and pacifism, largely driven by individuals and groups on the left side of the political spectrum. It included the 1948 founding of the World Peace Council (WPC), which was spearheaded by prominent scientific and political figures on the political left, many of them members of communist parties. One of only a handful of organizations that regularly brought intellectuals from East and West together, it soon came under suspicion in the West as a Soviet front organization. While this was not true for the early work of the WPC, it became increasingly doctrinaire in the latter part of the 1950s, particularly after the 1956 reform movement in Hungary was crushed by a Soviet-led invasion. The WPC’s executive leadership officially defended the use of military force, prompting a wave of departures of more moderate members, who condemned the action as antithetical to the cause of peace. Other peace organizations emerged in the West, among them the British Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), the American Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy (SANE), and the German Ostermarsch-Bewegung. These groups became loosely linked with one another, largely through informal contacts among their leaders, without ever merging into a transnational organization on the scale of the WPC. They nonetheless succeeded in challenging the dominant cold war mantra of nuclear armament and deterrence as the best guarantors of peace and security.

Cold War Culture Wars Cold war divisions were drawn as much along cultural as territorial lines. The Soviet Union and the United States exercised firm control over their respective spheres of influence and invested heavily in cultural diplomacy to convince non-aligned nations to adopt their respective ideologies and to contain further advances by their counterpart. The Soviet Union established a cordon of loyal states as a buffer between it and Western Europe. It closely monitored the political and military policies of those neighboring countries

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and censored public opinion. It supported a communist coup in Czechoslovakia in 1947 and interfered militarily when popular uprisings challenged communist power in East Germany in 1953 and Hungary in 1956. Furthermore, it built a powerful surveillance apparatus and secret police, which curtailed free speech, incarcerated dissidents, and exercised direct control over cultural institutions in Eastern Europe. Free speech came under attack in the United States as well, as fear of communism ushered in an era of ideological and social conformity, loyalty oaths, and cultural intolerance. Americans used their post-war political, military, and economic predominance to maneuver their allies into a tight system of international security, ranging from the NATO and SEATO defense pacts, signed in 1949 and 1954 respectively, to economic alliances. They also interfered repeatedly in Latin America, Africa, Asia, and the Middle East, sometimes covertly, as in Iran in 1953 and Guatemala in 1954; at other times overtly, as in Korea between 1950 and 1953, and Vietnam between 1954 and 1973. The United States tolerated and even supported authoritarian regimes, as long as they were battling communist insurgencies, thereby directly undermining its own claim as a defender of freedom and democracy. By the early 1950s, a Three World Order had taken shape. The First World included Western Europe, North America, and Japan. Often referring to themselves as the “free world,” the members of this group included nations that believed in the principles of liberalism, capitalism, and democracy, but it also embraced anti-communist authoritarian regimes. First world countries repeatedly compromised their commitment to freedom and democracy for the sake of political stability and anti-communism. The Second World adhered to the political and economic ideologies of communism and boasted of the protection afforded to workers in their system. However, the system could only function through the suppression of political dissent and free speech. Non-aligned nations became known as the Third World, encompassing countries in Asia, Africa, and Latin America, either recently liberated or on the verge of liberation from colonial control. Besides seeking a third path between communism and capitalism with roots in the 1920s as indicated earlier, most shared a status as one-time subjects of European or North American domination and an ambition for the creation of independent states and societies. Some non-aligned countries, such as Brazil, eventually embraced capitalism. Others, including Cuba and China, became communist. Several formed temporary alliances with one bloc or the other and readily accepted some form of military or economic assistance from both. Most resisted formal affiliation with either of the two other blocs. The French intellectual Alfred Sauvey had originally coined the term Third World or “tiers monde” in reference to the third estate of the French Revolution, the impoverished masses whose rights had been trampled on and who eked out a living on the margins of society.

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Both cold war camps recognized the close synergy between cultural and political power. They showered the non-aligned world with cultural propaganda and offers of material assistance. The United States emphasized its international role as the protector of freedom and democracy and as a model of modern consumer capitalism. It promised prosperity to all who adhered to a democratic-capitalist ideology. The Soviet Union, in turn, projected an image of itself as the guarantor of international peace, protector of the underprivileged classes of the world, and advocate for those suffering under the yoke of colonialism and imperialism. Both engaged in a cultural battle for the hearts and minds of the Global South and accused the other of violating core principles of the United Nations agenda. From the outset, the United States was poised to win the culture war, because it emerged from the war stronger than any other country in the world. In addition, the American public had finally embraced the country’s new leadership role in sharp contrast to the aftermath of the First World War. This new attitude was already apparent before the Americans even entered the war. In February 1941, the American publisher Henry Luce claimed in a Life magazine article entitled “The American Century” that the United States had not only the capacity but also the duty to spread its ideals and system of government across the world. He saw an opportunity for America’s imprint in four areas in particular: enterprise, technical expertise, charity, and the defense of the ideals of freedom and justice. The United States, he argued, was already dominant internationally in cultural matters by exporting jazz, Hollywood movies, slang, and technology, and should translate its cultural capital into a political one. The US could export its political ideology through the medium of its popular culture. Unbeknownst to Luce, President Roosevelt had already laid the groundwork for pressing America’s cultural influence into political service. Since 1938 the Division of Cultural Relations within the State Department coordinated the spread of American culture abroad. Once the United States entered the war, the Office of Facts and Figures (OFF), later renamed the Office of War Information (OWI), took over the task of spreading America’s gospel at home and overseas. One of its organs was the radio station Voice of America (VOA), which broadcast all over Europe and Asia. After a brief retirement following the war, both organizations resumed operations in 1948 under the auspices of the Smith-Mundt Act, which provided funding for the dissemination of propaganda information abroad. Voice of America expanded rapidly in the cold war era: within five years, two thousand employees, a quarter of them foreign nationals, broadcast programs in forty-six languages, including Russian. By then VOA had become part of the United States Information Agency (USIA), which oversaw educational and cultural missions abroad, distributed information material in foreign countries, and supported foreign information centers. Further support for America’s cultural mission abroad came from nongovernmental organizations, among them the Congress for Cultural

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Freedom (CCF). Founded in 1950 in Berlin, CCF brought together European and American liberal intellectuals who had become thoroughly disillusioned with the Soviet system. They included Sidney Hook, a professor of philosophy at New York University and one of the leading anti-communist intellectuals of the early Cold War; the German philosopher Karl Jaspers; American journalist and political leftist Melvin Lasky; the playwright Tennessee Williams; French philosopher Raymond Aron; and the British philosopher Bertrand Russell. Alarmed by the heavy-handed Soviet propaganda in support of peace and equality, the CCF fashioned an alternative message that celebrated freedom and democracy. Officially, CCF sponsored journals, magazines, art exhibits, and cultural events; unofficially, and unknown to most of its members, it became part of America’s cultural containment strategy. In the 1960s, the American magazine Ramparts revealed that the CIA had secretly funded the CCF since its inception, exposing the covert operations of the US government in liberal intellectual circles. America’s cultural cold war ranged from propaganda campaigns in communist-controlled countries to more subtle forms of cultural “infiltration” under USIA auspices. During the Korean War, Truman revived the Second World War-era Psychological Warfare Division—now called the Psychological Strategy Board (PSB), which spread propaganda in enemy territory. By the mid 1950s, government officials increasingly became aware that they could use the appeal of American popular culture abroad, including jazz and Hollywood movies, to their advantage. They began placing more weight on the work of the USIA, including VOA with its popular programs such as Willis Conover’s “Music USA,” which played jazz for audiences in Eastern Europe, Africa, and Asia. The USIA also recruited black musicians for its international jazz tours in an effort to overcome the stigma of racial discrimination that was tarnishing America’s reputation in Africa and Asia. Though initially reluctant, many prominent musicians eventually agreed to participate. As the historian Penny von Eschen has shown, those who went, among them Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong, confounded the USIA’s intent by using these tours to deliver an independent often subversive message about race relations to audiences at home and abroad.53 One of those subversive moments occurred in 1961 when Dave and Iola Brubeck teamed up with Louis Armstrong to write and perform the musical The Real Ambassadors, which satirized the State Department tours and featured blunt criticism of race relations within the United States. Consuming American culture and American goods became one of the principal ways in which the world engaged with the United States in the aftermath of the Second World War. The United States made the freedom to consume a central part of its cold war cultural campaign against the Soviet Union. Freedom of choice, political leaders reasoned, extended from the ballot box to the marketplace. Americans first sold their idea of a consumer democracy to occupied Germany and Japan, where occupation officials linked the restoration of democracy to economic prosperity and material

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security. The Berlin airlift of 1948–1949 became a powerful symbol of this link. Americans shored up western liberal democracy in the heart of the Soviet occupation zone by delivering foods and material goods to the West Berlin enclave. German policy-makers echoed that synergy by closely tying their embrace of democracy to the promise of consumerism and prosperity. No product aligned itself more closely with America’s consumer culture and cold war anti-communism than Coca-Cola. The head of its export division, James Farley, an ardent anti-communist, associated the global expansion of the brand with the spread of American democracy. Coca-Cola advertisements often contained anti-communist messages, most glaringly on display in a publicity stunt during the 1952 Olympic Games in Helsinki. Farley arranged for the shipment of thirty thousand crates of Coca Cola aboard a rebuilt Second World War landing craft, such as those used in the D-Day landings in 1944. And much like the D-Day invasion, the shipment landed on the beaches of Finland, a country located on the fault lines between East and West. The liberty to consume became one of the most important hallmarks of the capitalist system and its first line of defense against communism. In 1951, the writer and sociologist David Riesman satirized the putative close connection between consumption and anti-communism in a satirical essay entitled “the Nylon War.” The essay opened as follows: “Today, August 1, 1951—the Nylon War enters upon the third month since the United States began an all-out bombing of the Soviet Union with consumer goods, it seems time to take a retrospective look. Behind the initial raid of June were years of secret and complex preparations, and an idea of disarming simplicity: that if allowed to sample the riches of America, the Russian people would not long tolerate masters who gave them tanks and spies instead of vacuum cleaners and beauty parlors.”54 A miniature version of Riesman’s satire played out in real life eight years later in the summer of 1959, during the kitchen debate between the American vice president Richard Nixon and Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev. The debate took place at the American National Exhibition in Moscow. Financed in large part by American corporations—the US Congress contributed only $3.6 million in federal funds—the exhibition showcased US industrial products including Sears sewing machines, Hoover vacuum cleaners, and the entire contents of a model ranch house, complete with a fully equipped kitchen. The model kitchen became the backdrop for an exchange between Nixon and Khrushchev over the relative merits of consumer comforts and housing standards. Khrushchev launched a spirited attack on American capitalism: “Your American houses are built to last only 20 years so builders could sell new houses at the end.” Russians, on the other hand, “build firmly. We build for our children and grandchildren.”55 Nixon retorted by lauding Americans’ desire to acquire the latest technological inventions that would make the lives of housewives that much easier. For Nixon, consumption was

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the measure of economic success; for Khrushchev, it was the pride in production. There existed a paradox at the heart of the Soviet attitude toward consumption during the 1950s. Khrushchev rejected the conspicuous consumption on display in the US high-tech kitchen model. But he also claimed success in the area of mass consumption, thus legitimizing it as a national aspiration. For Nixon and the exhibition’s organizers, conspicuous consumption of the latest technological gadgets became the measure of success of the western capitalist system. The Moscow exhibit suggested that in the United States life was far more comfortable than in the Soviet Union, and that this comfort was grounded in the material goods available to ordinary citizens rather than the abstract freedoms and democratic privileges they also happened to enjoy. At a deeper level, the kitchen debate revealed the gendered dimension of the cold war cultural battles. While Nixon praised the modern kitchen as a space which afforded women greater comforts and ease of housework, Khrushchev emphasized women’s role outside the home, as productive participants in the national workforce. Consumption in the United States and Western Europe became central aspects of women’s role in the post-war liberal democratic economy. More importantly, as the historian Lizabeth Cohen has argued, consumption in 1950s America became a patriotic act that strengthened democratic ideals, fueled the post-war capitalist economy, and thus contributed to national security. Soviet propaganda, in contrast, publicized women’s productivity in the workforce. Statistics showed that by the early 1960s, women’s participation in the workforce had reached 45 percent, compared to 34 percent for women in the United States. Communists could thus claim that they valued women as producers in contrast to the American ideal of women as consumers. The Polish artist Wojciech Fangor illustrated that contrast in his painting Postaci (translated: characters/figures), which featured a couple and a single woman. The couple are both dressed in work clothes, the woman in rolled-up sleeves, one hand resting on a shovel, as well as robust facial features. The single woman has bright red painted lips, painted fingernails clutching a small purse, and a delicate figure. She wears sunglasses and a white dress printed all over with commercial slogans, such as Wall Street and Coca-Cola. The contrast between the two women hammers home the artist’s disdain for consumption and appreciation for hard work and productivity. Despite their rejection of capitalist consumption, Soviet leaders were acutely aware of the widening gap between Soviet and western living standards, a problem Khrushchev had already addressed at the Twentieth Party Congress in 1956. At the time he had promised to increase living standards in the Soviet Union, not just to match but to overtake the capitalist West in the production of consumer goods. Khrushchev had confidently predicted that the Soviet Union could achieve “complete abundance.” Shortly after the Party Congress, he removed some restrictions on economic

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and political freedoms, yet the modest liberalization could not quell the discontent that had already spread to several Soviet satellite states. In the fall of 1956, several Eastern European states faced popular unrest, particularly Poland and Hungary. While the Polish government was able to resolve the crisis internally, Soviet troops intervened militarily in Hungary, crushing the revolt and demonstrating the limits of the post-Stalinist liberalization. Consumption became an acceptable socialist goal in the late 1950s. East Germany’s ruling party, perhaps more acutely aware of its lackluster economic record compared with West Germany, announced that it would accelerate production of consumer goods to demonstrate the superiority of the socialist social order over the imperialist Bonn regime. In the immediate post-war period, economic planners had focused on alleviating the housing shortage through the construction of cheap, functional apartment buildings. By the early 1960s, they were expanding production of furniture, household goods, and clothing, even attempting to copy Western European fashion designs. East Germany became the Eastern bloc’s leading manufacturer of plastics and other synthetic goods, building on a well-developed pre-war chemical industry. East Germans also developed their own brands of car, the Trabant and the Wartburg. But instead of becoming the pinnacle of socialist engineering, these cars became a major embarrassment. Customers had to wait an average of fifteen years for the delivery of a car. Furthermore, the design changed little over decades, making them look outdated by the late 1970s, and thus not competitive in the international market. Soviet cultural propaganda increasingly targeted areas outside its direct sphere of control, above all in Southeast Asia and Africa. The Soviets were able to exploit two weaknesses of the capitalist world: its historical affiliation with colonialism and its legacy of racism. Western support for freedom, democracy, and self-determination had always been more rhetorical than real, and the aftermath of the Second World War proved no exception. Britain, France, Portugal, and other colonial powers showed little willingness to give up their colonial possessions, even as they signed the United Nations Charter in 1945. This left Asians and Africans wary of empty promises and more likely to establish friendly relations with the Soviet Union. Suspicion of western imperialist ambitions continued to linger long after colonies gained independence. The Soviet Union pointed to the connection between capitalism and imperialism, as laid out in Lenin’s 1917 essay. The equally damaging legacy of racism created an even deeper layer of suspicion in the non-aligned world. During the Second World War African colonial troops had fought in segregated units, as did African Americans within the United States Army. Soviet propaganda often publicized news reports about segregation, discrimination, lynchings, and other acts of racial violence in the United States. Ignoring their own record of domination of neighboring states in Eastern Europe and Central Asia, Soviet officials proved quite adept at spreading the

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message of peace and anti-imperialism in the non-western world through printed pamphlets and news services. The news agency Novosti published foreign language newspapers, among them weeklies and monthlies such as the English language New Times, The Soviet Weekly, and The Soviet Union, which circulated internationally. In addition, propaganda officials aired radio broadcasts abroad, as well as published translations of ideologically acceptable Soviet literary works. Some of their practices mirrored those undertaken by the United States Information Agency, though they were more unabashedly propagandistic than their western counterpart. Each cold war adversary tried to outperform the other in its campaign to win the hearts and minds of the people in the non-aligned world. Each zeroed in with remarkable precision on the weaknesses of the other. Despite those efforts, few non-aligned nations let themselves be pulled firmly into one camp or the other. A more common scenario was that competing factions within a single country would turn to one or the other cold war power for military and economic support. The Soviet Union and the United States thus found themselves supporting opposing sides in the Congolese civil war, in Mozambique, Angola, and, ultimately, in Vietnam. A less common scenario was the skillful exploitation of the cold war strife by third world leaders to secure the maximum military and financial aid from one side or the other, or as in the case of Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser, from both sides. During the 1956 Suez crisis, he successfully maneuvered between the superpowers, gaining political leverage that far outweighed the military power of his state. He was among the first third world leaders to successfully challenge the cold war system.

12 Challenging the Cold War Consensus

As the United States and the Soviet Union sought to expand their influence beyond their respective spheres, they faced continuous internal and external challenges. Ranking high among them was the process of decolonization in Asia and Africa in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The United States could offer economic and financial assistance, but it was burdened by its long-standing alliance with Europe’s old colonial powers and its record of domestic racism. Likewise, despite its anti-imperialist, antiracist, and pacifist rhetoric, the Soviet Union encountered widespread skepticism in the colonial and non-aligned world. While newly independent nations were often happy to accept economic and financial aid from the Soviet Union, they were reluctant to make political concessions. They were often able to increase their leverage through a careful balancing act between East and West. The process of negotiating a post-colonial relationship between colony and metropole was as much cultural as it was political and economic. Newly independent nations might have looked to Egypt’s Gamal Abdel Nasser for a model of negotiating leverage vis-à-vis the cold war adversaries. He had proven quite adept at using the rivalry between the superpowers to his own advantage. He had secured funding from the United States and Great Britain for the building of a major dam across the Nile, while striking a deal with Czechoslovakia for a weapons shipment. When the US found out about the weapons deal, it withdrew funding for the dam. Nasser responded by nationalizing the Suez Canal, which had been under international control. This act, in turn, prompted a coordinated military attack on Egypt’s Sinai peninsula by Britain, France, and Israel. The offensive backfired: in a rare display of unity, both the United States and the Soviet Union condemned the aggression and forced the three powers to withdraw from Egyptian territory. In the aftermath of the crisis, Nasser secured financial support from the Soviet Union for his Aswan dam project. If the Soviets had hoped to increase their political leverage with Nasser through this gesture, they would have been disappointed. He never turned toward 191

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communism. Quite the contrary: in 1958, two years after the Suez crisis, he actively cracked down on communists within his own country. India was equally circumspect in its relationship with the Soviet Union and the capitalist West. Its leader Jawaharlal Nehru considered himself a socialist but rejected the dogmatic apparatus of Soviet communism. Many former colonies carefully navigated the treacherous terrain between nurturing economic ties with their former colonial masters as well as the communist bloc while avoiding ideological entanglements with both. They built temporary alliances without fully committing to either side in the cold war conflict.

Decolonization For countries in the Global South, the process of decolonization had a far greater impact than the Cold War. Colonialism left a legacy of economic, political, and cultural repression, the consequences of which linger well into the twenty-first century. Struggling to redefine their cultural identity vis-àvis their former oppressors, newly independent nations debated whether it was better to reject wholesale the cultural imprint of the metropole or work it into a new hybrid culture of independence. Even if nationalists were able to recover some of the buried elements of local African or Asian cultures, they found it impossible to erase decades and in many cases centuries of western cultural domination. Between 1945 and 1970, a staggering number of sixty-four countries gained independence, some through the peaceful transition of power, others through violent clashes with colonial administrators. The process of decolonization occurred both within and outside the parameters of the global Cold War. As these countries transitioned toward independence, they sometimes became embroiled in cold war rivalries, as in the case of Vietnam. At other times they exploited them, as Nasser did in Egypt. However, local power configurations did as much to shape post-colonial politics and culture as did the global cold war environment. Many of those leading the fight for independence were quite adept at bridging the divide between their indigenous culture and the culture of the metropole, among them the Vietnamese leader Ho Chi Minh and India’s Nehru and Gandhi. These individuals became powerful architects of their own country’s national identity, while at the same time exploiting their knowledge of the metropole toward the objective of national independence. Post-colonial leaders faced the difficult task of forging new nations out of the largely arbitrary boundaries set up by European colonial authorities more than a century earlier. Colonial boundaries rarely matched cultural, tribal, or even ethnic boundaries. Old pre-colonial rivalries often reappeared as soon as colonial control disappeared. Colonial administrators had often elevated one population group above others and suppressed cultural and

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ethnic minorities within their borders. Their departure brought about the realignment of domestic power relations, triggering an internal struggle among competing indigenous groups. Struggles over the contours of a country’s post-colonial national identity and cultural heritage played a central role in the power struggles between colonies and metropole as well as among various factions within newly independent states. The process of decolonization varied significantly across Asia and Africa. Some countries made a peaceful transition to home rule, others engaged in violent liberation struggles against their colonial rulers, or became engulfed in post-colonial civil wars. India was among the first to gain independence through largely peaceful means after the Second World War, yet suffered domestic violence in its aftermath. The British had encountered opposition to their colonial rule for decades, most prominently through the movement of non-violent resistance led by Gandhi, who espoused a philosophy of communitarianism and self-reliance. He advocated a simple life, spun his own clothes, and used hunger strikes to protest British rule. He also at times admonished his own people to refrain from violence in their struggle for independence. His approach was not without critics even within his own movement. One of his closest allies, Jawaharlal Nehru, objected to Gandhi’s pre-modern ideas of communitarianism. Nehru, a firm supporter of scientific and technological innovation, believed that only by embracing modernity could India succeed as a sovereign state. Internal differences came to a head when India approached independence after the Second World War. Religious violence briefly overshadowed the political debates about whether centralized modernization programs or decentralized small village structures of political organization were the best new form of government for India. There existed significant cultural differences between the majority Hindu population and the smaller population of Muslims. When riots broke out between Hindus and Muslims in 1946, Muhammad Ali Jinnah, the leader of the Muslim League, asked the British to divide the country into separate Hindu and Muslim states. In June 1947, the British Viceroy to India, Louis Mountbatten, agreed and announced the creation of a Muslim state consisting of Pakistan in the northwest and East Pakistan in the northeast, as well as Hindu-dominated India. Within days of independence, more than one million Hindus and Muslims were killed in local fighting. In the aftermath of the killings, as many as 12 million Hindus and Muslims left their homes to relocate to their majority areas. The violence abated only after Gandhi went on a hunger strike, averting civil war. Gandhi himself later fell victim to violence when he was assassinated by a Hindu radical in 1948. Religious strife continued to plague both India and Pakistan and repeatedly led to conflicts between them. In Africa, most colonies gained independence through negotiations with their colonizers. Nationalist movements had strengthened in the inter-war period, often led by indigenous elites educated in the metropole. Faced with increasing demands for nationalist independence, colonial powers eventually

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agreed to leave, in part because they were no longer able to shoulder the cost of controlling the colonies in the face of rising opposition. Only in the southern part, where a sizeable group of white settlers clung to political control, did white rule persist. Ghana inaugurated the post-war decolonization wave in 1957. Its first president, Kwame Nkrumah, had studied in the 1930s at Lincoln University, a historically black college in the US state of Pennsylvania. The university counted prominent African Americans among its alumni, including the Harlem Renaissance poet and writer Langston Hughes and America’s first black Supreme Court justice Thurgood Marshal. Upon his return to Ghana in 1947, Nkrumah became active in the United Gold Coast Convention (UGCC), a new political party advocating for self-government. Two years later he founded his own party, the Convention People’s Party (CPP), and rose to the position of prime minister in the mid-1950s. By that time, negotiations for independence from Britain were underway. Senegal’s first president after independence from France in 1960, Leopold Senghor, had studied in France in the 1930s and 1940s before returning to Africa. These European-educated leaders acknowledged the vital importance of education and technology for the economic and scientific advancement of their newly independent countries. As a result, many new states invested heavily in education. According to historian Odd Arne Westad, the rate of secondary education in post-colonial states increased more than fourfold, while university enrollment increased by a factor of seven between 1960 and 1990. Many of the students went to universities in Europe, the Soviet Union, and the United States, while domestic universities expanded rapidly as well. In Algeria, Namibia, and Rhodesia, colonies with a significant white settler population, the anti-colonial movement incurred violent suppression from the white ruling class. South Africa, which had established a whitecontrolled centralized state in 1909, served as a model for other white settler colonies. After losing the military protection provided by the colonial authority, white settlers often took drastic measures after independence to preserve their privileged positions of power over the black indigenous majority. South Africa’s white ruling class retained close relations with the British and instituted a rigid system of apartheid and political repression, designed to prevent the increasingly well-organized African National Congress from assuming power. It also brutally suppressed the black opposition movement and incarcerated most of its leaders, including Nelson Mandela, who spent twenty-six years in prison before being released in 1990, when South Africa’s apartheid system finally collapsed. Algeria, another colony with a sizeable white settler population, erupted in violence in 1954 when the Algerian National Liberation Front (NLF) planted bombs in areas frequented by white Algerians to drive the French out of the country. French police forces retaliated with an equal measure of brutality, often targeting poor Muslim neighborhoods in their raids against the rebels. In 1962, France’s president Charles De Gaulle negotiated a peace

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accord which granted independence to Algeria, after which most of the one million Europeans left. The conflict had claimed an estimated 300,000 lives over its eight-year period. Algeria’s first leader after independence, Ahmed Ben Bella, a leading FLN fighter during the war, instituted widespread land reform and autogestion, a system of rural self-management. His reign was cut short by an internal power struggle, which led to his overthrow in 1965. His successor, Houari Boumédiène, who had been Bella’s defense minister, pursued the nationalization and expansion of key industries, particularly those related to oil extraction. Algeria’s post-colonial internal strife demonstrated that independence was only the first step on the long and arduous road to nationhood. Many newly independent countries descended into civil war with opposing ethnic and tribal groups vying for power. Indigenous elites disagreed over whether to continue on the path toward modernization and westernization or return to their indigenous roots. Sometimes the very fruits of modernization provided the tools for turning back advances in the social and political realm, for instance the rights of women, who had played a vital role in many independence movements. While the anti-colonial struggle had unified indigenous populations against their oppressors, the post-colonial period of political indigenization revealed new fissures among interest groups with competing visions for independence. Political leaders’ success often depended on how well they were able to embed traditionalism within modern forms of social and political organization, and how well they were able to transcend ethnic, tribal, and cultural differences among their own constituents. Amid the cultural debates, the pan-African négritude movement gained widespread support. Its roots dated back to the 1930s when African and Afro-Caribbean intellectuals offered a cultural rationale for the political drive for independence. Among those leading the movement were the Senegalese poet and politician Léopold Senghor, and the poet Aimé Césaire from the Caribbean island of Martinique. They were part of a growing panAfrican movement that had taken hold in the inter-war period in Europe and the Americas, including members of the Harlem Renaissance in the United States. Black writers and intellectuals drew inspiration from historical struggles against white colonial rule, such as the Haitian revolution of 1791–1804. For Senghor, Césaire, and others, négritude encompassed the entire cultural, economic, social, and political canon of the descendants of the African continent. It assumed a fundamental coherence in the historical and cultural heritage that bound Africans together into a single cultural and ethnic entity despite their diasporic dispersal over the past centuries. Négritude developed into a powerful unifying force among post-war AfroCaribbean independence advocates. Just as activists were challenging the legitimacy of western political rule, they were now challenging the validity of western cultural rule. Despite its transnational appeal, négritude was challenged from within the African diasporic community. One of its fiercest critics was Frantz

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Fanon, a fellow black Caribbean writer who charged Senghor and Césaire with replicating European ideas about a monolithic indigenous African culture. Négritude amounted, in his words, to a “logical antithesis of that insult which the white man flung at humanity.”56 The effort to lump all Africans, regardless of their national origin or cultural identity, into a single homogeneous entity was the same as pressing them into a ready-made racial category of blackness and therefore denying them autonomy. The process was, according to Fanon, essentially an inversion of the colonial system of cultural oppression. Négritude, in short, legitimized the racialization of cultural identity. The debate about négritude revealed a crucial dynamic of the process of cultural change, the construction of cultural identity, and the relationship between culture and power. Contact with foreign cultures, whether by force or by choice, invariably altered a people’s cultural matrix. Post-colonial leaders struggled to reverse the process of cultural transformation and to erase the imprint of colonial domination. Furthermore, by the mid-1960s, Africans and Asians had become embroiled in heated debates about whether there existed a unified African or Asian identity and if so what the nature of that identity was. The question few of them raised was whether a common cultural heritage and identity was a necessary prerequisite for political legitimacy and unity. These debates exposed not only the scars left by more than a century of colonial domination but also the diversity of post-colonial experiences. Africans more than Asians had to renegotiate their identity within an increasingly heterogeneous environment, in which the recovery of a lost tribal culture held both promise and peril. That process could lead to strength through unity but also risked ethnic conflict and war. Often, independence created living conditions no better and sometimes worse than those experienced under colonialism. Regional diversity in language, religion, and customs posed a serious challenge to national unification. Language became another obstacle to unification, sometimes in unexpected ways. Prominent writers and poets often communicated their search for a common African identity not in their native language but in the language of their former colonizers, including Senghor, who wrote in French, and the Nigerian writer Chinua Achebe, who wrote in English. The reasons were as much pragmatic as they were culturally charged. If they had chosen to write in their native language, they would have reached an exceedingly small audience, and thus would have failed in their effort to establish unity among African peoples, one of the principal foundations of the négritude movement. Their resort to the language of the colonizers offered an opportunity for anti-colonial unity. It also represented an acknowledgement that part of the desire for unity stemmed from the common suffering under the same colonial regimes as well as an acknowledgement of the extensive ties that existed between the western colonial cultural canon and indigenous political and cultural objectives. Finally, the language of the colonizer offered an opportunity to challenge the cultural power of the colonizer over the

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colonized. Literature and political writings in the language of the oppressor gained an international audience potentially sympathetic to the cause of liberation. Ironically, then, cultural and linguistic hybridization or creolization, rather than a sign of the weakening of an indigenous culture, also offered a form of empowerment, an opportunity to be heard by a global audience.

Vietnam The protracted struggle over Vietnam involved old and new imperial powers for several decades. It also upended the western cold war narrative of democracy, freedom, and self-determination. The United States’ involvement cannot be explained fully by exclusively looking at geopolitical and economic factors. Cultural factors, including ideology, nationalism, gender, and race, shaped the West’s approach to the conflict as well as Vietnamese responses. Vietnam, Laos, and Cambodia together made up the French colony of Indochina, which came under Japanese control during the Second World War. The Vietnamese nationalist leader Ho Chi Minh seized on the Japanese surrender in August 1945 as an opportunity to declare his country’s independence. On September 2, he issued the “Vietnamese Declaration of Independence,” which, on the advice of officers from the US Office of Strategic Services, who had collaborated with Ho during the war, borrowed heavily from the American original, including the following: “All men are created equal. They are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights; among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” By leaning heavily on American revolutionary rhetoric, Ho hoped to gain US support for Vietnamese independence. He was therefore understandably disappointed, when France reasserted control over its former colony with tacit approval from the Americans. The French insisted, as they had done after the First World War, that the people in the former colonies were not ready for self-rule. Conjuring up the traditional colonial narrative of racial and civilizational superiority, the French framed their own desire to hold on to the semblance of empire in cultural terms. This time, however, anti-colonial activists pushed back, igniting a guerrilla war that would last for close to thirty years and took a heavy human toll. Disparate political groups coalesced around the common objective of driving the French out of the country. The strongest and best organized of them were communists under Ho’s leadership, confronting the French in a protracted guerrilla war that lasted until 1954. By that time, the French had poured more than $5 billion into the war, propped up by the United States, which began absorbing an increasing share of the cost of the war. In addition, the Eisenhower administration sent around 300 military advisors to Vietnam. All those measures could not avert the humiliating French military

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defeat at Dien Bien Phu, which finally prompted them to withdraw from the region. The1954 Peace Accord stipulated that Vietnam should be divided at the seventeenth parallel, with the northern part controlled by the rebel forces led by Ho Chi Minh’s communist party, and the south by a government supported by the French and Americans. The decision to divide was made for purely military reasons, since the communists under Ho controlled almost the entire northern part of the country. The accord also called for free elections after two years, followed by unification under a single democratically elected leader. The United States did not sign the accord, and thus supported the South Vietnamese leader Ngo Dinh Diem’s decision not to hold free elections in the southern part in 1956. He would have lost the election. Diem was highly unpopular in his own country and came to rely increasingly on American assistance to stay in power. As a Catholic he was able to establish a strong rapport with Eisenhower and Kennedy, yet as a Christian leader of a Buddhist country he displayed tremendous insensitivity to Buddhist beliefs and customs. Buddhist monks, in turn, became his sharpest critics. Diem and his family treated the Buddhist opposition movement with utter contempt, particularly when desperate monks resorted to self-immolation as a form of protest in 1963. By that time the United States’ military engagement in Vietnam had expanded, yet its support for Diem was waning, in part in recognition of the vast cultural and ideological gulf that separated Diem from his population. As support waned, opposition forces grew bolder. In the fall of 1963, military leaders staged a coup and assassinated Diem just weeks before Kennedy himself was assassinated. Lyndon Baines Johnson continued the trajectory of increased military engagement, despite speculation that Kennedy just prior to his assassination might have been close to a major course correction on Vietnam. Under Johnson, America’s involvement in Vietnam escalated dramatically, reaching over 500,000 troops in 1969. Despite overwhelming manpower and military equipment, the Americans were unable to drive out the North-Vietnamsponsored guerrilla forces, the National Liberation Front of South Vietnam (NLF). They struggled to navigate the treacherous terrain that separated their southern allies from the northern enemy and its supporting guerrilla forces in the South. They fought alongside the South Vietnamese army against an invisible enemy that hid among ordinary South Vietnamese peasants. Thousands of innocent civilians became casualties of the war, caught between the fronts. American military officials were unable to devise a working strategy toward gaining and holding enemy territory. They began to measure progress against the NLF and North Vietnamese forces not by square miles of conquered terrain but by daily body counts of enemies killed. When the North Vietnamese launched the Tet Offensive in February 1968, they came close to defeating the South. American and South Vietnamese forces were barely able to prevail, exposing the weakness of the South Vietnamese army. Journalists reporting from Vietnam sent images of

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violence, death, and destruction home, and commentators called into question the efficacy of the Vietnamese American coalition forces. Historians have long struggled to explain the reasons for the US escalation of the war in Vietnam in the 1960s. Power-political considerations, including cold war era reflexive anti-communism, cannot fully explain the depth and length of the US involvement in Vietnam. More recently, historians have begun to examine the war through the lens of cultural and gender analysis. They found that within the inner circles of the American foreign policy establishment, particularly during the Kennedy administration, assessments of threats and considerations of appropriate responses were filtered through a gendered lens demanding demonstrations of strength and resolve on the international stage, even if it meant going to war in a country of only minor strategic importance to the United States; even if it meant going to war on behalf of a regime that was neither democratic nor enjoyed the backing of the majority of its population. The language and rhetoric of the Kennedy and Johnson administrations revealed gendered notions about strength and weakness, a preoccupation with winning at all cost and concerns about “credibility,” which became foundations for policy decisions, even though no-one defined precisely what the utility of the concept was in the conduct of foreign policy. When examined though the lens of gender, the term revealed core fears about not being perceived as decisive, tough, or dominant—in short, attributes associated with masculinity. Both the Kennedy and Johnson administrations were consumed with fear about appearing weak in the eyes of their adversaries, should they cut their losses and withdraw from Vietnam. Historians have also begun to examine more closely the agency of the North and South Vietnamese in shaping the war. Lien-Hang Nguyen revealed that both followed their own agenda and proved quite adept at manipulating the major powers into acting in their own interests. This included not only the United States, but the Soviet Union and China as well. North Vietnamese leaders feared a Sino-Soviet split but at the same time exploited it to receive the maximum support from each communist ally. They also launched an international public relations campaign that drew significant strength from the increasingly militant anti-war movements in the West.57 The growing disillusionment in the United States with the war added to the quagmire in Vietnam. Anti-war movements in the United States and Western Europe grew in size and power. They increasingly challenged the liberal democratic cold war consensus that had shaped US foreign policy since the end of the Second World War. The republican presidential candidate Richard Nixon was able to exploit the national mood and won on the promise of getting the United States out of the war “with honor.” His strategy of Vietnamization consisted of two seemingly contradictory measures, designed to get the US out of Vietnam while preserving its status and “credibility” as a tough power. The first was to reduce American troop strength in Vietnam while providing more financial support for training and

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outfitting the South Vietnamese army. By the end of 1971, American troop levels in Vietnam had declined to 140,000. The second became known as the “madman” strategy. Nixon escalated tensions by threatening to use nuclear weapons if the North Vietnamese did not back down and by extending bombing raids into Cambodia and Laos, ostensibly to destroy the infamous Ho Chi Minh trail. The trail ran along the Vietnamese border on the Cambodian and Laos side for hundreds of miles and was used to transport weapons and other equipment from North Vietnam to the South. One could interpret the introduction of the madman strategy as a brilliant move by a realist, who inserted an element of irrationality into the game of diplomacy to achieve a rational end. That is certainly the interpretation Nixon would have liked people to adopt. But that ignores the fact that even before he availed himself of a madman persona, the policies of Nixon and his predecessors toward Vietnam had been irrational. One could not consider the American involvement in Vietnam from the 1950s to the 1970s as a rational act of foreign policy decision-making. It is further doubtful that the strategy cemented America’s reputation as a tough and decisive leader in international affairs. One of its unintended consequences was the slowing of progress in negotiations underway in Paris at the time. An accord was finally reached in 1973, leading to America’s withdrawal from South Vietnam. Two years later in 1975, the North Vietnamese launched an attack on the South, overpowering a completely unprepared and demoralized South Vietnamese army. The few remaining Americans and their Vietnamese aides abruptly fled the country, some in dramatic fashion from the top of the American embassy building in Saigon. The widely-publicized image of the refugees atop the American embassy symbolized the diminished status of the United States as a hegemonic power. By that time, Nixon had been forced out of the White House by the Watergate scandal.

Internal Challenges Vietnam was the most glaring manifestation of the breakdown of the cold war consensus, which had dominated international relations since the end of the Second World War. But that consensus had been crumbling from within in both the United States and the Soviet Union since the 1950s. Each superpower faced multiple challenges from within its own sphere of influence. In both, challenges emerged first in the domestic social and cultural realm before spreading into the political realm of their respective alliance systems. Somewhat ironically, too, the American and Soviet efforts in the 1950s to develop cultural exchange programs between the two blocs also facilitated the building of a transnational network of dissidents that eventually hollowed out the cold war consensus from within. As internal pressures mounted, they set the stage for a fundamental reorientation of cold war relations in the early 1970s.

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In the United States, challenges to the cold war consensus began as a cultural rebellion against the conformism of the early 1950s. Embattled by fears of nuclear war and communist infiltration in the early post-war period, Americans sought security in narrowly defined codes of acceptable social behavior. Those who deviated from the norm were often ostracized as delinquents, subversives, or even communists. Young women faced pressure to find a partner in early adulthood, give up employment outside the home, and focus on housekeeping and childrearing. Young men were expected to embrace the role of breadwinner within marriage earlier than in previous generations. Men who remained single beyond their mid-twenties invited charges of immaturity and/or homosexuality. Median marriage age for women in the early post-war period decreased to twenty, for men to twentythree. Ninety-six percent of women and ninety-four percent of men who came of age during the war and in the early post-war period married. Those young couples also produced the baby boom generation, achieving the highest birthrate in US history. In the 1950s, a group of New York intellectuals, among them Jack Kerouac, Allen Ginsberg, and William S. Burroughs, offered a first critique of America’s oppressive system of cultural conformity. The Beats, as they became known, met as students at Columbia University in the l940s. They inspired a generation of young people who challenged gender and social norms, demanded greater sexual freedoms, experimented with psychedelic drugs, and rejected middle-class materialism. Kerouac’s fictional travel narrative On the Road, published in 1957, became the defining literary work of the beat generation. Written in stream of consciousness-style prose, the novel’s two protagonists are in constant motion, traversing the country, slipping in and out of relationships, and seeking adventure and liberation from the constraints of time and place, what in his 1960 book Growing Up Absurd Paul Goodman called the “rat race.” American and Western European women also began to challenge the social confines that perpetually kept them in subordinate positions. They drew inspiration from The Second Sex, a book written by the French writer Simone de Beauvoir in 1949, in which she argued that modern society had always treated men as objective ‘self’ and women as subjective ‘other,’ a “second sex.” The American journalist and writer Betty Friedan expanded on de Beauvoir’s arguments in her 1963 publication The Feminine Mystique. Foundational for feminism’s “second wave,” Friedan’s book resonated particularly with middle-class, college-educated, white women, who felt stifled by the social pressures that had confined them to the roles of mother and housewife without many opportunities to make use of the education they had received in college. By the end of the 1960s, young women had broken out of that mold. But even though they participated in the civil rights and student movements, they continued to experience discrimination, not unlike the kind that their elders had suffered, and that African Americans were experiencing on a daily basis. Women’s liberation movements emerged

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in all major western countries in the late 1960s, calling for equality in the workplace and in the political arena, and the right to control their own bodies, particularly the right to birth control and abortion. The spirit of internationalism was also alive and well in transnational organizations that advocated for global peace. Most prominent among them in the 1950s were groups concerned about nuclear war. By 1952, Americans and Soviets were developing hydrogen bombs, whose destructive power was more than 500 times that of the bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The British Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND), whose logo soon became universally recognized as the peace sign, coalesced around a group of Christian pacifists, scientists, and political leftists. US anti-nuclear activists Norman Cousins, Lenore Marshall, and others founded the Committee for a SANE Nuclear Policy in 1957. SANE soon attracted other prominent members, among them the pediatrician Dr. Benjamin Spock, playwright Arthur Miller, and actors Marlon Brando, Henry Fonda, and Marilyn Monroe. In 1958, leading members of the British CND, including the Canon of St. Paul’s Cathedral, John Collins, and the philosopher-activist Bertrand Russell, staged a march from London to the British nuclear bomb building site in Aldermaston during the Easter holiday weekend. Easter marches soon spread to several other European cities and the United States, becoming an annual ritual of the anti-nuclear movement. In Japan, the anti-nuclear movement received a significant boost after the 1954 Lucky Dragon incident, when an American nuclear test explosion on the Bikini Atoll in the South Pacific defied predictions and spewed nuclear debris much higher into the atmosphere than expected. Nuclear dust rained down over a far larger radius than expected around the test site, contaminating several inhabited islands and popular fishing grounds. A vessel caught in the vicinity, the Japanese fishing trawler Lucky Dragon 5, was showered with radioactive dust. By the time the boat reached its home port, several crew members were suffering from radiation poisoning. Before Japanese authorities became aware of the extent of the toxicity of the cargo on board, it had entered the market, setting off a major panic among consumers and prompting the collapse of the fishing market. One of the crew members died within weeks of the accident. In the aftermath of the panic, concerned citizens founded a grassroots organization against nuclear testing, called Gensuikyo¯. Within a few months, it had opened branches across the country and within a year it had collected several million signatures in support of banning all nuclear bombs. Concern over nuclear war and nuclear fallout became a powerful motivator for organizations to cooperate with others in a transnational anti-nuclear network. Another international challenge to the cold war consensus emerged from the civil rights movement in the United States. African Americans had long struggled for equal rights, but their efforts gained new urgency in the aftermath of the Second World War. African Americans who had fought in the war were less willing to return to a segregated society and accept the

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status of second-class citizens, particularly in the South, where Jim Crow laws segregated all public places, restricted voting rights, and limited educational and professional opportunities for African Americans. With the advent of the Cold War, this system of segregation turned into America’s Achilles heel. It became increasingly difficult for the US to call itself the champion of equality and democracy abroad while it discriminated against its own black population at home. More importantly, segregation and racial violence in the American South became a serious obstacle to establishing friendly relations with newly independent nations in Africa and Asia. In recognition of the international ramifications of America’s domestic racial policies, President Truman desegregated the armed forces in 1948. The U.S. Supreme Court added momentum in 1954 with its Brown vs. Board of Education decision, ordering the desegregation of public schools. Enforcement of the ruling did not proceed swiftly or smoothly, however. When black students in Little Rock, Arkansas, decided to test the law by registering at the all-white Central High School in the fall of 1957, they encountered violent opposition from white residents. Their actions garnered international attention and forced President Eisenhower to intervene on behalf of the students by sending in the National Guard. The civil rights movement that emerged in the mid-1950s had local roots but global repercussions. At the local level, actions such as the 1956 Montgomery Bus Boycott created a mass movement that ultimately succeeded in desegregating the American South. It also elevated a young unknown pastor at the Dexter Avenue Baptist Church in Montgomery, Alabama, Martin Luther King Jr., to national and international prominence. The movement’s greatest success was the 1964 passage of the Civil Rights Act, which outlawed any form of discrimination on the basis of race, color, religion, or national origin. Throughout their struggle, African Americans made connections to the decolonization movements in Africa and Asia. They drew inspiration from and lent their enthusiastic support to the independence struggles of African nations. Louis Armstrong toured Ghana and visited personally with Nkrumah in 1956. A year later, Martin Luther King Jr. travelled to Ghana at the invitation of Nkrumah, to attend that country’s independence ceremony. By the 1960s, a group of American civil rights activists had relocated to Ghana, among them the writer Maya Angelou and W.E.B. DuBois, who became a Ghanaian citizen shortly before his death in 1963. For African Americans, national liberation was at once a domestic and global struggle. And for some, Pan-Africanism, a movement spearheaded by Nkrumah, became the road to political sovereignty. A different set of challenges came from university students dissatisfied with the conformity and materialism of the capitalist world. The American student movement emerged out of the civil rights movement in the South, as well as the global anti-nuclear movement. Young people everywhere began to demand a more egalitarian form of democracy that rejected racism and

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FIGURE 8 Kwame Nkrumah, first prime minister of the newly independent Ghana, welcomed Louis and Lucille Armstrong on their African tour, 1956. © Getty Images.

gave individuals a bigger voice in determining their social, cultural, and political environment. Ideologically, they became part of the international New Left, which emerged in the aftermath of the Second World War and sought an alternative leftist political path that avoided the errors of Sovietstyle communism while also rejecting the materialism of the western capitalist system. New Left thinking was inspired by the exiled Frankfurt School, most prominently Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer, and Herbert Marcuse, who reinterpreted Marxism within the context of mid-twentiethcentury capitalism and socialism. The American sociologist C. Wright Mills gave voice to the movement with his 1960 essay “Letter to the New Left,” in which he encouraged young intellectuals to reject both Soviet-style communism and American capitalism and embrace the new utopian spirit of grassroots non-violent activism. The formative document for the American student movement was the Port Huron Statement, which introduced the concept of “participatory democracy.” It served as a founding manifesto for the newly established Students for a Democratic Society (SDS), addressing social and political grievances, such as class and racial equality, nuclear war, and anti-

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communism, which suppressed free speech. By the mid-1960s, SDS had established chapters on almost every college campus in the United States. Initially focused on local issues—it played a key role in the Free Speech movement that rocked the campus of the University of California at Berkeley in 1965—the movement turned to international issues with its opposition to the Vietnam War in the second half of the decade. Increasingly, its members supported the national liberation movements in the Third World. Over the course of the 1960s, student movements emerged all over the world. The impetus for the initial protests varied in each country, ranging from complaints about student housing and university governance in France, to political protests against authoritarian state structures in West Germany. As the movements gathered momentum, their grievances and objectives became more political and more transnational, focusing increasingly on the war in Vietnam and more broadly on national liberation movements in the Third World. In Europe, the student movements gained strength later than in the United States but turned more quickly to militant revolt. By the end of the 1960s, most western countries were experiencing some form of street violence and domestic terrorism in connection with political protests. The Soviet Union suffered challenges to its rule in Eastern Europe throughout the early Cold War, beginning with the 1953 uprising in East Germany and the popular unrest in Poland and Hungary three years later. Khrushchev’s thaw in his own country remained inconsistent and superficial. It allowed greater freedom of expression in the public sphere but did not end repression and censorship. Communist leaders maintained their grip on power by incarcerating dissidents and censoring free speech. They continued to exercise direct control over cultural institutions and employed an extensive domestic surveillance apparatus. Many dissidents went underground and smuggled their political writings out of the country to be published in the West. Known as samizdat, the genre produced world-class literature, including Boris Pasternak’s Doctor Zhivago and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago. By the mid-1960s, local challenges to the Cold War became increasingly intertwined with global ones. Some of the more radical groups in Western Europe and the United States saw themselves as part of a global struggle against colonialism and imperialism. Western militant activists were drawn to Frantz Fanon’s The Wretched of the Earth, particularly his argument that violence was endemic to the system of colonialism and therefore an inevitable part of the process of liberation. Student activists developed a romantic notion of the militant third world revolutionary, fueled by narratives of heroic struggles against imperialism. Third world guerilla fighters such as Ho Chi Minh, Che Guevara, and Mao Zedong achieved iconic status among western youths. Even though revolutionary guerilla movements included women, it was the hyper-masculine, virile image of the male fighter that garnered the greatest admiration among students. Of the three, Che Guevara was universally revered, embodying perfectly the image of the global

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revolutionary. Even though he was born and raised in Argentina, his homeland never became a target for his revolutionary struggle. Instead, he moved seamlessly from one national liberation struggle to the next. A bystander to the CIA-engineered coup in 1954 Guatemala, in 1959 he helped Fidel Castro oust the Cuban leader Fulgencio Batista from power. In 1965, he moved to the Congo and a year later to Bolivia, to lend his support to the militant liberation struggles, both without success. In October 1967, he was captured by the CIA in the Bolivian mountains, and executed a day later. His death cemented his mythical status as a hero of the militant struggle for national liberation, amplified by the global proliferation of his youthful image in guerilla fatigues and wearing a beret. As student activists in the western world increasingly identified with the anti-colonial liberation struggles of Latin America, Africa, and Asia, their willingness to engage in violent acts of opposition at home increased, often in tandem with the state’s willingness to use force against them. Violence had been a tool of the state and white segregationists for decades, including lynchings, police beatings of civil rights protesters, or the unleashing of dogs on peaceful marchers, as happened in Birmingham, Alabama, in May 1963. Angry mobs had assaulted civil rights activists at lunch counter sit-ins across the American South. And militant segregationists had bombed churches and assassinated civil rights leaders, including Medgar Evers and Martin Luther King. By the mid-1960s, violence erupted frequently in American cities, prompted by popular frustration with police injustice and the slow pace of civil rights reform. Riots were sparked by instances of police brutality or occurred in response to street violence and senseless killings. In the aftermath of Martin Luther King’s assassination in April 1968, riots broke out in almost every major city in the United States. A few months later at the Democratic National Convention in Chicago, police beat protesters in an explosion of violence that looked eerily similar to a mob riot. Violence had become a regular feature of American public life. In Europe, too, state violence provoked popular violence in a vicious cycle that escalated in the late 1960s. When West German students took to the streets of Berlin in June 1967 to protest the official state visit of the Shah of Iran, they were pursued by armed police. In one chase a police officer shot and killed a protester, Benno Ohnesorg. The killing of an innocent individual—Ohnesorg had been shot in the back of the head and thus could not have posed a threat to the police as initially claimed—enraged students and leftist intellectuals across Germany. A year later, Rudi Dutschke, the nationally prominent leader of the Berlin branch of the German SDS (Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund), was shot in the head by a young radical rightist in broad daylight. Dutschke survived the attack but sustained chronic injuries that contributed to his death a decade later. Violence also erupted in the streets of Paris in May 1968 during antigovernment protests. The clashes capped months of unrest that had begun earlier that year at one of the city’s suburban campuses in Nanterre, where

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students protested against university regulations. The protests expanded quickly into a broad critique of the conservative social and political course of the Charles de Gaulle government. Students demanded greater participation in the governance of the university, and expressed outrage over the increasingly aggressive measures of the local police against student protesters. By early May the protests had spread beyond Nanterre to the heart of Paris, culminating in bloody street clashes during the night of May 10–11. The question of violence stood at the heart of the splintering of the student movements of the late 1960s. In fierce debates over strategies and objectives, students disagreed over whether to continue on a path of non-violent civil disobedience or engage in revolutionary armed conflict, following the example of third world liberation movements. In several countries, radical students formed urban guerilla movements and began planning attacks on political and commercial targets. In West Germany, three groups, the June 2nd Movement, the Baader-Meinhof Group, and the Red Army Faction (RAF), engaged in bombings, political abductions, and targeted assassinations. In the United States, a radical faction split from the SDS and formed the Weather Underground, which planted bombs, robbed banks, and engaged in other acts of sabotage. Leftist terrorist groups also emerged in Italy and Japan. Though some of them proved quite adept at spreading fear within the population, none succeeded in toppling their national government. Popular violence against the state was not a major threat in Sovietcontrolled Eastern Europe, yet authorities still feared that the spirit of protest could spill over there. Thus, when new reform movements emerged in Poland and Czechoslovakia in the mid-1960s, Soviet and neighboring Eastern European leaders reacted with alarm. The Prague Spring of 1968 posed the biggest social, cultural, and political challenge to the Soviet Bloc system, prompting a joint military invasion by most of the Warsaw Pact countries, effectively crushing any hope for a reform of the system. In contrast to the West, Eastern European protests never took a violent turn in their opposition to the system. The initial impetus for reform in Czechoslovakia came from the country’s literary elites, who in the summer of 1967 openly criticized the Communist Party’s restrictions on free speech. Their critique soon expanded into a more general challenge to the Czech implementation of socialism. Those calling for reform received support from Alexander Dubcˇek, who became first secretary of the Communist Party in January 1968. Under his leadership, the government approved the “Action Program,” a series of measures that allowed for more political diversity and greater freedom of expression. Noncommunist political parties re-emerged from internal exile and publicized their own blueprints for reform. Pressure from below prompted Dubcˇek to expand his initially modest reform agenda, leading to greater freedom of the press, more open criticism of the regime, and a new optimism of the country’s ability to create what Dubcˇek called “socialism with a human face.”

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Hardline communists both inside Czechoslovakia and in neighboring countries expressed grave concerns about the reforms, fearing that the momentum might inspire youth in other Eastern European countries to rise up in revolt. When Dubcˇek declined to take back the reforms, five Warsaw Pact states—Poland, East Germany, Bulgaria, Hungary, and the Soviet Union—moved in with military force and crushed the reforms in Czechoslovakia. Within days of the invasion on August 20, 1968, hardliners in the party leadership rolled back the reforms and returned to the Soviet fold. The invasion drew sharp criticism from two communist allies, Romania and Albania, who declined to participate in the invasion. Both had followed an independent course toward socialism since the end of the Second World War and rejected foreign interference in what they regarded as the internal affairs of a sovereign country. Albania took a drastic step to distance itself from the invasion—it left the Warsaw Pact. Yugoslavia, a socialist state in southeastern Europe which had split from the Soviet Union in 1948 yet maintained close ties to the Warsaw Pact countries, also protested the military move, concerned more about a possible future infringement on its own sovereignty than a spillover of the Czech spirit of reform. Most western communist parties sharply condemned the invasion and turned away from Soviet-style communism. China, whose communist system was as restrictive and authoritarian as that of the Soviet Union, expressed concern over the invasion as well. Sino-Soviet relations had for some time been tense, to the point of military clashes along its shared borders, and Mao feared a possible challenge by the Soviets to China’s own brand of communist rule. Even outsiders could see by the early 1970s that the communist world was a lot less monolithic than just ten years earlier, mirroring in many ways the political fragmentation that was occurring in the capitalist West. The break-up of political consensus in both spheres offered the first opportunity since the onset of the Cold War for a general realignment of power relations. Vietnam for the United States and Czechoslovakia for the Soviet Union showed the limits of superpower control over client states. Even if the Soviet Union prevailed in realigning Czechoslovak politics with the communist precepts of its own system, the cracks were visible to the outside world. These challenges unfolded and grew over the course of the 1960s, leading to a reconsideration of the cold war consensus on both sides of the iron curtain. The political shift toward a policy of détente in international relations in the early 1970s had its roots in the cultural, social, and political grassroots realignments of the 1960s. They emerged out of the cultural revolt against the conformist social conventions in the early cold war era.

The Rise of Human Rights The internal and external challenges to the cold war order shared a common thread. They all demanded rights: the right to self-determination, the right

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to equal treatment before the law, the right to equal opportunity, the right to freely choose political representation. These rights had been enshrined in the United Nations charter and given concrete expression in the 1948 UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights. But only in the 1970s did human rights rhetoric enter mainstream international politics. Human rights advocates had petitioned since the 1940s for greater international protections for minorities, religious groups, individuals, political dissidents, women, and children. The UN declaration marked a milestone, but it lacked a mechanism for enforcement. Besides, European powers had gone to great length to exclude the populations in their colonies from the reach of these universal rights. They justified these exemptions with reference to cultural difference. Giving colonial subjects the same rights, the argument went, would endanger the public order in those territories, since they were not yet ready for selfrule. Anti-colonial activists were early and enthusiastic supporters of the UN human rights agenda, identifying it as a vital tool for their struggle for independence. Human rights were part of the agenda at the 1955 Bandung Conference of Non-Aligned Nations. At the closing session, several delegates reaffirmed their support for human rights, singling out the right to selfdetermination as the first and most important right. They placed collective above individual human rights, a policy that not all delegates supported. The critics pleaded for a more expansive commitment to individual human rights and implored the conference attendants to commit to upholding individual social and political rights as well. Those included the right to free speech, which was still suppressed in places like Egypt, China, and Indonesia, where there was widespread censorship of the press. Another concern was women’s rights, which had become more restricted in several countries under self-rule. Asians and Africans availed themselves of the universal language of human rights in their demands for independence in the 1950s and 1960s. They resoundingly rejected the relativist argument put forward by Europeans in defense of excluding non-western peoples from those rights. For example, when the African National Congress formulated its Freedom Charter in 1955, it included a passage that affirmed that individual rights, long the prerogative of the white minority population, extend to all citizens of South Africa, regardless of skin color. Cultural relativism had been part of the debate about the meaning and extent of human rights since the beginning. During the drafting of the UN declaration in the late 1940s, the mostly white Euro-American commission had entertained but ultimately dismissed arguments in favor of interpreting human rights differently in different parts of the world. It solicited the opinions of prominent non-western intellectuals, among them Mahatma Gandhi and the Chinese philosopher Chung-Shu Lo. Both issued reservations, arguing for a greater emphasis on duties over rights. In Confucian social and political thought, Chung-Shu Lo argued, rights were enshrined within the

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language of duties to one’s neighbor. To be clear, neither of the two rejected the general concept of human rights but challenged the way in which these rights were framed. Both affirmed the universality of rights and duties across cultural divides. In the 1960s, debates about universal human rights were largely carried out within the framework of the United Nations, which was undergoing a dramatic transformation thanks to the wave of independence movements in Asia and Africa. Between 1956 and 1968, membership in the UN swelled from 77 to 126 member nations. The newly independent countries, most of them located in the Third World, used the General Assembly as a forum to voice their particular concerns and to shape the agenda. The increased representation of the southern hemisphere did not necessarily translate into increased leverage (though they made up 60 percent of the world’s population). The UN charter ensured that the principle of national sovereignty of its member states was preserved, giving one voice to each nation represented in the General Assembly. The organization had no mandate to interfere in the domestic affairs of individual states, no matter how many resolutions passed in the General Assembly by majority vote. UN resolutions therefore took on a largely symbolic function, without serious political consequences in international relations. In fact, many wealthy countries cut their funding to the UN or bypassed its recommendations and resolutions in the 1960s. As large international organizations such as the UN faltered, grassroots human rights groups stepped in to exert pressure at the local and transnational level. One of those was Amnesty International, founded in 1961 by the British lawyer and labor activist Peter Benenson. Amnesty’s original aim was to organize massive letter-writing campaigns in support of political prisoners in repressive states. By focusing on individual human rights victims, Benenson shifted the debate from collective to individual rights, and empowered ordinary citizens to become directly involved. Despite its modest success rate, the organization grew rapidly into an international network of local chapters. As it expanded, it broadened its agenda to include advocacy for women, children, refugees, and victims of torture. Amnesty epitomized the expansion of human rights advocacy from a high-level intergovernmental diplomatic endeavor to a grassroots transnational movement. Despite its increasing popularity, Amnesty International generated controversy even among human rights supporters. One criticism was that in its effort to remain politically neutral, it ignored the uneven nature of human rights violations within the cold war political environment. Amnesty had admonished its members to “adopt” political prisoners in equal proportion from liberal democratic, communist, and non-aligned countries. Another point of contention was Amnesty’s obvious preference for cases with sensationalist potential. Critics charged that this method favored publicity over actual cases and possibly detracted from human rights violations that deserved equal or greater attention but lacked the potential for publicity.

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The surge in the global discourse on rights also galvanized the women’s and environmental movements. Even though it would take another quarter century before a leading political figure declared women’s rights as human rights, the women’s liberation movement of the late 1960s framed its demand for gender equality and control over their reproductive organs within the context of rights, the right to equal pay for equal work and the right to reproductive self-determination. Environmentalists also declared clean air, clean water, as well as healthy and uncontaminated food as basic human rights. The moment when grassroots efforts aligned with the diplomatic agenda of the cold war powers did not arrive until the 1970s. Even though this alignment was short-lived and limited in scope, it lasted long enough for the policy of détente to bear fruit and for a human rights clause to enter into the 1975 Helsinki Accords. The signing of the accords marked a turning point when human rights became a pragmatic political tool in international diplomacy. For much of the 1950s and 1960s, many nations had focused on human rights violations of their adversaries but failed to adhere to the same standards at home, much less formulate policies. Many found themselves on both sides of the human rights debate, accused of human rights violations in one context and defenders of human rights in another. The United States and the Soviet Union frequently accused each other of human rights violations; while third world countries saw the West as human rights violators for their colonial abuses, yet also stood accused of human rights violations themselves for curtailing free speech and denying voting rights to their own citizens after independence. This practice of trading accusations did not end in the 1970s but many nations were beginning to see the politics of human rights as a useful tool in the conduct of foreign policy. This transformation strengthened the leverage of non-governmental human rights activists to advance their cause in the international arena. The emphasis on international human rights in historical context offers an opportunity to rethink turning points and periodization in the mid-twentieth century. By giving labels to decades, eras, or ages, historians often seek to impose order on what seem chaotic and unpredictable turns of events. Periodization is therefore helpful in that it allows us to see broader patterns of historical change, but it must not prevent us from identifying developments that do not fit neatly into those larger categories. The British historian Eric Hobsbawm, for instance, called the period between 1914 and 1945 the “Age of Catastrophe.” There is no doubt that much of what occurred in world history in this time period was catastrophic. The combined death toll of two world wars exceeded 80 million, which made them the deadliest conflicts in human history. Racial bigotry, hatred, and greed shaped domestic and international politics. Those sentiments prevented the global implementation of the ideal of self-determination after the First World War. Instead, they facilitated the rise of extremist political ideologies on the left and right and contributed to the breakdown of the global capitalist system in the late 1920s.

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Hobsbawm called the post-war period the “Golden Age,” and here too we can find ample reason to agree with him: an international security system that finally seemed to succeed in maintaining peace among the great powers; rising living standards in many parts of the world; an overall decline in violence; decolonization; and an increase in the number of people living under democratic rule. Of course, at least until the 1970s the Cold War posed a major threat to international peace and security, but despite a massive nuclear arms build-up, the United States and the Soviet Union never made use of their nuclear arsenal or even directly engaged in armed conflict with each other. Looking at the twentieth century from this vantage point, the contrast between the two halves could not have been starker. This contrast between catastrophe and golden age does not work as neatly, however, if we apply a cultural approach to international history. It changes the narrative in two distinct ways. First, it reveals continuities and nuances often overlooked by an exclusive focus on diplomatic relations. A cultural approach does not ignore the importance of geopolitical transformations and the watershed moments they produced. Rather, by placing the political changes in cultural context, underlying currents of change and continuity become visible. Among those are the cultural foundations of the struggle for decolonization that began in the early twentieth century and played out in the global arena between the 1920s and 1960s. The struggle did not burst on the international scene suddenly in the 1950s. It had deep-seated cultural and political roots that shaped the way the colonial world intersected with the imperial metropole. A cultural approach also makes the racial aspects of international politics more visible. Economic and political histories of the two world wars and the Cold War too often diminish or erase altogether the role of race in international relations. Race played a key role in the western world’s relationship with Asian and African countries throughout the twentieth century, it formed a vital component of the conduct of war in both Europe and Asia, and it shaped the course of the Cold War. Secondly, a cultural approach allows historians to explore an alternative periodization. The traditional emphasis on war and conflict in international relations history encourages historians to identify the important breaks at the beginning or the end of wars. For instance, American history is often bisected into pre-civil war and post-civil war history. The twentieth century is usually divided, as Hobsbawm suggested, into pre-1945 and post-1945. Placing the war in the middle of this section, not at its margins, has allowed us to find the threads that connected the 1920s to the 1950s. This perspective pushes changing ideas about modernity to the fore and shows how ideas about progress not only drove historical transformations but also became utterly subverted by the turn of events in the 1930s and 1940s. While the year 1970 saw no dramatic watershed moment that clearly marked the end of an era and the beginning of another, there were several distinct signs that point to a seismic shift in the way countries, cultures, and people perceived and interacted with each other in the international arena.

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In the political arena, it provided the first serious respite in the Cold War, marking a symbolic end to the Second World War era. The policy of détente had produced tangible results by the early 1970s, and even though these changes proved to be temporary, undone by the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan and the renewal of the abrasive cold war rhetoric under the Reagan administration, there is ample evidence to suggest a genuine transformation in international relations at the beginning of the 1970s. In addition, because of a return to the rhetoric of Cold War in the early Reagan years, most historians did not recognize the decidedly different nature of the Cold War in the 1980s. More importantly, by 1970 the vast majority of countries in Asia and Africa had achieved independence, marking the end of the colonial era. The few hold-outs, primarily the Portuguese colonies in southern Africa, knew their days were numbered. The 1970s thus marked the first post-colonial decade, with all its promises and pitfalls. The 1970s also saw the breakthrough of human rights as a central political cause in international relations and an integral aspect of cultural and political globalization. After decades of lingering on the margins of international diplomatic relations, human rights became a politically acceptable, even opportune—if not opportunistic—foreign policy approach. To be sure, this did not translate into widespread adherence to the terms of the UN Universal Declaration of Human Rights. But it meant that at least rhetorically and diplomatically, most UN member nations placed it on their policy agenda. Countries as diverse as the Soviet Union, China, India, and the United States used human rights language to advance their own policy goals and to pressure their adversaries. These historical transformations belong neither exclusively in the realm of geopolitics nor exclusively in the realm of culture. By examining political and cultural transformations together and in relation to one another, historians can develop a deeper understanding of continuity and change. In 1970, the world was economically, culturally, and politically more connected than ever before. After 1970, globalization emerged as a major concept in international relations. Initially confined to the economic realm, it later expanded to encompass cultural and political relations. It would come to dominate the conduct of international relations for the remainder of the twentieth century for better and for worse.

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Transnational Connections “One small step for man, one giant leap for mankind.” These words, uttered by the American astronaut Neil Armstrong as he set foot on the surface of the moon on July 20, 1969, marked a moment of national triumph for the United States. Its space program had accomplished what John F. Kennedy had set as an ambitious goal eight years earlier, to land a man on the moon before the end of the decade. Space exploration had by then become a crucial arena of competition in the Cold War between the United States and the Soviet Union. Before Kennedy’s term in office, the Soviets had already snatched a series of firsts in space: first satellite in space in 1957 (Sputnik); first living creature in space in 1957 (Laika, the dog, who sadly did not survive the trip); the first human-made device on the moon in 1959 (Luna 2, a satellite). During Kennedy’s administration more firsts followed: the first man in space in 1961 (Yuri Gagarin), as well as the first woman in space in 1963 (Valentina Tereshkova). The moon landing at the end of the decade finally broke that pattern. The United States was pulling ahead of the Soviet Union in the space race. Despite these nationalist rivalries, the moon landing was also a profoundly transnational moment, the collective venturing of Earth’s inhabitants into outer space, setting foot on extraterrestrial ground. This rare moment of humankind’s earthly unity was captured disarmingly and simply in Armstrong’s memorable first words upon stepping foot on the surface of the moon, “one giant leap for mankind.” The moon landing inspired not only national pride but also universal awe. It might also have contributed to the 215

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inauguration of the first Earth Day, a year later. Observed on April 22, 1970, in the United States and Canada, Earth Day aimed to focus attention on the environmental degradation of the planet and to galvanize collective human energy in the service of protecting Earth’s natural resources. UN Secretary General U Thant, in a proclamation signed in 1971 on the first anniversary of Earth Day (choosing the day of the spring equinox), compared Earth to a spaceship, emphasizing the planet’s place within the larger universe. There was a palpable sense among internationalists that there was more that united human beings than divided them, that people and states should set aside ideological differences in order to create a sustainable, healthy, and peaceful environment in which all human beings could thrive. The world since 1970 has been a transnational one. Cross-border movements of people, capital, goods, and ideas accelerated and lowered barriers among nations. At the same time these global forces challenged the modern nation-state as the key framework for ensuring people’s security and livelihood. Non-state bodies, in particular business enterprises and nongovernmental organizations, increasingly gained leverage and power in the international arena during the 1970s and the 1980s. People moved across borders in greater numbers, both temporarily and permanently, legally and illegally. Economic globalization liberalized market forces across the world and challenged the idea of the welfare state, following its own momentum. In response to these developments, regional communities emerged, most notably the European Union, which aspired to become a model of economic liberalization and political cooperation for other parts of the world to follow. But such transnational trends also produced a backlash, a movement to curtail transnational activities and to restore the nation as the primary focus of citizens’ loyalty. Fear spread that alternative forms of identity, such as religion, ethnicity, race, or ideology, might undermine the social and political order within individual states. There were several major historical watershed moments in international relations in the period between 1970 and 2020, among them the end of the Cold War in 1989 and the terrorist attacks on US targets on September 11, 2001. These are usually discussed within a geopolitical framework, but they were also cultural watershed moments whose transformative import was not always immediately visible to observers. This part of the book will focus on the cultural import of these and other developments, and we shall follow these cultural transformations through the last decades of the twentieth and early years of the twenty-first century in hopes of making our contemporary world comprehensible. Several themes emerge when exploring this period from a cultural vantage point. One is the rise of human rights since the 1970s, a development closely connected to the political shift toward détente in international relations. A second theme is the increased concern about the environment, which evolved from grassroots movements in the 1970s to high-level environmental diplomacy by the early twenty-first century. A third phenomenon is the

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global spread of consumerism. Since 1970, the transnational circulation of consumer goods has grown exponentially, with the addition of more than three billion new customers in China, India, Brazil, Russia, and elsewhere. Global consumerism is closely tied to political and economic globalization, yet its cultural implications are often overlooked and understudied. A fourth area of focus relates to the increasing visibility of women as economic, social, and political actors in the world. Though there is still a lot of work to be done, women, particularly those in the Global South, have become more outspoken about the protection of their rights, their lives, and their livelihoods, leading to gradual—if uneven—improvements in their lives, and advances toward independence and empowerment. Another theme is communications technology, or more specifically the rise of the internet, which has resulted in global virtual networks. These networks have allowed individuals to transcend their own local environments and connect to larger de-territorialized communities or to create new communities, complicating—and possibly permanently undermining—the concept of national culture. Cyber-technology has also contributed to the transnationalization of entertainment, as global distribution networks and the instant transfer of massive data enable even remote parts of the world to access cultural products such as movies, music, books, and images within moments of their creation. It has been credited with fostering democracy in some parts of the world, most prominently during the Arab Spring in 2011. But it has also more recently been implicated in the spread of disinformation, conspiracy theories, anti-democratic vitriols, and violence, and more generally contributing to the proliferation of global movements whose goal is to undermine rather than foster democracy. Cyber-technology has contributed to the consolidation of both global Islamist and white supremacist terrorist networks. Together these transformations have resulted in greater cultural homogeneity across national borders and greater heterogeneity within different localities. They have resulted in greater understanding of cultures that are different from one’s own, but at the same time produced new points of friction and conflict among clashing cultural communities. In a more general sense, the period between 1970 and 2020 saw the rise of identity politics, where individuals defined themselves no longer exclusively or even primarily as part of a particular national entity, but by a multiplicity of other markers, among them gender, ethnicity, race, religion, and ideology. Tolerant national societies have been able to accommodate these diverse multiple identity groups, but others with a stricter code of conduct or a more narrowly defined concept of national identity have imposed restrictions and boundaries around acceptable expressions of identity. Debates and clashes about cultural norms—for instance, the controversy around the wearing of the veil in public in western societies—have become prominent features of local as well as transnational public life over the past two decades as populations in many countries have become more heterogeneous in the wake of mass migrations.

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Finally, we will discuss how these disparate themes—human rights, environment, consumerism, technology, and identity politics—shape our world today and ask the question whether the momentum toward economic, political, and cultural globalization will continue unabated in the future or will gradually wither under the weight of renewed nationalist and protectionist impulses across the world. This question is particularly prescient in light of the 2020 global pandemic and the attendant resurgence of protectionist and nationalist policies in many parts of the world.

13 Cultural Globalization, 1970–1990

When comparing the recent decades with the earlier periods, especially the years before 1920, the pre-eminence of certain cultural themes emerges boldly. One of them is the increasingly hybrid nature of cultural products, ranging from food to popular entertainment. Indeed, the world’s people themselves may have become more “hybrid” due to migrations and the multiracial existences they give rise to. Another theme is the greater awareness of the planet Earth as a common human habitat. Ecological consciousness and efforts to conserve energy and enhance sustainability have given rise to modes of living different from the traditional materialist consumer model. In the meantime, people are living longer, thanks to advances in medical research and healthier lifestyles, and senior citizens are creating a culture of their own that may become increasingly similar across boundaries. Generational differences, intergenerational collaboration, and transnational generational interactions may be emerging as important themes in contemporary history. None of these developments can be understood within conventional political frameworks of international relations. They point to a shared set of values and concerns that transcend national particularities and bind human beings together in a transnational web of interactions.

Global Human Rights in the 1970s and 1980s Human rights as a global political project to protect individuals only began in earnest during the 1970s. Even though the United Nations had enshrined human rights in a separate declaration in 1948, it had not provided the mechanisms for enforcement, nor did it challenge the sovereignty of nationstates with regard to human rights. A new generation of activists in the 1970s challenged the primacy of national sovereignty over human rights, arguing that individual rights should be protected by the state and from the state, meaning the rights of individuals should at all times trump the rights 219

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of states. This shift marked the rise of transnational human rights grassroots activism as well as the weakening of the state as a sovereign entity. The 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) had addressed both collective and individual rights. Though some historians have argued that self-determination and other collective rights of people should not be considered human rights, the UDHR included provisions for both: the protection of the rights of collective entities, such as ethnic minorities; the right of the people to choose their own government; as well as the rights of individuals vis-à-vis the state. Nevertheless, the UDHR, as comprehensive as it was in its formulation, remained aspirational for decades to come. It also contained loopholes and language that left room for significant disagreements in interpretation. Three major areas of contestation persisted into the twenty-first century. Each of these surfaced in different contexts, often in contradictory ways. The first was a contest over the hierarchy of human rights. Collective rights frequently conflicted with or contradicted individual rights. For instance, the right to self-determination of a collective entity could interfere with human rights demands of individual members within that group, giving rise to the question whether collective rights superseded all others. More often advocacy groups struggled over which rights they should fight for first, the right for social equality or economic rights to work and live in reasonable conditions. The issue of hierarchy first surfaced prominently in the debates at the 1955 Bandung Conference of Asian and African peoples and has continued to trouble states and human rights activists alike to this day. The delegates at Bandung ultimately decided to make self-determination the first right. This was, of course, of primary importance to countries that had not yet gained independence from the colonial powers. Yet positioning selfdetermination above other rights allowed indigenous leaders of newly independent nations to selectively apply the human rights agenda in their own country, enabling them to draw on the declaration when it suited them and ignore it when it did not. To illustrate, former colonies called for the right to self-determination when demanding independence from the metropole. Upon gaining independence, some then denied women the right to participate in political processes or the right to work outside the home. Newly independent nations also infringed on citizens’ right to free speech, as was the case in Egypt at the time of the conference. While collective and individual rights are not necessarily mutually exclusive, in practice conflicts occurred when several newly independent states violated individual human rights and resisted outside pressures to improve conditions by claiming the right to national sovereignty. A second problem occurred over the question of the universality of human rights. Should all cultures adhere to the same standards of human rights? What about the right of a woman to freely choose her husband? To live independently? To make a living wage? And what about the rights of children? Or the right to religious freedom? To sexual freedom? These areas

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of contestation lay embedded in the Universal Declaration, which was almost exclusively crafted by delegates from western industrialized nations. Different cultures, critics from the Global South argued, had different conceptualizations of what human rights meant. Consequently, they could not be universal but had to be defined within the context of regionally specific cultures. This problem became acute in the early 1970s as the second-wave women’s rights movement expanded from Europe and the United States to the Global South. In the western world, women’s concerns in the early 1970s centered around gaining equal rights and equal pay in the workplace, and gaining sexual rights, including the right to determine whether and when to have a child. But even among western feminists there were significant distinctions. Different women’s rights groups catered to particular subgroups of women, divided by age, class, race, and political affinity. African American women’s organizations, radical left-wing groups, working-class women’s associations, Asian American women’s groups, and female student organizations did not speak with a single voice. Some women gained national and international prominence, among them Betty Friedan in the United States, whose book The Feminine Mystique created crucial momentum for women’s rights yet largely ignored the plight of workingclass or African American women, whose experience of gender discrimination was filtered through their experience of racial and class discrimination. The emergence of the gay rights movement in the western industrialized world generated similar divisions, though not just between the western and non-western world, but within different population groups in the western world as well. The Stonewall riots in New York in 1969 marked the symbolic starting point for the lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender (LGBT) rights movement in the United States, but pressure had already been mounting in several countries to decriminalize homosexuality. The riots occurred after a police raid cleared out a bar in Greenwich Village that was known as a gathering spot for the city’s gay population. Within a year gay pride marches in commemoration of Stonewall occurred in several American and European cities, including London, Paris, and West Berlin. The first international gay rights congress convened in 1974 in Edinburgh, Scotland. Four years later, gay right activists founded the International Gay Association, the first international non-governmental organization devoted to defending the rights of the LGBT community. Compared to the women’s rights movement, however, LGBT transnational advocacy remained limited until the AIDS crisis of the 1980s created a global wave of activism.58 In the non-western world, women’s rights activism was intimately connected to the struggle for decolonization and state-building. Women in these areas often had to contend with problems of economic and social rights that transcended issues of gender differences, prompting them to set different priorities within their particular environments from their counterparts in wealthy nations. Indian women’s organizations, for example,

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emerged in the 1920s in tandem with the movement to gain independence from Britain. Even in the 1970s they were less concerned about issues of personal or sexual liberation and often sought to work in concert with other organizations toward the goal of national liberation. This was also the case elsewhere in Asia and Africa, where the feminist cause was intimately connected to the project of decolonization, national self-determination, better wages, better social services, and greater participation in the political process. That did not mean that issues of sexual rights were ignored. One of Egypt’s leading feminists, the physician Nawal El Saadawi, caused a national uproar with her publication of Women and Sex in 1972, in which she brought to public attention the ritual of female genital mutilation (FGM) practiced in some Arab Muslim communities. Western women later took up the cause as a human rights issue, creating new momentum but also new areas of conflict with non-western feminists, many of whom saw the former’s advocacy on behalf of non-western girls and women as a modern version of the age-old system of colonial domination. Despite these differences, few disagreed that FGM constituted a major violation of women’s human rights. The third problem was the issue of how to enforce human rights across the world. It was appropriate and commendable for the UN to pass the UDHR, but without establishing institutions and mechanisms to enforce

FIGURE 9 A public health campaign against female genital mutilation (FGM) in Uganda, September 2004. This road sign was located between Kapchorwa and Kapkwata in eastern Uganda. © Amnon Shavit, reproduced with the permission of the author.

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these rights in the world, the declaration was all but meaningless. Most member states jealously guarded their sovereignty, and thus efforts to establish an international enforcement system proceeded haphazardly. A few major institutions were established to guarantee enforcement, most of them after 1970. The only court established before that date was the European Court of Human Rights, set up by the Council of Europe through the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms (ECHR). Enacted in 1953, it guaranteed adherence of all member states to a human rights code and created an international court, the European Court of Human Rights, to adjudicate violations of human rights within Europe. Jealously guarding their national sovereignties, the fourteen signatories of the convention made adherence voluntary. Acceptance of individual petitions was voluntary as well, leaving much of the power of jurisdiction in the hands of participating states. A breakthrough in the adjudication of human rights in Eastern Europe came with the Helsinki Accords of 1975, as indicated earlier. The accords were not primarily about human rights, but they contained a few clauses that proved to be a turning point in the European human rights movement and possibly contributed to the end of the Cold War. The accords came about at the behest of Eastern European countries, who had in the early 1970s proposed a conference on security and cooperation among all European nations together with the US and Canada. The resulting agreement guaranteed western acceptance of the existing post-war borders in return for the inclusion of specific human rights clauses. These clauses committed the signatory nations to respect the human rights and freedoms of all citizens within their own borders, as laid out in the charter of the United Nations and the UDHR of 1948. The accords led to the creation of the Moscow Helsinki group, a non-governmental organization that monitored compliance in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union, and inspired the formation of Charter 77, a dissident group in Czechoslovakia. As historian Sarah Snyder has argued, after the signing of the accords, western human rights groups stepped up their efforts and began to collaborate with like-minded—often underground—organizations in the socialist countries. These efforts led to greater transnational visibility of the already well-established dissident networks in Eastern Europe. Starting in the 1970s, activists in those countries made recognizable advances toward civil and human rights and achieved other democratic reforms.59 In Czechoslovakia, Hungary, East Germany, Poland, and other countries, citizens organized civic forums that pushed for political reforms. By the mid-1980s, they benefited from the reformist turn of the Soviet leadership under Mikhail Gorbachev, who refused to intervene militarily to quell opposition movements. The Soviet Union itself was by then promoting a spirit of “openness” within its own borders. As a result, at the end of the decade, Eastern Europe’s socialist regimes collapsed one after another and the borders between Eastern and Western Europe opened up. Particularly

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FIGURE 10 Germans celebrating the fall of the Berlin Wall, November 12, 1989. © Photo by Pool CHUTE DU MUR BERLIN/Gamma-Rapho via Getty Images.

dramatic was the fall of the Berlin Wall in November 1989, which provided a symbolic climax to the drama of democratization in Eastern Europe. The human rights clauses within the Helsinki Accords helped create the conditions for the fall of the communist regimes in 1989. The fall of the Berlin Wall and the other events of 1989 and 1990 signaled the dramatic ending of the Cold War. Most geopolitical accounts of this watershed moment see in it the beginning of a new era of democratization. But when exploring the events as well as the period leading up to them, through the lens of human rights history, one can see that it was the process of democratization and the rise of human rights that ushered in the end of the Cold War, and not the other way around. More importantly, it would be too simplistic to assert that Eastern European democratization represented a victory for the United States in the geopolitical contest between East and West, as many historians have done. Diverse groups of people and politicians, many of them residing within the communist bloc, had been promoting human rights and democratization for a long time. They had constructed non-state networks of activism, and the significance of these collective actions went far beyond the ups and downs of international diplomacy. Rather, the story belongs to the realm of transnational history, and in that sense the events in the 1980s demonstrated that conventional international relations shared agency with transnational relations. Perhaps for the first time in history, human rights asserted a primary role in international relations.

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International history as human rights history reveals other watershed moments, such as the establishment of regional human rights courts throughout Europe, Africa, and the Americas. Among them was the establishment of the Inter-American Court of Human Rights in 1979. The court, located in Costa Rica, modeled itself after the European Court, established in 1959, and has operated under the auspices of the Organization of American States (OAS). Yet it differs in one important respect from the European version: no individual citizens can bring cases before the court, only state agencies, or the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR), the OAS agency that examines allegations of human rights violations. Neither the United States nor Canada, both OAS members, joined the convention establishing the court. Cuba, a former member of the OAS, also failed to join the court system. Other states dropped out and joined at various moments in the court’s history. But in many ways, the establishment of the court itself marked a significant step toward protecting and enforcing human rights in the region.

The Rise of Environmentalism As the human rights revolution unfolded in the 1970s, so did the global environmental movement. Disquiet about pollution and waste was on the rise in the 1970s, yet little was done in the international arena to address those concerns. The most graphic indicator of a planetary problem lies in the warming of the Earth’s temperature due to the “greenhouse effect,” the direct result of a build-up of carbon dioxide and other heat-trapping gases caused by human activities such as the burning of fossil fuels. In the first seven decades of the twentieth century, global temperature anomalies increased an average of 0.06°C per decade. But in the next decade, it rose by an alarming 0.18°C.60 In 1980, the world emitted 19.37 billion metric tons of carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels such as coal, oil, and natural gas. Ten years later the figure had risen to 22.7 billion, and in 2019 it stood at 36.4 billion.61 In 1980, the United States and the Soviet Union were the largest emitters of carbon dioxide, together accounting for 35 percent of the world’s total; in 1990, they accounted for 34 percent. China contributed an additional 8 percent in 1980 and 11 percent in 1990, meaning that these three countries were the main contributors to what came to be known as “global warming.”62 Since then, China’s output has grown dramatically, making it the largest polluter in the world in 2014, responsible for over 27 percent of the total carbon dioxide output; it was followed by the United States (14 percent), the European Union (9 percent), and India (7 percent).63 While greenhouse gas emissions have become the greatest concern of environmentalists in the twenty-first century, in 1970 they were but a small blip on their radar. At that time, environmental activism had focused primarily on chemical, air, water, and particularly nuclear pollution. The

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modern environmental movement had been shaped by the anti-nuclear movements of the 1950s, when opposition to nuclear testing spread across Europe, North America, and East Asia. With the passing of the Nuclear Test Ban treaty in 1963, environmental groups turned their attention to broader sources of environmental pollution, including the contamination of soil through the widespread use of pesticides in agriculture, as depicted in Rachel Carson’s influential book Silent Spring, and industrial pollution. By 1970, the movement was gaining momentum and assumed global importance. Its followers were as diverse as the causes they championed. Some campaigns were local, such as protests against industrial waste sites near residential neighborhoods, while others were global, such as the ongoing campaign against nuclear testing in the Pacific. Perhaps the biggest indicator of the global ambitions of the movement was the expansion of Earth Day from its modest origins in several cities in the United States in 1970 to a global annual event. Founded by Wisconsin Senator Gaylord Nelson in response to a massive oil spill off the California coast in early 1969, and in partnership with a young student activist, Dennis Hayes, who connected the effort to campus teach-ins across the nation, the first Earth Day featured mass demonstrations and public events that drew attention to environmental degradation and called for governmental protections. The Nixon administration appeared receptive to the cause and responded with the creation of the Environmental Protection Agency (EPA) later that year. Congress also took action by passing a series of environmental laws, including the Clean Air Act in 1970 and the Clean Water Act two years later. While Earth Day did not immediately catch on as a global event, environmental activism grew in Asia and Europe as well. The Japanese had already established a national network of local organizations in the battle against nuclear weapons and nuclear testing, rooted in their experience with the atomic bomb and the 1954 Lucky Dragon incident. By the 1970s, citizen groups were rallying around demands for a reduction in chemical, air, and water pollution, concerned about health risks, including birth defects. Similar movements got underway across Europe. In West Germany, environmental activists merged with naturalists, peace and human rights activists to form one of the strongest environmental movements in the world. Environmental activists there eventually turned to parliamentary politics and founded Europe’s first environmental political party, the Greens. While some activists moved toward mainstream institutionalized political action, others created non-governmental organizations that sought political leverage through grassroots movements. One group that made news headlines early and often, because its spectacular acts garnered international attention, was Greenpeace, which Canadian and American activists founded in the early 1970s. Its members quickly achieved international notoriety through such dangerous stunts as sailing a small boat into the nuclear testing area off the coast of Alaska in the fall of 1971. Even though the boat, called Greenpeace, never reached its destination—the US Navy intercepted it

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before it could reach Amchitka Island—and therefore did not prevent the explosion, the incident attracted international media attention, fueled by later creative embellishments of those who took part in the action. One of the crew members, Bob Hunter, later acknowledged in The Greenpeace to Amchitka, the chaotic nature of the journey and the assumption at the time that the stunt had been a complete failure.64 The media attention convinced Greenpeace members that spectacular actions combined with high publicity could achieve favorable outcomes. For even if the actual stunt failed, they could claim partial success: the nuclear explosion they failed to stop on Amchitka Island turned out to be the last one ever conducted there. The Nixon administration shut down the test site five months after the incident. From these early disorganized beginnings emerged a highly successful, well-funded, global organization, headquartered in the Netherlands, with twenty-six regional offices and representatives in fifty-five countries. The combination of governmental and non-governmental activism signaled a transformation in the public consciousness about the relationship between humans and their environment. While measures to curb environmental damage were often local or national, the shift in attitudes was global. Among the most prominent indicators of the transnational nature of this change was the 1972 publication of a report commissioned by the Club of Rome, The Limits to Growth.65 The club itself represented a bellwether of the growing interdependence among the world’s political, intellectual, and industrial elites. Its founders, the Italian industrialist Aurelio Peccei and the Scottish scientist Alexander King, had become concerned about the myriad problems facing humans and their planet. In 1968, they gathered a small group of influential leaders in Rome and commissioned a study about how much growth the planet could sustain in five key areas: population, industrialization, agricultural production, consumption of nonrenewable resources, and pollution. Translated into thirty languages, the published report sold more than 12 million copies worldwide. It found that even under the most optimistic of predictions calculated by a computer model called World3, the planet would reach the limits of growth sometime during the twenty-first century, leading to catastrophic consequences for the human population. Limits to Growth became part of a larger wave of publications, conferences, and public debates about the future relationship between humans and nature and the question of long-term sustainability. They included A Blueprint for Survival, published by the British magazine The Ecologist, also in 1972, and the 1980 publication of Global 2000, commissioned by the Carter administration in the US. The United Nations also addressed environmental concerns for the first time in the 1970s with its conference on the human environment held in Stockholm in June 1972. Delegates came from 122 countries with the notable exception of the Soviet Union and other Warsaw Pact countries, who boycotted the conference in

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protest against the non-recognition of East Germany as an independent delegation. The meeting concluded with the Stockholm Declaration, which established twenty-six principles ranging from human rights to wildlife protection, pollution, and the relationship between development and the environment. It also established the United Nations Environmental Program (UNEP). Despite initial momentum, most countries either ignored or were slow to implement the principles of the Stockholm conference, but it set a precedent for follow-up conferences in Rio de Janeiro (1992), Kyoto (1997), Johannesburg (2002), and Paris (2016). After Stockholm, countries increasingly acknowledged that environmental degradation was a problem exceeding the confines of a single nation and signaled a willingness for greater global cooperation. More importantly, Stockholm, for the first time, incorporated the concerns of the Global South in the debate about environmental protection, making clear the interdependence between global poverty, development, and environmental sustainability. In the aftermath of the Stockholm meeting some governments began to tackle environmental problems through regulatory legislation. It also inspired the formation of new grassroots organizations protesting environmental degradation in their own local communities. Such organizations proliferated globally in the 1970s, including in the Global South, where development needs brushed up hard against attempts at environmental regulation. Damage from mining, deforestation, drought, and soil erosion plagued many Asian and African countries, compounding food insecurity and exacerbating environmental pollution. War and violence created new shortages and led to widespread starvation, most dramatically in Biafra, which fought Nigeria for independence in a bloody civil war between 1967 and 1970. The war resulted in the mass starvation of close to two million Biafrans, most of them young children before Nigeria eventually crushed the Biafran independence movement. The Biafran and other famines that have continuously erupted in recent decades across Asia and Africa have more often been the result of political mismanagement and war than environmental degradation, even though environmental policies, such as the cultivation of land for commercial agriculture rather than local sustainability, have severely aggravated the problem. Some local organizations have tried to find practical solutions to ecological imbalances. One of them was the Greenbelt movement in Kenya, founded by the environmental and political activist Wangari Maathai in 1977. She became a particularly vocal advocate for the linkage between environmental sustainability and development. As she recounted in her 2006 memoir, Maathai first became aware of the problem of deforestation and soil erosion in the early 1970s. She began a local movement to plant trees in order to stop and ultimately reverse environmental degradation in rural Kenya. From those local beginnings the tree project grew into a transnational movement that expanded from tree-planting into areas of gender equity, human rights, and sustainable development in the post-

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colonial world.66 In 2004, Maathai became the first African woman to receive the Nobel Peace Prize for her work in support of environmental sustainability, democracy, and women’s rights. Halfway across the world, the Amazon river basin region faced similar problems of deforestation, but on a much larger scale and with little political will to stem the destruction. Between 1970 and 2010, close to 15 percent of the forest was cut down to make way for farmland and cattle ranching; in Brazil, the rate is close to 20 percent.67 The release into the atmosphere of carbon stored in the Amazon forest region as a result of the massive deforestation has measurably worsened global warming over the past decades. If the trend continues, it will threaten not only the viability of the remaining forest in the Amazon region and elsewhere but also have serious consequences for the entire planet. Already in 2020 climate change is causing drought in some areas and floods in others and changing overall weather patterns across the globe. While industrialized countries increased pressure on emerging ones when it came to pollution and ecological preservation, they themselves had historically been and continued to be the largest contributors to global warming. Even though many of them had begun in the 1970s to reduce their dependency on fossil fuels and invest in alternative energies, including wind, solar, and hydropower, progress remained slow. Their search for alternative energy sources gained urgency in the aftermath of the 1973 oil embargo imposed on European countries, the United States, Canada, Japan, South Africa, and Rhodesia (today’s Zimbabwe) by the Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries (OPEC). The embargo, instituted in retaliation for western support of the Yom Kippur War, lasted for a year, tripled the price of oil, and rushed industrialized countries into searching for alternative sources of energy. Political pressure also came from newly emerging green parties, particularly in Europe. Their increasing success at the ballot box led to a gradual mainstreaming of environmental policies, including regulations imposed on auto manufacturers to reduce carbon emissions of cars, subsidizing renewable energy entrepreneurship, and implementing environmental regulations in manufacturing and construction. One source of energy that received a temporary boost from the oil crisis of the 1970s was nuclear power. Even though environmental activists had long fought the construction of nuclear power plants, these plants had one advantage: they did not pollute the atmosphere—at least as long as they worked properly. The only problem was the massive build-up of nuclear waste that had to be stored somewhere. The occurrence of a series of accidents seriously undermined public trust in nuclear energy, however, among them the Three Mile Island accident in 1979, Chernobyl in 1986, and Fukushima in 2011. The Three Mile Island nuclear power plant near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania in the United States suffered a partial meltdown of one of its reactors, leading to radioactive leakage into the surrounding area. Chernobyl in the

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Soviet republic of Ukraine near the border with Belarus, seven years later, was far worse, with a massive explosion in one of its reactors releasing a gigantic radioactive cloud into the atmosphere. The spike in radioactive material could be measured as far away as Western Europe. The area around the power plant became uninhabitable, with complete villages having to be evacuated permanently. The total death toll from short-term and long-term radiation is estimated to be in the range of several thousand. An accident of similar magnitude occurred in Japan in March 2011 when an earthquake and subsequent tsunami caused nuclear meltdowns in three reactors. Because the meltdown released radioactive contaminants into the surrounding environment, around 150,000 residents were evacuated and the area declared uninhabitable until the clean-up is completed—experts estimate that this will take between thirty and forty years. Many more accidents occurred in power plants across the world but remained hidden from public view. But every one that became known to the public chipped away at the people’s faith in nuclear energy. Of the countries that decided to halt the construction of new power plants after Fukushima, Germany went furthest when it decided in 2011 to phase out all nuclear power plants by the end of 2022. According to the 2019 International Atomic Energy Agency annual report, there remained 443 operational power plants across the world, only seven fewer than the previous year. The report also listed fifty-four power plants under construction, giving an indication that some countries might still regard nuclear energy as a viable and affordable option.68 Many of those will never become operational, however, since the cost of building and maintaining a nuclear power plant has become prohibitive, making other energy sources more attractive for providers. The Chernobyl disaster demonstrated that environmental concerns transcended the cold war divide and environmental damage was being shared transnationally. Chernobyl was a transnational tragedy with nuclear gases spreading far beyond Soviet borders. As recently as 2011, scientists reported that pastures in Wales used for the grazing of sheep still recorded low levels of radioactivity. This was a civilian not a military disaster, but its impact was all the greater as it involved health risks through radiation— estimated to have been of far greater and longer-lasting impact than that produced by the dropping of nuclear bombs. Even before these accidents occurred, people’s fear of nuclear disaster was a frequent subject of public debate in the United States and Europe and found expression in popular culture during the 1970s and 1980s. The 1979 movie “The China Syndrome” depicts the occurrence and subsequent coverup of a nuclear accident at a powerplant in California. The movie was released in the US just days before the Three Mile Island accident, a stark reminder of the real possibility of the kinds of disasters depicted onscreen. The 1983 American television drama The Day After had an even greater impact on the national and international psyche, with its presentation of a

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fictional nuclear war and its effect on the small college town of Lawrence, Kansas. It was one of the most watched television movies of all time and was soon released internationally. Many viewers believed they were watching an actual nuclear catastrophe in real time. The movie’s anti-nuclear and antiwar message resonated with ordinary people and many policy-makers alike. It might even have swayed President Ronald Reagan toward becoming more inclined toward nuclear arms reductions negotiations with the Soviet Union in the mid-1980s. By that time, both countries were confronted with the long-term environmental consequences of their nuclear and environmental policies, as well as a resurgent popular anti-nuclear movement.

Global Consumption The emergence of a transnational environmental consciousness in the final three decades of the twentieth century occurred within the context of a growing awareness of rapid economic globalization. Beginning in the 1970s, which witnessed a reduction in cold war tensions, scholars, pundits, and the informed public increasingly applied the term “globalization” to the accelerated economic interconnectedness across national boundaries, specifically the spectacular growth in the number and scope of activities of multinational enterprises. Of course, the expansion of international economic networks dates back to at least the early twentieth century, but the pace quickened markedly in the last quarter of the century. As had been the case in the earlier period, nevertheless, the economic layer was just one of several that constituted the emergence of a transnational world. In the economic sphere, perhaps the most significant development of the late twentieth century was the People’s Republic of China’s modernization and opening to international trade and investment under the leadership of Deng Xiaoping. Beginning in 1979, foreign capital and technology began flooding into the country, facilitating the establishment of manufacturing hubs and bolstered by cheap domestic labor. By the end of the century, China had emerged as one of the fastest growing economies, its rate of growth averaging 9.8 percent per year during the twenty-year period, 1980– 2000. Its products, initially consisting mostly of agricultural and mineral goods but increasingly including manufactured items, began to flood the global market. From virtually nil in 1980, Chinese export trade was already accounting for 1.2 percent of the world’s total in 1990 and 3.3 percent ten years later. In 2017, it surpassed the United States as the world’s top exporter, reaching 10.78 percent by 2018.69 China’s exports as a share of the country’s GDP rose from 5.9 percent in 1980 to an all-time high of 36 percent in 2006 before declining to 18.5 percent in 2019.70 Its foreign currency reserve, a test of how well a country is doing in the international balance of payments, already recorded close to $30 billion in 1990 and rose to $3.9 trillion in 2014, the highest of any country. Estimating the reserve as being too high,

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China reduced it to around $3.2 trillion in 2020, still by far the highest in the world and almost $2 trillion more than its runner-up, Japan.71 In virtually all countries, the label “Made in China” appeared on a vast number of consumer products, including television sets, radios, air conditioners, and computer parts. But “Made in China” did not necessarily mean that an item had been manufactured entirely by the Chinese. Products were often designed and manufactured in multiple countries, including China, signaling its full integration into the global economy. China itself, in turn, increasingly became a market for foreign consumer products as living standards gradually rose and the country developed a consumer-oriented middle class. The rural poverty rate in China declined from 280 million in 1990 to 124 million in 1997 according to World Bank estimates.72 Despite China’s opening up to a global capitalist market, state planning rather than market forces dictated the overall direction, size, and specific contents of the Chinese economy. The communist-controlled Beijing regime set annual goals for economic growth, made plans for industrial and agricultural production, and provided subsidies to export-oriented businesses. Even the implementation of a strict population policy in 1979, referred to as the “one child per family” rule, was part of the state’s attempt to increase the nation’s productivity. By limiting the overall population, the leaders hoped to better educate and train those who were born so that they would become productive members of the country and succeed in the international arena. This was an integral part of China’s strategy of modernization, launched in the early 1980s. Even so, the state alone could not have carried out the task of transforming the country without the cooperation of its people, the more so because modernization entailed incorporating the nation into the global system, which in turn meant providing a profit motive to ambitious and hard-working individuals. An increasing number of Chinese entered the global market, and a few became extremely wealthy. The increasing wealth gap created social discontent and political tensions, which over time became harder to suppress despite the efforts by the governing elite to maintain domestic order. Countries like India and Brazil were not far behind, although their rates of economic growth remained lower. And in the wake of the ending of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet Union in the late 1980s and the early 1990s, Eastern European countries entered the global arena as well, taking advantage of new opportunities afforded by economic liberalization. Some of the formerly socialist states did better than others, however. Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic made a fairly successful transition to a market economy, whereas Russia’s GDP fell by 50 percent between 1990 and 2000, while Ukraine’s fell by more than 60 percent.73 The fact remains that there were now far more numerous players in the drama of globalization. As a result, the United States, Japan, and the Western European countries that had dominated the world economy now had to share the global market stage with newly competitive globalizing states.

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Such a nation-by-nation description of accelerating globalization tells only part of the story, because the principal units playing a role in the world economy were no longer just nations. A major effect of economic globalization at the end of the twentieth century was the relative decline in the role of states in determining economic activities, supplemented, if not supplanted, by the agency of non-state actors and individuals. This phenomenon had already become noticeable in the 1970s but accelerated during the 1980s. Instead of focusing exclusively on the rise of China and the entrance of Eastern European states into the global economic arena, therefore, one must pay equal attention to the increasingly open flow of goods, capital, and labor across national boundaries. While the Chinese state economy created conditions that facilitated economic growth, individual Chinese entrepreneurs as well as profit-oriented firms made Chinese goods competitive on the global market. These were people and organizations whose roles were not bound by territorial borders and who acted as individuals rather than state representatives. They moved all over the world in search of business opportunities. Capital, too, was becoming increasingly unmoored from the state, released from various restrictions that had regulated its movement. Perhaps the decisive moment in the transnationalization of capital came at the end of 1985, when representatives of central banks and finance ministers from the United States, Britain, Germany, France, and Japan met in New York to liberalize currency transactions across national borders. The authorities in these countries had since 1971 sought to coordinate their monetary policies to sustain the value of the dollar at a fixed level. Now they would minimize, if not eliminate altogether, such intervention. The Plaza Accord, as it came to be known, withheld support for the dollar as the officially sanctioned currency of choice in international transactions and eliminated state-controlled rates of exchange, at least in theory. With China a particularly notable example, the central banks in various countries retained substantial control over rates of exchange through buying or selling their respective currencies. Still, currency traders, speculators, and even ordinary citizens all over the world were now much less constrained in purchasing, accumulating, or selling chunks of whatever national monetary units they chose. For the first time in centuries, currencies began to float globally, complicating business transactions. The establishment of the European Union in January 1991 and the decision by most countries of the regional community—Britain was a notable exception—to adopt a common monetary unit, the Euro, in 1999 was further evidence of the transnationalization of the global economy. Travel between most countries in Western and Central Europe became much easier as border controls disappeared and currency exchanges were no longer necessary. At the same time imports to and exports from the regional community waxed and waned as the rates of exchange between the euro and the dollar, as well as between the euro and the pound sterling and other currencies, kept changing.

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Much of the transformation of the global economy in the latter part of the twentieth century was driven by the rapid expansion of consumer markets. While in the early post-war period consumption was primarily identified with the United States, by the 1970s it was becoming global. American brands such as Coca-Cola, Levi’s, and McDonald’s fast food reached more parts of the world than ever before, but their consumption was not as strongly identified with Americanization as had been the case in the early post-war period. Rather, these products became indigenized and hybridized, transforming local cultures and patterns of consumption, but not necessarily replicating the American model. Sociologists who studied the cultural environment of McDonald restaurants in Asia, for instance, found that they played culturally distinct roles within each national context. In addition, America’s dominance in the production of consumer goods was increasingly challenged by Western Europeans and Asians, leading to a diffusion of the global consumer landscape. The global exchange of goods made foreign places culturally legible to people everywhere. Individuals all around the world came to know each other through the consumption of products, if not directly. Their knowledge may have been superficial, but compared to their forebears, a far greater number of men and women—and even children—in virtually all parts of the world became aware of each other’s existence and shared goods, information, and experiences. This included the spread of various kinds of culinary traditions throughout the world. During the last decades of the twentieth century, ethnic restaurants expanded across national boundaries to such an extent that in most large cities one had a broad range of food choices: French, Italian, Greek, Ethiopian, Turkish, Indian, Thai, Vietnamese, Cambodian, Indonesian, Chinese, Korean, Japanese, and many others. Many of these restaurants were run by immigrants who initially catered to their own ethnic group, but eventually expanded to serve a diverse multiethnic urban population. Ethnic diversity and culinary variety reinforced each other. At the same time, dining out among city dwellers became more common everywhere in the second half of the twentieth century. Restaurant and catering businesses grew in number in many parts of the world, no doubt also reflecting the fact that more and more women were now working outside the home. Ethnic restaurants also diversified the fast-food industry, creating Mexican and Asian chain restaurants and offering foods like sushi in supermarkets and shopping center food courts. The increased culinary variety was part of a larger development that made most major cities of the world look more and more alike. Despite being on different continents, Shanghai and New York imparted some similar impressions on visitors, and all cities faced similar problems of accommodating growing populations, including housing shortages and traffic congestion. In 1950, about half the population in the industrialized world already lived in cities, but by 2000 it had risen to 70 percent. The

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urban population of the world has grown rapidly from 746 million in 1950 to 3.9 billion in 2014.74 According to UN World Urbanization Prospects, by 2007 more people were living in cities than in rural areas.75 The figure is somewhat imprecise because individual nations applied their own definitions of what counted as “urban.” In the last quarter of the twentieth century, urban growth was particularly dramatic in Asia, Africa, and Latin America. Along with the problems that had traditionally accompanied rapid urban growth in Western Europe and North America—public education, garbage collection, sanitation, crime—came modern amenities, including hubs of global consumption, such as shopping malls. Once the hallmark of America’s consumer culture, they were sprouting up on the outskirts of major metropolitan areas in Asia, Latin America, and Africa, and they soon surpassed the size of the biggest malls in the industrialized world, with so-called megamalls in China taking the lead. These malls featured international brand name stores as well as local merchandise. Malls also increasingly included public entertainment venues such as movie theaters, game arcades, skating rinks, and other indoor play areas, indicating that a significant portion of global consumption had expanded into the realm of entertainment. Urban populations all over the world were becoming global consumers. Critics of the global spread of consumer culture lamented the decline in cultural diversity. They pointed to the loss of local authenticity, as megabrands displaced locally made goods that carried the cultural imprint of a region. They lamented the de-personalization of material goods, the loss of individualism, and the disappearance of local artisanal production. Those were valid concerns, because the often time-consuming and small-scale production systems of local artisans could not compete with the enormous financial power of global corporations. Yet one also has to take into consideration the cultural aspects of these transformations. Local businesses were often swallowed up by larger multinational corporations, but a few succeeded in having their products rebranded and sold beyond the local markets, thus gaining wider distribution. Thus, heterogenization of cultural products occurred alongside the homogenization of consumption. While one could find the same brands, shops, and foods in cities all over the world, most urban centers also became much more diverse than they had been decades earlier. Despite the global proliferation of goods which drew ever larger numbers of people closer together and made their life experiences much more similar, many of the world’s poor remained outside of this globalized orbit. Rural populations did not have equal access to the breadth of consumer items as urban populations, and poor people everywhere could not afford the luxury goods they might see advertised on television screens and billboards. While inequality was much more acute in the Global South, it existed in he wealthiest countries as well, incrementally intensifying and sowing

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discontent since the 1970s. In most urban areas, abject poverty and conspicuous wealth resided side by side, often separated only by a few city blocks. By the twenty-first century, it was increasingly race and class rather than nationality or geography that defined the nature of people’s consumption.

14 The Growth of Non-State Actors

While nation-states and their supra-national organizations and alliances still firmly controlled the international system of the late twentieth century, non-governmental organizations and power-brokers proliferated as never before. These non-state actors—individuals, corporations, international organizations—operated transnationally independent of, and at times in opposition to, state agencies. As they grew more numerous, they also gained power, wielding increasing influence on the international stage and challenging established norms and practices of international relations. Nongovernmental organizations (NGOs) were independent, voluntary associations of people around a shared interest. Most NGOs operated domestically within the confines of a nation-state. But increasingly international NGOs—or INGOs—emerged, sometimes as a result of the expansion of NGOs beyond their national borders, at other times around an issue that was inherently international in scope. An example of the latter would be the founding of Greenpeace, discussed earlier, which from its inception was an international organization created out of a shared transnational concern about nuclear testing. According to the Union of International Associations (UIA), itself an international non-governmental organization devoted to the documentation of the nature and evolution of international organizations, the number of INGOs grew exponentially from 2,795 in 1972 to over 12,000 in 1984. In 2020, the UIA listed 41,000 international organizations. Multinational corporations, international finance conglomerates, and new technologies also challenged the primacy of the state in international relations. Together, these entities reshaped global civil society in ways unimaginable in the age of nation-states.

Supra-national and Non-national Institutions As already indicated earlier, the 1970s represented a turning point in the history of international relations. The decade saw a decline in the role of the nation-state in determining the lives of individuals, and in its stead an increase in power of supra-national and non-national actors. Supra-national 237

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actors were multinational communities that gave up part of their national sovereignty in order to strengthen their power within a larger entity. Nonnational actors were groups and communities of people whose identities were not limited to, or determined by, their nationality. For over a century, the nation had provided the key framework in which individuals defined their identities. International history had essentially been a chronicle of how nations dealt with one another as sovereign entities, some becoming “great powers” and seeking to enhance their influence and prestige, while others remained static or lost their relative status in world affairs. The rise and fall of the great powers appeared to determine the flow of world history. One way to think of supra-national communities is as an attempt to reconcile the transnational and national layers of historical agency. The most obvious example of such a community is the United Nations, a loose confederation of the world’s nation-states that left the sovereignty of each member fully intact. Another example is the European Community in its early phase of existence. Beginning in the 1970s, European nations moved toward something more ambitious, the construction of a supra-national community, whose unity and power to act in the name of its constituent nations far exceeded that of the United Nations. Nationalism and transnationalism—local and global forces—could perhaps be mediated through regional communities. Europe’s path toward the European Union, inaugurated in 1994, was a gradual, at times cumbersome process from economic via cultural to political union, in which various nationalisms became refracted and mediated through a regional framework. It began long before the 1970s with a mainly trade-focused set of agreements and the creation of the European Economic Community (EEC) in 1957. Over the years, cooperation among member states moved beyond the economic realm, and the community eventually became known simply as the European Community (EC). Membership also increased from the original six signatories to twelve by 1986. In 1985, member states signed the Schengen Agreement, abolishing all border controls and allowing citizens of all member states to move freely across national boundaries. Once citizens from outside the EC were admitted to one country, they were able to freely move among all EC member states. Besides open economic relations the regional community agreed to address common concerns, such as migration, water resources, and environmental protection. Europeans were particularly concerned with their water resources. While there are no arid areas within the European Union, it was imperative to preserve its rivers and lakes so as to provide sufficient quantities of water for industrial, agricultural, and consumer needs. Since the 1960s, member states have cooperated in developing strategies for controlling water usage and limiting carbon emissions and deforestation in order to protect the natural environment. Beyond facilitating the free movement of goods and people within the boundaries of the European Community, Europeans also sought to foster the

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development of a transnational European consciousness. They created a common European flag, consisting of a circle of twelve golden stars, on a blue background, and chose a European anthem, Beethoven’s “Ode to Joy.” They also sought to facilitate the free exchange and consolidation of knowledge production through the founding of the European University Institute in Florence, in 1976. It gave expression to the belief among the institution’s founders—who came from all parts of Europe—that shared intellectual and cultural experiences, particularly in the area of education, would foster a sense of unity among member states. Traditionally, education had been a nation-centered undertaking, as each country sought to educate a cohesive, literate, and informed citizenry that would serve the nation’s needs. As a consequence, not only primary schools but also institutions of higher learning had tended to be nationally organized. With the founding of the new institute, European leaders sought ways to transcend such a narrow focus. They declared a willingness to share resources for bringing together university-level students from all over Europe and beyond in one location and to expose them to a more transnational environment of scholarship and research. Initially consisting primarily of programs in economics, law, history, and the political and social sciences, the European University Institute reflected a commitment to the liberal arts in the intra-European cultural exchange. The commitment was expanded in 1987 by the establishment of the European Region Action Scheme for the Mobility of University Students, or the Erasmus Program, which enabled students to take classes across national boundaries, followed by the “Bologna process” of 1999, which established equivalency standards among higher education institutions within Europe. The European model inspired the growth of regional consolidations elsewhere. However, most of them focused on economic cooperation and free trade, stopping short of facilitating the free movement of people and educational cooperation. Far less systematically or thoroughly developed, such arrangements as the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA), bringing Canada, the United States, and Mexico together, the Latin American Free Trade Association (LAFTA), and the Central American Common Market, represented initial steps toward the creation of transnational communities. Unlike Europe, however, no further steps toward cultural cooperation or the free movement of people followed. NAFTA sought to establish common policies toward environmental and labor issues, but significant areas of disagreement remained. There was also only limited coordination with respect to intellectual or educational exchange, doubtless because the United States was already attracting students and faculty from all over the world, offering a well-established transnational knowledge community. In addition, US and Canadian institutions of higher learning had been regularly exchanging faculty and students as a matter of course, facilitated by the shared language. Of fundamental importance in the successful launching of supra-national communities was the nurturing of what some historians have called “a

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community of shared memory.” Despite the recent painful events of two world wars, genocide, and ethnic intolerance, Europeans were able to draw on a shared history of enlightenment, past diplomatic interactions, and a common canon of science, art, literature, and music. In the western hemisphere, however, Americans, Canadians, Mexicans, and South Americans had not actively engaged in constructing such a shared hemispheric history. The United States and the English-speaking parts of Canada shared a common legacy as former British colonies, drawing on the same language and literary traditions; their histories were also rooted in common struggles and experiences, though there was much that divided them as well. Art and entertainment, including movies, theater productions, and professional sports regularly traversed the US-Canadian border. Broadway plays and musicals were brought to Canadian theaters as a matter of course, and audiences did not view them as alien or unfamiliar, even when they portrayed scenes from the American past. There was much less exchange of cultural knowledge and artifacts, and a greater sense of national difference with Mexico, a former Spanish colony. This was not the case in the borderland communities along the USMexican border, where citizens on both sides of the border had long interacted with each other on a daily basis, shared common cultural interests, foods, and entertainment. These borderland communities were characterized by cultural hybridity and a lively exchange of people, goods, and ideas. As borders became more rigid in the twentieth century and immigration restrictions prevented the easy flow of people from one side of the border to the other, the exchanges declined, but never ceased altogether. In recent years, sociologists and historians have paid increasing attention to these communities as they continued to nurture their hybrid practices even as borders became more tightly controlled. Their findings demonstrated that borderland communities played a vital role in the cultural enrichment and hybridization of territorially defined national communities, often affecting change that moved from the margins to the center. Transnational communities also emerged beyond continental boundaries, of which the transatlantic partnership acquired particular significance in the post-war period. Together, the United States and Canada had defined themselves as part of a wider Atlantic world, consisting of the heritage of western civilization as well as more recent geopolitical post-war arrangements such as the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. The idea of a Pacific community was much slower to develop, but, as Walter A. McDougall pointed out in a 1993 book, Let the Sea Make a Noise, countries and peoples of the north Pacific—ranging from Chinese and Russians to Hawaiians, Canadians, and Americans—had been interacting with one another for a long time as well. More recently, historians in Australia, Canada, the United States, and elsewhere began to identify a trans-Pacific community as a separate entity with networks of migrants and trade connections tying together its diverse states and regions.

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Asian countries moved toward closer regional cooperation with the founding, in the late 1960s, of the Association of Southeast Asian Nations (ASEAN). The association promotes not only economic but also political interdependence among its members but suffered a serious setback in the late 1990s when Thailand and other nations in the region experienced a sudden financial crisis that had a knock-on effect on other ASEAN member states. A global crisis on the scale of the Great Depression was averted, in part by the timely intervention of the International Monetary Fund, which provided temporary relief measures in return for these countries’ pledge to reformulate their economic policies. As a result, ASEAN began to expand its trade agreements beyond member states, including China, South Korea, Japan, and the European Union, looking toward a more global engagement. Such undertakings still occurred within the traditional framework of international relations, but they also generated an environmental and cultural consciousness in the region that reflected the awareness of the area’s geographic location wedged between China to the north and Australia and New Zealand to the south. Although rather vague, leaders and the public in the region were trying to develop a transnational identity that would enable them to define a common position on issues such as human rights and environmentalism, including the protection of the region’s coral reefs. The seas surrounding the Southeast Asian countries were home to about one-third of the world’s coral reefs. When scientists warned in 1990 that virtually all these reefs were in danger of extinction because of pollution, ASEAN provided a framework for transnational cooperation to curb marine pollution. However modest, the Southeast Asian countries’ regional initiatives were far ahead of any development in East Asia. Consisting primarily of China, Taiwan, South and North Korea, and Japan, the region remained divided not only because of the uncertain relationship between mainland China and the island of Taiwan, or between the two Koreas, but also because whatever shared memory existed in the region was dominated by enmity and violence. The Korean public still resented the Japanese invasion of the peninsular kingdom toward the end of the nineteenth century and the rule by Imperial Japan during the first decades of the twentieth, while the Chinese retained bitter memories of their war against Japan. Unlike Europe, which had integrated past German aggression and atrocities into a collective memory, in East Asia Koreans, Chinese, and Japanese tended to nationalize rather than transnationalize their shared history. Even Koreans processed their recent past, notably the Korean War, in sharply contrasting ways. Those in the northern Democratic People’s Republic of Korea attributed the war’s origins to South Korea’s invasion in collusion with US imperialism, whereas the southern Republic of Korea blamed the communist regime of the north not only for initiating the conflict in 1950 but also for denying a large number of people a chance to return to their homes in the south. Under these circumstances, it was very difficult to promote a sense of regional (or even of Korean national) identity.

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Nevertheless, at least among China, South Korea, and Japan, there slowly developed a measure of regional cooperation, particularly with respect to economic relations. Japan, the world’s third largest trading nation during the 1980s and 1990s (behind the United States and Germany), increased its exports to China from $5 billion in 1980 to $30 billion twenty years later, and its imports from China from $4 billion to $55 billion in the same period.76 Since then, China has surpassed the United States as Japan’s biggest trading partner, with exports worth $141 billion compared to $118 billion to the United States in 2020. East Asia on the whole was emerging as a major and rapidly expanding regional market; the ratio of intra-regional trade among East Asian countries as a percentage of their total world trade grew from 34.4 percent in 1986/87 to 52.1 percent in 2006/7. These figures were still lower than those for the European Union or for NAFTA, which reached 73.1 percent and 55.7 percent, respectively, in 2000, but far higher than for ASEAN whose members traded among themselves for only a quarter of their total trade. There was also much intra-regional investment. A steadily increasing number of Japanese firms began to establish themselves in China. The Japanese export partner share with China increased from 2.13 percent in 1990 to 10 percent in 2000, while its share with the US declined from 31.69 percent in 1990 to 29.73 percent in 2000. Conversely, more and more Chinese visited Japan, some of whom stayed and added to the non-Japanese Asian population in the country, numbering roughly one million by the end of the century.77 Popular and elite cultural exchanges among Chinese, South Koreans, and Japanese also deepened during this period. Movies made in South Korea gained popularity in Japan, and Japanese dramas were shown on Chinese television. Historians from the three countries began their initially modest attempts to study the past together, tracing the three countries’ economic, social, and cultural interdependence, and stressing the importance of transnational regional history. It remains to be seen if in time an intellectually coherent idea of East Asian regional history will emerge, comparable to that of Europe. The efforts by scholars, journalists, and others to undertake the task jointly are creating the first transnational moments and spaces that transcend official relations. These trans-regional organizations form only part of the global network of interest groups that developed or expanded during the latter part of the twentieth century. Side by side with supra-national organizations whose members were still traditionally defined nation-states, “non-national” or “non-state” actors emerged on the global stage whose connections and interactions across national boundaries came to constitute an increasingly important part of the world. Non-state actors were not a new phenomenon. Their existence preceded that of the modern nation-state. Kinship and religious associations were obvious examples, but there had also long existed commercial, educational, professional, and academic communities that had constituted themselves throughout the world. These communities never

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disappeared despite the nation-state gradually extending its authority over them in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Beginning in the 1970s, moreover, non-governmental organizations grew in number and importance to such an extent that some of them began to challenge the authority and influence of the state. These were cross-national communities of people defining themselves through alternative identities and interests, some of them political, others cultural, ethnic, gendered, or through occupational or recreational pursuits. One arena of transnational engagement that had a long history dating back to the late nineteenth century was sports competition. The modern Olympic Games had been established in 1896 in the spirit of internationalism. Although the Games were suspended during the Second World War, they resumed in 1948 and ever since have occurred without interruption every four years. The one exception was the postponement by one year of the 2020 Games in Tokyo, Japan, as a result of the global Covid-19 pandemic. Some recent sites for the summer Olympics were among the fastest growing urban centers of the world, such as Seoul, Sydney, and Beijing. International conflicts also occasionally marred the spirit of the Games. After the Soviet Union invaded Afghanistan in late 1979, the United States and many of its cold war allies boycotted the games held in Moscow the following summer. The Soviets and other Warsaw Pact states retaliated four years later with a boycott of the Los Angeles Games. Surprisingly, these boycotts were the only cold war-era encroachments on the Olympic spirit, and the political hostilities did not affect the winter Olympics held in Lake Placid, New York, in 1980 and in Sarajevo, Yugoslavia, in 1984. The athletes themselves often ignored the political sparring of their leaders, instead focusing on the competitions and enriching their transnational experiences. Politics intruded on the Games in more violent ways as well, most horrifically during the 1972 Games in Munich, when a Palestinian terrorist group took eleven Israeli athletes and their coaches hostage, eventually killing all of them during a failed rescue attempt by the German authorities. Even though the Games, which had been halted during the hostage crisis, resumed two days later, several athletes declined to compete and left Munich early. Another act of violence occurred during the 1996 summer Games in the United States, when a bomb exploded in a crowded square in Atlanta killing two people and injuring more than a hundred. The perpetrator was Eric Rudolph, a carpenter, who went on to commit three more bombings before being captured by the authorities in 2003. He acted in protest against Washington’s liberal—“socialist” as he called them—policies on abortion and gay rights. The organizers decided to continue the Games as planned, albeit under heightened security. These acts of violence shocked the international sports community, but they were offset by myriad displays of global togetherness. A particularly apt artistic illustration of the transnational reach of the Olympic spirit came

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during the opening ceremony of the Nagano, Japan, winter Olympics, held in early 1998. The conductor Seiji Ozawa led a global chorus in singing the anthem “Ode to Joy” from Beethoven’s Ninth Symphony. Groups of singers from Australia, South Africa, Europe, China, the United States, and other countries sang in real time, being coordinated via satellite television by Ozawa’s baton in central Japan. It was a fitting display of the coming of the age of transnationalism. Another quadrennial global sporting event has been the World Cup in soccer, though participation in the event is confined to the thirty best national teams in the world. In both events athletes compete in the name of their respective nations, and nationalistic emotions usually run high during the games. But such nationalism is also a transnational phenomenon in that it is shared all over the globe and usually expressed through nonexclusionary and cooperative gestures. While the spectators at World Cup games tend to be segregated by nationality in the stands, the teams themselves have become increasingly international and racially diverse in their composition. During the 1990s, football leagues in Europe progressively shed their association with regional or national entities (except in name), and much like a prototypical transnational corporation (which they actually were), teams recruited coaching staff and players from around the globe. A glance at the winners of the FIFA (Fédération Internationale de Football Association) World Player Award in football since 1991 shows a very weak correlation between a player’s nationality and the nationality of his team. International non-governmental organizations emerged in several other areas that transcended national concerns, among them human rights, environmentalism, humanitarian aid, and health. For instance, a group of French doctors founded the international medical organization Médecins Sans Frontières, or Doctors without Borders (DWB), in 1971 in the aftermath of the Biafra crisis. Its mandate was to provide medical care in underserved areas or in crisis regions across the world irrespective of cultural, political, or religious constraints. It refuses funding from national governments in order to maintain its independence. It rapidly grew into a major organization with over 65,000 medical workers operating worldwide, including in some of the most dangerous conflict areas of the world, such as Afghanistan. During the recent Covid-19 pandemic, it has been helping to secure adequate access to healthcare in the world’s poorest regions. For its humanitarian services DWB was awarded the 1999 Nobel Peace Prize. Multiple aid organizations have been providing humanitarian aid to the growing number of refugees held in camps for weeks and months at a time as the international community weighs options for resettlement or return to their home countries. These organizations have been doing the work that individual states or supra-national organizations such as the United Nations could or would not do, putting into practice the spirit of internationalism enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

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Corporate Internationalism Business communities and corporations also had a vested interest in increasing transnational flows of goods, people, and ideas. International trade agreements expanded during the era of détente in the 1970s, opening up channels of corporate interaction across the cold war divide. The United Nations became one venue, which fostered global cooperation. In 1974, the Group of 77, a bloc of the UN’s non-aligned nations, most of them newly independent states from the Global South, issued a declaration calling for a New International Economic Order (NIEO), which would eliminate inequities in the global trade and financial system. They had gained some leverage because, due to their low labor costs, they were becoming major manufacturing centers, particularly for goods like textiles, electronics, and housewares. Despite the western capitalist nations’ support for free trade, they often regulated trade relations with countries in the Global South, imposing import restrictions, while demanding free access to those markets. The actions of organizations like the International Monetary Fund (IMF) and the World Bank also often favored the world’s richest countries by placing conditions on development loans to nations in the Global South. These inequities prompted a revolt among the latter and a demand for greater access to the markets in the northern hemisphere. At the same time, international trade negotiations were underway, designed to facilitate free trade across national boundaries and reduce barriers to the flow of goods. The largest among them was the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT), originally set up in 1947 and periodically renegotiated to lower tariffs and eliminate trade barriers. It grew from twenty-three initial signatories to 123 in 1995, when it was replaced by the World Trade Organization (WTO). Advanced industrialized countries redoubled their efforts to lower obstacles to international trade as their own economies became increasingly entangled in a global interdependent market. For example, as the historian Thomas Zeiler has noted, US foreign trade in the 1970s alone grew to over 20 percent of the gross domestic product, double what it had been during the previous two decades.78 This was all the more impressive since that growth spurt occurred during a decade of general decline in manufacturing in the United States and Northern Europe, as many firms outsourced production to cheaper labor markets in the Global South. International competition also led to the consolidation of businesses into ever larger multinational corporations, whose influence at times paralleled that of state governments. Increasingly, products were designed and assembled in multiple countries, making it harder to determine their national origins. Even if a brand was identified with a particular country, chances were that some of its components came from somewhere else. Most US and European big clothing, athletic, and shoe manufacturers were transferring production to Asia; car and electronic manufacturers assembled their

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products with parts from multiple countries. Automobile companies began building cars abroad in an effort to turn their products into global brands and save on exchange rate fluctuations and tariffs. For instance, Honda built its first foreign plant in Belgium in 1954, focused on motorcycles, rapidly expanding in the 1970s with automobile plants in Brazil, Indonesia, Europe, and the United States. Other car manufacturers did the same, building plants in countries where they hoped to expand their market share. The global economic balance shifted in the 1980s, when German and Japanese corporations became so successful in the international sphere that the American manufacturers lost the post-war competitive edge. They increasingly appealed to political leaders for trade protections. Many of them did so by invoking the specter of their Second World War enemies, particularly Japan, succeeding in “conquering” the American heartland by economic means. In their effort to stifle international competition, particularly in the car and electronics industries, they were not afraid to appeal to nationalist sentiments and ask for state support. They received a sympathetic response, particularly during the administration of George H.W. Bush, who in the early 1990s invited the CEOs of the three leading American auto manufacturers to accompany him on a state visit to Japan to discuss the trade deficit. Critics argued that the solution to the problem of America’s trade deficit was not government intervention but the improvement of American products which were no longer competitive in the global market. The US found itself having to swallow a dose of its own medicine at a time when the free trade ideology was gaining global acceptance. The debate died down in the 1990s with the rise of the big tech industry, which returned American companies to the pinnacle of the world market. The rise of these tech giants—companies such as Apple and Microsoft, later joined by Google, Facebook, and others—demonstrated the growth of global corporate power alongside the state. Parallel to the expansion of multinational corporations grew a shadow economy that was increasingly global in size and scope as well: the illegal international drug trade. Drug-trafficking across borders was difficult to detect and contain because it went beyond the jurisdiction of a single state and because there was no non-military mechanism for combatting such abuses sufficiently global in scope. Long-established international crime agencies, such as Interpol, designed to coordinate policing activities across borders, ultimately lacked the resources necessary to investigate these massive operations. When it was founded in 1923, Interpol included only a small number of countries, but its membership grew rapidly after the Second World War, reaching over one hundred by the end of the twentieth century. Interpol’s effectiveness in controlling illegal drug smuggling varied from region to region. In an effort to enhance the effectiveness of international crime fighting, the European Union created Europol in 1995 as its policing arm, but there was nothing comparable in other areas of the world.

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Neither organization was prepared to deal with the increasingly well financed and expansive international drug trade. According to the historian William O. Walker, the production and international trafficking of illegal drugs in some Latin American countries had become so huge that it exceeded their legitimate foreign trade revenue.79 Those who participated in the global illicit trade forged far-reaching transnational connections that linked small farmers in rural areas in Latin America, Central, and Southeast Asia, with consumers in the urban centers of wealthy nations. Efforts to curb the traffic involved a diffuse network of international organizations and agencies, including the United Nations Commission on Narcotics Drugs and the UN Fund for Drug Abuse Control (UNFDAC), created in 1971. The creation of the UNFDAC was a recognition that drug use and international drug trafficking had not only become a major global problem but that combatting it required international cooperation and coordination. Since the 1990s, efforts to combat the problem have been consolidated in the United Nations Office of Drugs and Crime. Despite these efforts, international cooperation waxed and waned over the years, and results have been mixed. Drug use remains a serious public health problem in many countries to this day, and economies in some of the poorest regions of the world often depend on the production of illegal substances for their survival. Another shadow economy that grew dramatically in size as a result of globalization was human trafficking, especially women and children used as sex laborers. Statistics vary, but according to a 2000 UN estimate, there were about one million “trafficked” people in the world. While global human trafficking is trending upward, it is unclear whether the increase in numbers stems from greater law-enforcement detection in many countries or an actual increase in trafficking. A 2020 report by the UN Office on Drugs and Crime also noted that data collected from participating countries is uneven. It is, for instance, easier to expose cross-border trafficking than domestic trafficking, which remains largely undetected in many countries. Available data suggests that the vast majority—about 70 percent—of the victims are women and girls, and about a third of all detected victims are children. About half of all detected cases involved sex trafficking, and more than a third of the victims were trafficked for forced labor. But the report also states that women played a role as perpetrators of human trafficking as well. It furthermore reveals that international trafficking is a truly transnational operation with local criminal groups capturing victims and transferring them to domestic traffickers in the receiving countries. In some cases, especially in wealthy countries, local traffickers belong to immigrant populations from the same region or nationality as the trafficked victims.80 Victims are usually powerless to prevent their capture and transfer as sexual or domestic workers. Teenagers are lured away from their homes with promises of jobs abroad, only to find themselves confined to tight spaces, with their passports taken away and forced to serve strangers as servants. It remains to be seen whether international law enforcement

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agencies as well as the regional communities and transnational organizations will eventually develop effective mechanisms to stop these violations of human rights. What had become abundantly clear by the beginning of the twenty-first century is that human trafficking has become a global problem requiring global solutions.

Communications Revolutions The explosive growth of computer technology, telecommunications, and the internet in the last quarter of the twentieth century dramatically changed every aspect of people’s lives, from the way they lived, worked, learned, and consumed, to the way they traveled. Much of the technology used in the development of computers and the internet was spun off from military research and development. By the mid-1970s, computers were becoming increasingly common for civilian use, initially in offices and manufacturing, then in private homes. By the early 1980s, the user-friendly Apple computer posed a formidable challenge to more established companies like IBM, Commodore, and Xerox in the personal computer market, beginning its meteoric rise to the top of the industry. The development of the internet also emerged from military research and development operations, foremost in the United States but with significant collaboration from computer scientists in the UK and France. Scientists had long sought to link various computers into a broader network so that each computer in the network could send and receive data, but the project required the infrastructure of a centralized planning agency and a massive influx of funding, both of which the US Department of Defense had at its disposal. By the 1980s, however, non-military organizations became aware of the civilian utility of linking computing systems regionally, nationally, and eventually transnationally. One of them was the US government-funded National Science Foundation, which in the mid-1980s underwrote the establishment of supercomputing centers across the United States, contributing to the development of the infrastructure needed to set up virtual communication systems. Initially used as a device to send electronic mail between individuals and offices, the internet expanded in the 1990s to include the world wide web, the system the world now relies upon as a source for instantaneous information, global communication, and social media distribution. The internet and the world wide web have revolutionized communication, knowledge production, and learning, creating new opportunities, new transnational connections, but also new dependencies. Because information could freely flow locally as well as transnationally, human rights advocates initially saw great promise for empowering politically and culturally marginalized groups, who could gain a voice and spread news about conditions in remote parts of the world. The optimism reached its peak

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FIGURE 11 A demonstrator in Tahrir Square, Cairo, during the Egyptian uprising uses her cell phone to record the protest, January 2011. Pro-democracy activists used social media to mobilize supporters and broadcast the movement to a global audience. © Marco Vacca via Getty Images.

during the Arab Spring of 2011, when protesters in Egypt, Tunisia, Bahrain, Syria, and other Arab countries took to the streets, summoned by social media, and then spread information to the world community, again through social media, about the movement. Called the “twitter revolution” by some journalist observers, others cautioned that social media alone could not produce a revolution, and that greater access to information about injustices might create global outrage but did not necessarily translate into action or real change. The pessimists were, unfortunately, proven right. Among the countries where pro-democracy protests had erupted with the help of social media, only Tunisia succeeded in making the transition toward democracy. As it turned out, the world wide web could be used to undermine democracy as well as support it. The internet probably had the greatest impact on cultural globalization. It facilitated the creation of new imagined communities based on cultural, political, and social interests rather than geographic location or nationality. In some ways, the internet de-territorialized social relationships among individuals. This was above all beneficial for groups that might have felt marginalized in their home communities. They could find kindred spirits in far-flung places and communicate with them over social media. Those virtual interactions included the pursuit of niche interests, gaming, or political discussion forums. But they also sustained diasporic enclaves,

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which could maintain or even strengthen ties with their home communities. Immigrants not only found it easier to stay in touch with loved ones on a regular basis but could also access local television programs from their home country, read local newspapers online, and participate in local political debates. Virtual distances shrunk as physical distances increased. All these benefits, of course, were accessible only to those who had access to the internet, which in the 1990s, were mostly people living in advanced industrial nations. While over the past thirty years worldwide internet access has grown from less than 2 percent in the mid-1990s to about 50 percent in 2020, most internet users are still located in the world’s richest countries. According to the UN International Telecommunication Union, internet use in the developing world grew slowly in the first ten years to about 9 percent by 2006, accelerating to about 41 percent of the population in 2020, while the world’s wealthiest nations had reached a saturation level of about 81 percent.81 The inequality of access to the internet had consequences in the economic, educational, and social realms. As the world wide web creates a global community of cosmopolitans, many populations are left out, notably the world’s poor, who are disproportionately non-white, the aged, and the young. In fact, a 2020 UN study, completed in the midst of the global Covid-19 pandemic, found that two out of three children and youth under twenty-five did not have internet access at home. The statistics were even more jarring when comparing high- to low-income countries. In low-income countries, only 6 percent of young people had internet access at home, compared to 87 percent in high-income countries. This discrepancy deepened the educational gulf that had already existed prior to the pandemic. While rich countries and rich school districts were able to continue instruction remotely, those in poor countries had to halt schooling entirely for the duration of the pandemic. But even within rich areas inequality became magnified as children in poor households who could not afford computers or internet access fell behind in their schooling.82 More than a novel means of communication, the internet in time developed into a major transmitter of information, eventually raising thorny questions about who controlled access, transmission, and content. As one organization after another began to create its own website, accessible to anyone who typed in the right address, businesses emerged that filtered and sorted the information for users. Even though the internet itself was free, these companies generated revenue through advertising and by pushing certain content to the top of the list when users accessed their search engines. The Google system best exemplified the new phenomenon. Developed in the late 1990s by two Stanford PhD students in California, it amassed an immense cache of information worldwide that was offered free of charge to anyone connected to the internet. At first only a small number of people— barely 100,000 users per day at the end of the decade—took advantage of what the device had to offer. But in the new century Google expanded into

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a massive near monopoly, attracting the attention of regulators increasingly concerned about the company’s power to make available and suppress information. Companies like Google, Facebook, Yahoo!, and Microsoft dominated the global market by the early twenty-first century with far-reaching cultural repercussions. First and foremost, their domination confirmed English as the language of global communication, even though websites gradually emerged in multiple languages. But because information technology was most rapidly developing and spreading in the United States, technical terms such as computer keys, commands, and users’ manuals were written in English, forcing non-English clients to adapt. Email addresses and links were likewise in English. The situation changed only gradually after Japan, China, and other non-English speaking countries began manufacturing computers and writing websites in Chinese, Spanish, Japanese, and other languages. More problematic for critics of these companies, however, was their ability to manipulate users’ access to information—and advertisements— based on automated algorithms that filtered information according to identified preferences. Critics charged that information was no longer free and neutral because the largest tech companies pushed people toward particular sites. Thus, what on the surface appeared to be a free and unbiased marketplace of information had, in fact, become an algorithmically manipulated mix of content that offered users ever more narrow choices of what they could buy, hear, and see. Equally concerning was that states found ways to regulate access to the web, and in some cases, shut down the internet altogether. What had looked like a final breakthrough to an open and free global society in 2000 and a driving force for democratization, soon revealed an ugly underside: the regulation and suppression of the flow of information in line with the interests of those who controlled that technology.

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15 The Post-Cold War World

The end of the Cold War, while a historical watershed moment, did not initiate the process of economic and cultural globalization. Rather, it accelerated a process that had long been underway and had gained momentum since the 1970s. Cracks in the iron curtain had appeared in the 1960s, when western non-governmental groups, among them intellectuals, religious groups, and members of the New Left, began to forge contacts with like-minded people in Eastern Europe and the Soviet Union. Contacts expanded to the official state level during the era of détente, when trade, cultural, and educational networks expanded. The end of the Cold War accelerated the movement of people, goods, and ideas throughout Europe and the world. To explore this moment and its aftermath as a cultural event means paying attention to the new transnational flows of goods, people, and ideas, and identifying new or revitalized non-state power brokers and their impact on international relations. It also means revealing continuities between cold war and post-cold war practices of transnational relations, such as a global reckoning with colonial legacies, the unintended consequences of cultural and economic globalization, and the persistence of global violence that increasingly centered on religious and perceived cultural differences among peoples.

The Globalization of America To many observers of international relations, in the Cold War’s wake the United States appeared to be the only superpower left. Some hailed the postcold war period as the final realization of what Henry Luce had predicted in his 1941 article “The American Century.” A group of American conservatives even began a movement called “For a New American Century.” That assessment, however, was a mono-nationalistic take on a fundamentally transnational phenomenon, which rested on the assumption that power was measured exclusively in the realm of the military, political, and economic standing of nation-states in the international system. No less triumphalist but more nuanced were declarations like those of Francis Fukuyama, who 253

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in his 1995 book, The End of History, hailed the ultimate triumph of western enlightenment ideas of liberty and democracy. The book became a bestseller in the United States in large part because Americans found the idea that the American model had conquered the world, and hence history’s search for progress and perfection could be declared over, immensely appealing. Fukuyama differed from more hawkish American voices in one important respect: he defined American power in the post-cold war world not so much in military, economic, and geopolitical terms but in terms of its “soft power.” Developed by Joseph S. Nye in his 1990 book, Bound to Lead, soft power included a nation’s corporate, educational, and religious institutions. It also included the power of cultural ideas and instruments to persuade nations to engage on friendly terms with one another and seek a cooperative relationship.83 At the end of the century, the United States embodied some ideas and ideals that held universal appeal. Yet it would be a mistake to assume that these ideas flowed in only one direction, from the US outward, without any outside influence penetrating American culture and ideas. In fact, as already noted earlier, in the age of globalization, power was much more diffuse, emanating not only from geopolitical but also cultural and other non-state sources, including corporate entities and international organizations, and the flow of influence was multidirectional. One could even say that at the end of the American century, the United States itself was less “American” and more global than it had ever been before. The Americanization of the globe and the globalization of America occurred in tandem, through population movements, technological developments, and many other hidden processes. The movement of people was a key arena for the diffusion of the world’s cultures in the post-cold war period. This included new patterns of migration, short-term travel for business or education, and global tourism. The end of the Cold War itself produced a wave of migration from Eastern European countries to Western Europe and the United States. In the western hemisphere, Latin American migration to the United States continued a trend that had begun with the liberalization of US immigration laws in 1965. At the turn of the twentieth century, the percentage of the foreign-born population in the United States had been around 14 percent, but it declined to a low of 4.7 percent in 1970. Toward the end of the century, however, the trend reversed, and by 2018 the percentage had risen to almost 14 percent again. By far the largest group of immigrants now came from Central and South America. According to the Pew Research Center, people from Mexico alone accounted for 25 percent of all immigrants in 2018. America’s Cuban population had been growing since the 1959 revolution, as many people fled the island nation. The community received a jolt when, in 1980, the Havana government allowed 120,000 Cubans to move to the United States. Altogether, immigrants from Central and South America made up around 40 percent of all foreign-born residents in the United States.84

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Immigrants from Asia, most prominently China, India, and the Philippines, accounted for 28 percent of all immigrants in 2018. Europeans, who as recently as 1960 accounted for more than 50 percent of the Americans born abroad, had now fallen to as low as 13 percent. Political unrest also produced waves of refugees in search of asylum, among them Vietnamese refugees at the end of the Vietnam War in 1975, Lebanese fleeing civil war in their country in the 1980s, refugees from the former Yugoslavia in the 1990s, and refugees from genocide in Rwanda in the mid-1990s. International aid organizations as well as the UN High Commission for Refugees were often stretched to their limits to provide for those seeking asylum away from war zones. While some eventually returned to their homelands, many others settled permanently in countries across Western Europe and North America. Their integration into domestic societies became both a challenge for host countries and an indicator of increased cultural diversity, particularly in urban centers. Each wave of migration provoked domestic opposition by native-born citizens concerned about jobs and cultural upheaval. Because an increasing number of migrants entered the United States and Western Europe illegally, calls grew louder to crack down on and deport immigrants, often with little distinction made between documented and undocumented immigrants. Many traditionalists called for greater restrictions on all immigration, and some even argued for depriving alien residents of their right to receive schooling and medical services. These calls ignored the fact that many countries, including the United States, Australia, and the Western European nations, relied on immigrant workers, many of them undocumented, to fill temporary and informal jobs, such as housekeeping, childcare, agricultural work, and other low-wage jobs. Many employees in the agricultural sector, for instance, were temporary workers who crossed the border only during harvesting season. Whether temporary or permanent, documented or undocumented, the increase in the Hispanic population in places like Southern California and Texas transformed the cultural landscape of these regions. They contributed to re-establishing the United States as a transnational nation by the late twentieth century. Similar trends were underway elsewhere in the world. Polish workers regularly crossed the Poland-German border for temporary work during harvest season in central and southern Germany, or as live-in home aides for senior citizens. In the Middle East, the oil boom attracted a large foreign labor force, most of them from Asia and Africa. Housed in temporary quarters, these workers had no plans to build a new life in their host countries, nor did the hosts permit permanent settlements. In the United Arab Emirates, for instance, 90 percent of residents were foreign-born in the 1990s, the vast majority of them living in specially designated compounds reserved for foreigners. Regardless of whether local communities fought or welcomed immigrants, local economies in many parts of the world depended on them as a source of cheap labor.

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Unlike many other nations, naturalization laws automatically conferred US citizenship on those born in the country, with the result that younger generations of citizens were more racially heterogeneous than their elders. According to the US Census of 1990, the last year when individuals could report only one race, 80.3 percent of the American people considered themselves “white,” 12.1 percent “black,” and 2.8 percent “Asian.” Most people of Hispanic origin reported their race as “white,” but, considered separately, they comprised 9 percent of the total population.85 Intermarriages across racial lines became increasingly common among Americans, prompting the Census Bureau to change its categories to allow people to identify with more than one race beginning in 2000. Globalization also occurred in the realm of education. More and more foreign students came to study at US universities, while an increasing number of US students studied abroad. In the late 1970s, the proportion of foreign students at US colleges and universities for the first time exceeded 2 percent. By the end of the century, that figure had risen to 3.6 percent, or nearly half a million coming from abroad to study in the United States. By the academic year 2019–2020, that number had risen to 1.1 million students or about 5.5 percent of US enrollment; notwithstanding restrictions put in place by the Trump administration that made it harder for students to obtain the necessary student visas. In fact, student enrollment declined for the first time in decades by 3 percent in 2016, the year Trump was elected, and plunged another 7 percent the following year. Despite the dip, the United States still remained the world’s top destination for international students. The proportion of foreign students earning a PhD at US institutions was even higher, rising from 11 percent in 1974 to 31 percent in 2005.86 Many of those PhDs found employment in American research centers and institutions of higher education after graduation. US universities also attracted highly qualified foreign academics to their institutions, significantly diversifying faculties and increasing their international prestige. And American universities were among the most globally diverse institutions of higher learning, turning their laboratories and classrooms into domains of transnationally collaborative research and learning. The academic excellence of these scholars is reflected in the number of Nobel prizes that they received. Overall, about one-quarter of the almost 390 Nobel prizes awarded to US recipients since their inception went to foreign-born individuals. Furthermore, many Nobel prize winners from other countries spent at least part of their education or research activities at US institutions. By the same token, many American Nobel Laureates had spent part of their research and education abroad. Academic border crossing had become common practice and a mark of excellence, the production of knowledge an exercise in international collaboration. US-based scholars were most prevalent in the Nobel prize category of economics. Between 1969, when the prize was first awarded, and 2020, fifty-seven awards went to US scholars. The next largest beneficiary was the

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UK with nine winners. Yet here, too, as in most of the other fields, the divisions into national categories obscured the level of international entanglement in the field. For instance, the economist Amartya Sen, who garnered the Nobel prize in economics in 1998 for India, his country of birth, had spent most of his professional career at US and British universities. In fact, the year he received the award he was transitioning from Harvard University in the US to Cambridge University in England. Not only in his choice of workplaces, but in his research, too, Sen applied a global lens. He emphasized political and social aspects of all economic phenomena and stressed the need for education to bring impoverished people in all countries out of their predicament. He became a powerful voice for a new cosmopolitanism that would emphasize the interconnectedness of nations and espouse universal values adapted to local conditions. His thinking was influenced both by Indian traditions and American education. Sen belonged to a group of scholars who emphasized the importance of the social and cultural dimension of global transformations and actively sought practical solutions to the global problem of economic inequality. Even those whose identities remained firmly rooted in the culture of their place of birth increasingly ventured out to explore foreign places and cultures. International tourism accelerated markedly in the last decades of the twentieth century. The overall number of international tourists grew from 279 million in 1980 to 1.4 billion in 2019.87 While in the early post-war period international travel was dominated by Europeans and North Americans and top destinations were almost exclusively located in Europe, by the end of the twentieth century the picture looked a lot more diverse. Tourists now came in far greater numbers from places outside Europe and North America, with the greatest increases from China, Japan, Korea, and the oil-rich Arab countries. Stores in New York, London, Paris, and other western cities began posting signs in Japanese and other nonwestern languages or hired native language speakers to cater to the new visitors. While Europe and the United States still were among the top tourist destinations, other parts of the world became increasingly popular. By 2019, China had risen to fourth place worldwide as a tourist destination, Mexico ranked seventh, and Thailand ninth. The shift was in part the result of the greater number of Asian travelers seeking destinations nearby, in part the desire of tourists to visit more remote places. The expansion of international tourism was reflected in the phenomenal increase in the amount of money spent by travelers all over the world. Tourism receipts grew from $95.3 billion in 1980 to $264 billion ten years later to over $1.45 trillion by 2019, with the United States receiving the lion’s share of revenue with a total of over $214 billion.88 These figures also suggest that more and more people could afford to undertake such trips. While few in the Global South were earning sufficient income to enable them to undertake even the cheapest of foreign travels, their homelands became attractive destinations for wealthier

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travelers, raising the local standard of living, yet also transforming their infrastructure and local cultures. The cultural impact of the rise of international tourism is harder to measure than its economic impact. As expensive hotels, restaurants, bars, and other tourist attractions were built, they often compromised or even erased the distinctive nature of a place, turning villages into resorts that looked more and more alike. Besides, local residents could barely afford the amenities offered to tourists from outside, bifurcating communities into insiders and outsiders. Concerned about the loss of the authenticity that had made them attractive destinations in the first place, some communities began to regulate the expansion of tourism, limiting the number of hotels, restaurants, and bars and regulating their operation, thus returning some power to local municipalities. Yet many could not muster the strength to oppose multinational tourist corporations and stood by as their spaces turned into global destinations without a distinctive local cultural identity. Tourism’s relationship to environmental degradation became a growing concern for environmental activists in the 1990s. As more and more people traveled, they overwhelmed big cities as well as provincial towns, putting pressure on water resources, polluting skies and lakes, damaging trees, even killing endangered species. African safaris, for instance, became so popular that already in the 1980s wildlife conservationists warned of the danger to the survival of elephants, lions, and other endangered species. Coral reefs were likewise threatened across the oceanic world. Concern about protecting the natural habitat and preserving endangered species converged in unexpected ways with the growth of international tourism, leading to a new wave of alternative travel—ecotourism. The declared objective of ecotourism was somewhat of a contradiction: to offer an authentic experience in pristine natural places, without disturbing the naturalness of those places. However, making those places accessible to tourists required the cultivation of those areas, while limiting access at the same time. Ecotourism became so popular in the 1990s that the United Nations declared 2002 the International Year of Ecotourism. That same year the world’s leading tourism companies issued a joint declaration that promised to preserve the natural and cultural heritage of tourist destinations. Their very popularity, of course, made it all the more difficult to keep those eco-destinations pristine. The conundrum of ecotourism exposed the deeper tensions inherent in cultural globalization. Innumerable transnational moments were created as hundreds of millions of people traveled abroad and met people in other lands, however fleetingly. But at the same time, these encounters changed locally distinct cultures and identities in unpredictable ways, sometimes erasing differences, sometimes enhancing people’s awareness of difference. It is impossible to generalize about the cumulative impact of such encounters; some confirmed existing prejudices and stereotypes about foreigners, others broke down those stereotypes. Nevertheless, through tourism the world’s

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people became more conscious of human diversity as well as shared humanity. The question was whether such awareness would result in constructive change, such as the promotion of the spirit of tolerance, or whether it would reinforce traditional prejudices toward the unfamiliar. Most likely, both processes occurred simultaneously, as Jane Desmond’s 1999 study of Waikiki tourism suggests.89 All the same, tourism represented yet another manifestation of the unceasing intermingling of people of diverse backgrounds and orientations. The key achievement of the American century was that it had transnationalized the world and had been transnationalized by the world to an extent never seen before. In other words, Americans were both drivers and recipients in this process; they were globalizing the world, but the world was globalizing American culture as well. The 1980s and the 1990s were above all an era of a rapidly interconnecting world, where people interacted with one another, not just through migration, tourism, and education, but even more fundamentally through shared technological and material culture (notably food). Transnational networks were forged on many levels, some through people, others through goods and ideas, and still others through “virtual” connections, made possible by rapid advances in information and communications technology.

Global Identities National identity, nationalist fervor, and patriotism are strongest in times of war, when populations perceive their nation under threat from the outside. As noted earlier, the period from the 1870s through the early 1970s had been dominated by war, the threat of war, destruction, and violence that sometimes turned into genocide. The dissipation of frequent warfare, bolstered by a sense that détente in the 1970s might spell the end of the Cold War, brought about a relative weakening of nationalism, or at the very least a weakening of the idea that the nation commands one’s ultimate loyalty, including the willingness to kill and be killed for one’s country. In the postcold war world, globalism and universalism became increasingly debated concepts in the public domain. Non-national identities as well as transnational economic, political, and intellectual exchanges established connections across nations, regions, races, and many other entities that used to be considered the key to an individual’s existence. In short, since the 1990s the nation became only one of many existences that imbued people with a strong sense of identity and belonging. To be sure, individuals had always identified with a multitude of groups, involving kinship, race, gender, and religion. What differentiated the late twentieth century from these earlier periods was that these identities were now increasingly forged and sustained transnationally. They thus competed with rather than were subordinated to one’s national identity.

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Of course, people can—and do—fight against one another in the name of their non-national identities, whether based on religion, ethnicity, or race. Prejudices against other countries, religions, or races continued to exist. But the physical and mental environment that provided a setting for encounters among individuals and their identities was transformed through the process of globalization. Put simply, globalization established connections among people who were brought together virtually as well as actually through advances in communications and transportation technology. Individuals encountered many more people of other nationalities, races, and ethnicities than ever before, and could discover shared interests and identities with them. Under what circumstances such encounters nurture a sense of shared values or confirm pre-existing prejudices is one of the major questions of the contemporary world. Bringing people of different backgrounds together fosters awareness of diversity. Such awareness could lead to the discovery of shared visions and objectives that would enable them to create an imagined community. It could also lead to greater tolerance for diversity and difference. On the other hand, it could reinforce and even strengthen pre-existing prejudices toward others. The path toward a universal cultural understanding of shared values that human beings from all walks of life and all parts of the world could agree has not been a straight one, nor is it clear whether the project will ultimately succeed. In fact, as the process of economic and cultural globalization was breaking down barriers between nations, a backlash occurred that pulled people in the opposite direction, generating greater nationalism and xenophobia, often with devastating consequences. Nationalism surged in Europe in the 1990s, beginning with the movement to establish autonomous nations and the break-up of the Soviet Union in 1991. As Russia settled uneasily into its new role as a territorially muchdiminished nation, it and some of its former sister republics struggled with their own efforts at national unity. The largely Muslim republic of Chechnya was the most notable example, where separatist rebels sought independence from Russia in 1994 and fought a bitter secessionist war for a number of years thereafter. Though the Russian military reasserted control over the region, Chechen separatists continued to launch attacks until well into the new century. Meanwhile, another country of the former Eastern bloc, Czechoslovakia, broke into two separate nations in 1992, the Czech Republic and Slovakia, a process that was completed through peaceful means. The most violent eruption of separatist nationalism occurred in the Balkan region where Yugoslavia disintegrated into ethnic violence in the 1990s. Like the Soviet Union and Czechoslovakia, the country ceased to exist, splitting into Macedonia, Serbia, Montenegro, Bosnia-Herzegovina, Croatia, Slovenia, and Kosovo. Each of these countries had its own distinctive history, religion, and ethnic identity. Boundary disputes and ethnic hostilities erupted as soon as Yugoslavia’s centralized authority disappeared, leading to violent clashes among Serbs, Croats, Bosnians, and Albanians. Violence

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erupted on a scale not seen in Europe since the Second World War, the worst of it in Bosnia-Herzegovina in 1992, when Serb militants laid siege to its capital Sarajevo, interned and ultimately murdered thousands of Bosnians in a large-scale campaign of ethnic cleansing. The fighting in the region displaced around 2.2 million civilians, only about half of whom eventually returned, according to a 2006 report by the United Nations. While nationalists instigated the violence in the region, internationalists eventually stepped in to prosecute the acts as crimes against humanity. The atrocities in the former Yugoslavia led to the first UN tribunal for the prosecution of war criminals since the Nuremberg Trials of 1946. The International Criminal Tribunal for the former Yugoslavia (ICTY) was set up in 1993 and conducted dozens of trials over the next twenty-four years. While the establishment of the tribunal was made possible only because the Cold War ended, the crimes it investigated were a direct consequence of its end. The court’s most prominent defendants were Slobodan Miloševic´, former prime minister of Serbia, and Radovan Karadžic´, former president of the Serbian Republic of Bosnia-Herzegovina. Miloševic´ died in custody while on trial, and Karadžic´ was convicted and sentenced to life. Altogether 161 individuals were indicted, ninety of whom were convicted and nineteen acquitted, while the remainder of the cases were either terminated or referred to other courts. The UN took similar action in the case of the 1994 mass killings in Rwanda, when over half a million Tutsis were murdered by Hutus. The killings commenced in the aftermath of the death of the presidents of Rwanda and Burundi in an airplane crash, both of whom were members of the Hutu ethnic group. The killing spree lasted for more than three months while UN peacekeeping troops, who were stationed in the country because of a previous agreement, observed the carnage from the sidelines. Their failure to intervene was later harshly criticized by human rights activists. The UN Security Council responded by authorizing the establishment of another criminal tribunal following the Yugoslav model. The Rwanda tribunal (ICTR) began its work in 1996 and over a period of twenty years issued eighty indictments, sixty of which ended in convictions, including those of Jean Kambanda, the former interim prime minister of Rwanda, and Jean-Paul Akayesu, who while mayor of Taba, ordered the killing of the town’s Tutsi population. The cases of Rwanda and Yugoslavia demonstrated the complex interplay between nationalist and internationalist sentiments in the post-cold war world. While the international community lacked the will or the power to stop the violence and human rights violations, the UN could at least muster the will to bring perpetrators to justice. UN intervention remained inconsistent, however. During the same period and since, many other cases of ethnic violence went unnoticed and unpunished. Ethnic violence was on the rise everywhere at the end of the century. The African continent was scourged throughout the 1990s by a series of brutal

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conflicts. In Somalia, civil war broke out in 1991 between the central state and separatists in the northwestern region. In Sierra Leone, fighting occurred for control over the country’s diamond mining region, leading to a rise in conscription of children into military service, instances of rape, amputations of hands and limbs, and other brutalities. In Central Africa, the mineral-rich areas of the Democratic Republic of Congo saw continuous fighting, involving eight states and dozens of militia groups, killing at its peak an estimated 1,000 people a day. As in West Africa, frequent human rights violations characterized the Congo wars, including mass rape, the use of child soldiers, and civilian massacres. Few of the perpetrators were ever brought to justice, even though the international community was more united on questions of human rights than at any time during the Cold War. While most of the conflicts in Africa revolved around ethnic identities, religion also played a role and was the source of conflict in several regions of the world. In South Asia, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, Sikhs, Christians, and other religious groups periodically asserted their respective power over other religious groups. Tamils, Sri Lanka’s Hindu minority, fought a long war against the rule of the Buddhist majority in the country that lasted from 1983 to 2009, ending in a Tamil defeat. Hindu majority neighbor India repeatedly brokered a ceasefire without achieving a permanent resolution to the conflict. Even Western European countries and Canada faced separatist campaigns. Most of these challenges, such as in Quebec, occurred through peaceful protests, but in Northern Ireland, Catholics and Protestants engaged in violent clashes, including bombing attacks, until reaching a peace accord in 1998. Separatist Basque militants also resorted to violence in their effort to gain independence from Spain, until a ceasefire was negotiated in 2010. Some of these clashes had deep roots in local histories such as in Ireland and Spain. In other cases, animosities had been suppressed by the Cold War and erupted into open conflict once the outside restraints had been removed, such as in Yugoslavia and Chechnya. Ethnic self-consciousness did not automatically lead to an assertion of separate nationhood. Russia, even after it lost many of its Soviet republics, still contained nearly two hundred nationalities, while the People’s Republic of China consisted of some fiftyfive ethnicities, with nearly 10 percent of the population non-Chinese. In both countries, the equal status of these ethnicities was often not guaranteed, and ethnic minorities continued to face social and economic discrimination here and elsewhere. China suppressed several of its ethnic minority populations, among them the Muslim Uyghur community in the northwest, asserting more direct control over a region once considered a semiautonomous province. Other countries struggled to integrate ethnic minorities, particularly those that had moved to the metropoles from former colonies, including Algerians in France and Indians, Nigerians, and other Africans in the UK.

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How can we explain the rise of nationalism and ethnic separatism in an age of cultural and economic globalization? As pointed out earlier, we must recognize that transnationalism and nationalism were not necessarily mutually exclusive, but rather that they were simultaneously influential forces, often reinforcing each other. In many ways, the new nationalism became absorbed into a broader conception of identity, which allowed it to operate both transnationally and nationally. This process worked on several levels. First, unlike the earlier “Age of Nationalism” that produced local and world wars and resulted in consolidation, this time nationalist identity politics could potentially have the opposite effect, namely, the break-up of larger multi-ethnic nations into smaller states, or the assertion of identity groups, be they national, ethnic, or any other form, within the domestic political sphere. Second, while nationalistic rivalries of the traditional sort remained, involving territorial, trade, and other disputes, they were constrained by global forces that were simultaneously working on another level of transnational connections. Nationalism, in other words, was just like other “local” identities, embedded within the larger framework of globalization. In that sense, there was no inherent contradiction or irreconcilable opposition between nationalism and transnationalism. Unlike imagined communities centered around particular interests, those centered around identities established sharper contours and demanded greater commitment. Interests could change, identities not so easily. Identity politics, the political organization of marginalized social groups that share common characteristics rather than belief systems, emerged out of the civil rights and social movements of the 1960s. Identity politics grew in prominence over time, as a way to empower minorities within the political sphere, most prominently ethnic and racial minorities, women, and LGBTQ. The increasing power of these groups resulted in significant legislative achievements in the United States and many other countries, including antidiscrimination laws and the legalization of same-sex marriages in the 2010s. These transnational movements gained in stature and political power, precisely because they combined minorities across multiple regions and thus gained the numbers and strength necessary to force the international community to recognize them. Identity politics had unintended consequences. While it produced communities that successfully fought for the expansion of rights for underrepresented groups, it also created new barriers against integration and cross-cultural understanding. Separatism became a source of strength as well as a source of conflict, since marginalized groups inadvertently defined themselves in opposition to dominant ones. There was, therefore, an ironic replication of nationalism as an oppositional ideology. Another consequence was the subjective nature of identity politics, which allowed any group, even one that was perceived by others as dominant—such as white, male, or Christian—to engage in identity politics, declare itself as embattled or persecuted, and pursue policies intended to curtail the rights of others. For

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instance, white supremacist groups emerged in Europe and the United States in the 2010s, supporting anti-immigrant policies and race-based social policies. Cultural conservatives advocated against cultural diversity and opposed the expansion of women’s and gay rights. Identity politics also contributed to the rise of religious fundamentalism in the late twentieth century. It produced local as well as transnational conflicts, most of them peaceful, yet some turned violent. Religiously inspired violence erupted with increasing frequency in the 1990s, culminating in the terrorist attacks in New York and Washington, DC on September 11, 2001. While the terrorists’ motives were not exclusively and perhaps not even primarily religious, Islamist fundamentalist beliefs fused with political motives to create a powerful essentialist ideology. Recruitment of young people to groups like al-Qaeda, Isis, or Boko Haram in northern Nigeria, often began in the mosques of radical fundamentalist imams. The concept of religious fundamentalism is not unique to Islam. It became a widely discussed phenomenon in the last two decades of the twentieth century, when it was primarily used for the most conservative branches of the major religions, including Christianity, Islam, and Judaism. In the late 1980s, the American Protestant religious scholar Martin E. Marty teamed up with the historian R. Scott Appleby to produce a multi-volume study called The Fundamentalist Project. Acknowledging the diversity of religious fundamentalisms—they preferred the plural—and dismissing the popular notion that fundamentalists were inherently anti-modern or anti-scientific, they offered some attributes that separated them from mainstream religious thought. One common characteristic was that fundamentalists drew selectively on only a few aspects of their religion, adhered to an exclusionary or separatist notion of religious practice, were “authoritarian” and “absolutist,” and were unwilling to forge any compromise with those who thought differently, even and especially within their own denominations.90 This definition shared some traits with cultural fundamentalists as well: defining their own culture in exclusionary terms, adhering selectively to only particular aspects of their culture, and announcing in absolutist terms what was considered acceptable or not. The rise of religious fundamentalist groups represented one indication of a broader backlash against the advances of cultural globalization and the increasing spread of cultural diversity. These movements had been on the rise in the western industrialized countries as well as in the Middle East and the Global South for quite some time. Because the movements were geographically and ideologically so dispersed, social scientists struggled to identify common causes for their increase. And there might well have been few common causes. As a purely religious phenomenon, it could be seen as a reaction of the particularly faithful believers to the liberalization of religious practices and the secularization of society in general. For instance, Christian conservatives in the United States recoiled at the removal of religious symbols from public places and the liberalization of women’s

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reproductive and gay rights. Muslim conservatives saw in the spread of western culture in their communities a departure from the strict observances of their faith, including the place of women within their communities. In broader social-political terms, fundamentalism could also be seen as a response to the experience of economic and social dislocation, including unfulfilled promises of decolonization, loss of local control, and the increasing gulf between rich and poor, openly visible in most local settings rather than hidden by the territorial separation between rural and urban areas or colony and metropole. In this context, religious practice became enveloped in a heavy layer of fundamentalist, authoritarian, and essentialist political ideology. For its most radical practitioners, violence became an acceptable means to protect and preserve the religious identity of their spiritual community. Identity politics in this extreme form was defended as holy war; it was condemned as terrorism by those who stood outside those communities. Alongside religious fundamentalist groups other forms of spirituality— religious and secular—also gained in popularity, many of them liberal and open to diverse groups of worshipers. In that sense, fundamentalism was part of the growth of religious pluralism in the world. Religious pluralism is defined as the interaction of different religious groups in close proximity to one another. Traditionally, religious sects concentrated in clearly defined territorial regions, often overlapping with and enforced by the political entity of the state. Yet with greater transnational migration, different religions and even conservative and liberal variants of a single faith often shared a common space. In all major metropolitan communities of the world, one can find religious communities and places of worship of all major faiths. This has been seen as both an opportunity and a threat to religious integrity. Individual congregants could more easily transition among faiths or among more conservative or liberal branches of a single faith, making boundaries between groups more fluid. The concept of religious pluralism also created new frictions, as groups tested the limits of religious tolerance; as secular state authorities debated the legitimacy of public religious displays; or as religious groups contested the inscription into public law of certain rights that appeared to violate religious laws. Conservative Christian groups contested abortion rights in the United States and fought the right to same-sex marriage. In France, which prided itself on the separation between church and state, conflicts broke out over Muslim women’s right to wear a veil in public. Interpreting it as a public display of religious identity, secular French officials in 1989 tried to ban Muslim students from wearing a headscarf in school. Even though the case was eventually resolved in favor of the students, the controversy resurfaced again in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks when Islamist terrorist attacks were on the rise in Western Europe. The controversy over the veil addressed larger issues concerning both cultural diversity and women’s rights. Some western feminists were quick to condemn the practice

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as a sign of oppression against women in Muslim cultures, even though some Muslim women defended their right to wear a scarf in public as a matter of personal choice and cultural identity. The historian of France Joan W. Scott saw in the debate a sign of cultural intolerance of a dominant culture toward minority cultures.91 Western Europeans, not just the French, expected immigrants to assimilate, if not by converting to the dominant religious faith, then at least by hiding any outward symbols of that faith. As Islamic terrorist attacks multiplied, Western Europeans, who had been absorbing an increasing number of refugees from majority Muslim countries, reached the limits of cultural and religious tolerance. In progressively greater numbers, policy-makers began questioning the compatibility between Muslim religious practice and western values, some going as far as to declare that Islam was incompatible with European values and culture. They usually referred to some Muslim rituals, such as female genital mutilation (FGM) or Sharia law, that brought practitioners, a small minority among Muslims, into direct conflict with western law. The question at the root of this debate was how a society built on Judeo-Christian ideas of pluralism, liberalism, and tolerance could fortify its institutions in the face of increased religious diversity, both domestically and transnationally. The American legal theorist and philosopher Martha Nussbaum asked that very question in 2007 at the height of a wave of anti-Muslim sentiment in the United States and Western Europe. She suggested to embed the very idea of tolerance and compassion in secular public institutions and in public education. It would thus become part of a “religion of humanity,” as she called it, a new form of patriotism that embraced religious pluralism and tolerance as integral to a state’s national identity.92 Nussbaum’s idea of embedding pluralism within a national project of identity formation recovers the original idea behind identity politics. By incorporating religious, cultural, political, gender, or any other forms of diversity within a larger project of education and nation-building, the state can assume a vital new function of identity-building within a multicultural world. This process can function at the local, national, and global level, but only if a general consensus on the intrinsic value of diversity exists. It requires cultural and religious leaders to focus on the fundamental values of human dignity and wellbeing rather than more narrow doctrines and practices; and to accept cultural diversity as an intrinsic value that allows communities to live side by side with those of different beliefs without infringing on those fundamental rights. Identity politics, thus understood, could lead to greater local and transnational tolerance.

Global Violence Cultural globalization was also inextricably interwoven with the proliferation of non-state level acts of violence. These acts of violence were harder to

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predict and thus harder to prevent since they were not primarily associated with a state and were often carried out by individuals or small groups, operating under cover until ready to strike. The terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 fall into that category. They shocked the international community because of the ease with which the perpetrators commandeered civilian planes and struck at the heart of America’s civilian centers of power. That day, a group of hijackers belonging to the Islamist terrorist group al-Qaeda, had hijacked four planes, steered two of them into the World Trade Center towers in New York, and a third into the Pentagon. A fourth plane was brought down in a rural part of western Pennsylvania by passengers, who had become aware of the hijackers’ intentions. The twin towers collapsed shortly after impact, killing almost 3,000 people. The attack prompted the George W. Bush administration to declare a war on terror and mobilize an international force to combat terrorism. Despite the fact that al-Qaeda was a transnational group and not directly affiliated with any nation in particular, the US identified Afghanistan as its initial target because its Islamist Taliban regime harbored al-Qaeda’s leader, Osama Bin Laden, a citizen of Saudi Arabia. The military campaign made up of a global coalition of forces, succeeded in deposing the Taliban regime, but it failed to capture Bin Laden. He was located and killed in Pakistan ten years later. For the United States at least, the war on terror came to define politics and society for years to come. It is tempting to argue that such a heinous act as the terrorist attacks of 9/11 justified a resounding show of military force, and thus marked an exception to the usually peaceful efforts of the international community to resolve crises. Yet war had been a constant in international relations for much of the twentieth century. And those who might have hoped that the end of the Cold War would finally usher in a period of peace and security were sorely disillusioned by the beginning of the twenty-first century. In fact, the wars and military confrontations of the 1990s helped sow the seeds for the Islamist jihads of the twenty-first century. In response to Iraq’s invasion of Kuwait in 1990, Americans led a coalition of forces against Iraq that included Britain, France, and Saudi Arabia. Later in the decade US troops intervened in Somalia, and NATO forces conducted military operations in Bosnia and the Kosovo region of the Balkans. The first Gulf War in 1991 gave rise to the first Islamic terrorist groups in the Middle East. The 9/11 attacks and the prolonged wars in Afghanistan and Iraq that followed widened the network of terrorist groups, demonstrating that not all aspects of transnational activities contributed to the making of a more tolerant world. Transnational connections enabled a significant number of individuals and groups to forge international networks of violence. International terrorists, drug smugglers, and traffickers in women and minors had always presented a serious threat to the international order as well as to domestic wellbeing, but it was in the last decade of the twentieth century that criminals began to use the tools of modern technology

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and cybercommunication to wreak havoc on the global community. In other words, what had once been hailed as a tool for the spread of democracy and freedom was now also utilized to surveille and terrorize civilian populations. Terrorist acts against US and Western targets preceded 9/11. In 1983, a suicide bomber attacked the US Marines’ headquarters located at the Beirut Airport in Lebanon. A decade later, terrorists set off a powerful explosion in the underground garage of the World Trade Center, killing six people. And in 1998, the US embassies in Kenya and Tanzania were bombed, resulting in the death of more than 200 people. While these episodes belonged to the realm of international affairs, they did not pit one nation against another. The terrorists neither represented nor sought to promote the interests of any particular state but targeted US citizens because of that country’s support for Israel and its overall policy in the Middle East. Neither did these early attacks attach a religious-cultural message to the political grievances against US policies. Only later did these terrorists associate themselves more closely with a fundamentalist Islamic movement grounded in anti-western, anticapitalist, and anti-secular beliefs. Islamic fundamentalism is distinct from radical political Islamism. While adherents of the former focus on the practice of strict moral and religious codes within their own family and close-knit community, the latter fuse religious and political identity in a broader, often transnational context. The legal scholar Abdullahi A. An-Na’im defined political Islam as “the mobilization of Islamic identity in pursuit of particular objectives of public policy, both within an Islamic society and in its relations with other societies.”93 Thus, while religious fundamentalists often secluded themselves from outside secular influence in separate enclaves, political Islamists confronted the outside world and attempted to remake it in their own image, sometimes by resorting to violent acts. The Iranian revolution of 1979 and the subsequent establishment of an Islamist state, which severely limited freedom of expression, imposed religious laws, and curbed political rights, including rights for women, is an exemplar of the fusion of religious and political identities. Political Islamism is inherently transnational in its orientation. The myth of a fundamental clash between western liberal capitalist and Islamist anti-modern cultures received widespread currency with the publication of a 1993 article by Samuel Huntington, published in Foreign Affairs and later expanded into a bestselling book. Huntington predicted that the future conflicts of the world would be carried out along cultural fault lines. Modern western civilization, in his eyes defined by Christian values, was threatened by other civilizations, notably Islamic and Chinese. He argued that this would in the future become a more serious problem for the United States and its western allies than any traditional geopolitical threat. He cited the terrorist attacks by Islamic fundamentalists as evidence that civilizations, not nations, were becoming crucial determinants of world affairs. But he was also concerned with the rise of Asia as a potential threat

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to western civilization. Somewhat ironically, Huntington expressed the hope that in the coming struggle between the West and “the rest,” India would take the former’s side.94 Those who understood international terrorism in such a framework correctly noted the emergence of transnational challenges to the world order, but their tendency to dichotomize between “the West and the rest” did not go much beyond traditional thought. Many of those ideas had been expressed by American and European thinkers as early as the turn of the twentieth century. They also ignored signs of an increasingly entangled web of interactions and interdependence between East and West. Different parts of the world were already deeply engaged in a process of creating a new, hybrid, global civilization at the beginning of the twenty-first century. Transnational connections and exchanges characterized that civilization, and even the terrorists’ acts represented one aspect of an emerging crossborder consciousness. These terrorists were not pitting one civilization against another, one nation against another, or even one religion against another. Rather, they were alienated individuals who existed everywhere and chose to marginalize themselves from mainstream society. They inflicted tremendous harm on innocent civilians within their own communities or wherever they sought to make their influence felt. For instance, Isis terrorized populations in Iraq and Syria, tightly controlling public life, and extorting financial tributes to finance its local and international terrorist operations. In northern Nigeria and neighboring countries, the terrorist group Boko Haram regularly attacked schools and kidnapped students within or near their own base, sometimes murdering them, sometimes releasing them weeks, months, or even years later. This practice did not win them followers in these local communities; instead, it sowed fear and terror, alienating the very citizens these groups sought to recruit to their cause. Al-Qaeda and the Taliban in Afghanistan acted in a similar fashion, murdering women, journalists, and others who supported a more tolerant open society. Rather than finding meaning in social and community affairs, they sought to retain their sense of purity and to eradicate everything that stood in their way. They acted out their beliefs in the transnational arena, yet in the service of blocking transnational influences on their own restrictive worldview. Most individuals who joined Islamic terrorist groups maintained only loose ties to their country of origin. Several leading terrorists came from Egypt, Yemen, Saudi Arabia, and elsewhere in the Middle East as well as South Asia. Others had grown up in Europe or the United States. They moved frequently among countries and regions, including Europe and North America, where some known terrorists had enrolled in colleges and universities. It was while spending time in the West that some of them came under the influence of radical Islam. The reasons for this radicalization by way of western civilization varied, but among them might have been a sense of alienation living as unwelcome guests in a country that espoused a different religion and a contrasting way of life, frustration at not having the

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same opportunities as native-born citizens in wealthier countries or being recognized as respectable members of the host community. France, which had Europe’s largest Muslim population, had to contend with a wave of urban riots in Muslim-dominated suburbs in the 1990s, which exposed the level of frustration and alienation experienced by young Muslim immigrants. The French government did little to alleviate the social conditions in these areas or provide opportunities for social mobility for young immigrants. Radical Islamic preachers began to fuel their anger and channel it into a call for a militant holy war against everything that was wrong with western civilization. Why some transnational sojourners embraced anti-social behavior while others embraced or at least chose to live peacefully within their new communities, is one of the key questions of modern societies. Although the idea of jihad, or holy war, belonged to the tenets of Islamic faith, for most of its believers it did not mean a call for collective violent action against all that stood in their way. What distinguished terrorists was their unwillingness to envisage a transnational future other than that of their own apocalyptic making. They were doctrinaire purists, or, to borrow from Martin Marty’s definition of fundamentalisms, absolutist and authoritarian. And they chose indiscriminate violence and terror as tools to implement their social visions.

16 The World Today

Some observers detected a retreat from what had seemed an inevitable march toward globalization in the aftermath of 9/11. The United States withdrew into a culture of nationalism and propagated a sentiment of “us versus them.” President George W. Bush, in one of his speeches shortly after the attack, laid out the supposed stakes in the war on terror: the terrorists, he declared, “hate our freedoms.” He framed the war on terror as a culture war, as an epic conflict that pitted the free, liberal, democratic world against the forces of hatred, illiberalism, and autocracy. Over the next twenty years, this framing fostered a rise in nationalism, anti-immigrant sentiment, cultural intolerance, and economic protectionism not just in the United States but everywhere in the world, leading many to speculate that the era of globalization was coming to an end. Yet other signs pointed in the opposite direction, toward closer cultural, economic, and political ties across the globe, greater interdependency among nations, and increased cultural sharing across different cultures. Global travelers could see both homogenization and heterogenization at work in many urban centers across the world. No matter whether they were in Nairobi, Beijing, Melbourne, St. Petersburg, Dubai, or Paris, they recognized consumer brands, chain restaurants, music, works of art in museums, and movies in cinemas. At the same time, most urban centers had become culturally more diverse, partly because their populations had become more international, and partly because people were eager to explore different cultures in their own neighborhoods. Most cities now contained a broad array of ethnic restaurants that offered a taste of the foreign, even though many adapted their recipes to local palates. The forces driving and inhibiting globalization thus worked in tandem and were often visible in a single locale, making it somewhat difficult to say with any degree of certainty whether the world today is moving toward greater globalism or turning away from it. Regardless of the fate of globalization, the global community is facing formidable challenges in several key areas, among them human rights, the global environment, and the movement of people.

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Human Rights As the examples of the Yugoslavia and Rwanda UN tribunals of the 1990s have demonstrated, the fate of human rights in the age of globalization was both dispiriting and promising: dispiriting, because it seemed that even after the end of the Cold War, global organizations were no better prepared to stop human rights violations across the world; hopeful, because those same organizations were working toward establishing legal institutions and procedures geared toward enforcing human rights law and prosecuting human rights violations. Human rights has become the most active arena of international law, with the creation of international courts working toward bringing perpetrators to justice. Their mere existence is testament to the fact that people all over the world have come to see the protection of human rights as a shared concern. These courts, however, must rely on the willingness of sovereign states to support their campaigns for justice. They also must rely on non-governmental organizations to do the work of uncovering and publicizing human rights violations where they occur. Often it is still only public pressure that brings cases before the courts. Various groups within nations have not always adhered to universally accepted human rights, but there has been a more open transnational debate about the need for decisive action in defense of these rights. One key problem that vexes international human rights advocates is how to enforce a set of rules that almost every nation agreed to on paper. The primacy of national sovereignty even within international organizations such as the UN makes it difficult to hold individuals and nations accountable. Yet since the signing of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights in 1948, several regional courts have been established that focus on adjudicating human rights violations. Even though some of these courts have been discussed earlier, it is worth briefly recapping their emergence over the past seventy years. The first of these was set up in Europe in 1953 when the Council of Europe created the European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms (ECHR). The Council itself was a product of efforts to reconstruct Europe on the basis of liberal democracy, peaceful cooperation, and the rule of law after the war. Ten Western European member states signed the Treaty of London in 1949, and the ECHR was one of its first initiatives. It guaranteed adherence of all member states to a human rights code and created the European Court of Human Rights with the sole mandate to adjudicate violations of human rights within Europe. However, the fourteen signatories of the convention—four more nations had by then been invited to join—made adherence voluntary. Acceptance of individual petitions was voluntary as well, leaving much of the power of jurisdiction still in the hands of participating states. In 1959, Latin American states followed the European model with the creation of the Inter-American Commission of Human Rights (IACHR), headquartered in Washington, DC. As in the European case, it grew out of a

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regional organization set up in the aftermath of the Second World War, the Organization of American States (OAS), which included all nations in the western hemisphere. The OAS’s first official act after its founding in 1948 had been to sign the American Declaration of the Rights and Duties of Man. For two decades, though, the commission lacked any means of enforcement. When it finally authorized the creation of an Inter-American Court of Human Rights, located in Costa Rica, Cuba and the United States declined to join. The United States had earlier signed the convention setting up the court but never ratified it. African nations established a regional court after founding the Organization of African Unity in 1979, later renamed the African Union. Its African Charter on Human and Peoples’ Rights, ratified in 1981, followed closely the models of the European and American conventions. The Court on Human and Peoples’ Rights took up its work in Arusha, Tanzania, in 2004. The only continent that has not yet established a human rights court is Asia, leaving the interpretation and enforcement of human rights in the hands of individual states. The existing courts operate by consent of its member states, meaning their jurisdiction does not supersede the sovereign rights of individual states. Nonetheless, their existence offers victims an opportunity to have their cases heard before an impartial international body. The emergence of regional human rights courts as well as the ad hoc tribunals on Yugoslavia and Rwanda prompted a rethinking within the United Nations about the need for a more permanent institution to adjudicate international crimes. Shortly after its inception the UN had set up the International Court of Justice in The Hague, but that court exclusively dealt with cases brought by one state against another. Hence it was not authorized to handle cases related to crimes by or against individuals or non-state actors that transcended national jurisdictions. The impetus for a renewed discussion about the need for an international criminal court dealing with individual perpetrators did not actually arise from human rights concerns but from concerns about the global drug trade. In 1998, at a UN conference in Italy, the assembly adopted the Rome Statute of the International Criminal Court (ICC), with 120 countries in favor, twenty-one abstentions, and seven opposed. The list of opponents is notable, because it included not only openly authoritarian states such as China, Iraq, Libya, Qatar, and Yemen, but also two western liberal democracies, Israel and the United States. As in all other transnational courts, the ICC’s mandate remained subject to the compliance of its signatories. Even though the Security Council had determined in a 1995 resolution that the UN’s mandate to protect the human rights of individuals superseded the mandate of noninterference in the domestic affairs of its member states, the UN bodies rarely if ever infringed on the sovereignty of member states. Since its inception in 2002, ICC has drawn widespread criticism, including charges of racial bias, since it has prosecuted disproportionately cases from African

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nations and other small states with limited power. Several countries in the Global South have since threatened to leave the ICC unless cases are distributed more evenly. As it had done earlier with respect to the Inter-American Court, the United States chose not to be part of the ICC system. Jealously guarding its sovereign rights, the US declared that its domestic judicial system was better equipped to handle cases that involved human rights violations of its own citizens than any supra-national organ. In 2000, the Clinton administration changed its mind and signed the Rome Statute, yet did not submit it to the Senate for ratification. This put the United States in limbo, requiring it not to act in ways detrimental to the purposes of the court, while not subjecting its own citizens to prosecution. At the time President Clinton declared that the US first wanted to see how the court would operate in practice, because several questions about due process had not yet been resolved. By the time the court took up its work in 2002, the United States military was deeply enmeshed in the war in Afghanistan and a Republican occupied the White House. Within a year the US would expand its war on terror into Iraq. By that time, George W. Bush had officially withdrawn the US signature from the treaty. This action on the part of the Bush administration gained significance when evidence surfaced in 2004 of human rights violations by American soldiers against Iraqi prisoners. The allegations seriously undermined the reputation of the United States as a defender of human rights. In fact, the Bush administration had justified its invasion of both Afghanistan and Iraq by accusing the Taliban and Saddam Hussein of human rights violations. When revelations of torture and physical abuse of prisoners in American custody at the Abu Ghraib prison in Iraq emerged, the United States found itself among those accused of human rights violations. While those directly involved in the abuse were tried and convicted before an American military court, the trouble deepened for the US when documents revealed that legal advisers had defended the use of torture, particularly the practice of waterboarding, as legitimate interrogation techniques. These revelations further damaged the international reputation of the United States in the world. If the US reserved for itself the right to bend the definition of torture in contradiction to internationally established conventions, it was effectively negating the idea of a universal human rights regime. Showcasing the increasing polarization in American politics in the twenty-first century, subsequent administrations continued to see-saw between supporting and rejecting the work of the ICC. During the democratic Obama administration, the US increased its engagement with the court by participating in a review conference in 2010 and pledging support, only to reverse course yet again during the Trump administration. Not only did Trump openly criticize the ICC, but he also withdrew the United States from the UN Human Rights Council and even publicly voiced support for waterboarding and torture as interrogation techniques, asserting that torture

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“worked.” The administration challenged the political legitimacy of the court in 2020 when the ICC considered bringing charges against American military and intelligence personnel, the Taliban, and the Afghan military for human rights violations in Afghanistan. After the election of a Democrat, Joseph R. Biden to the US presidency in November 2020, human rights advocates were hoping for yet another realignment of the US attitude toward the ICC, even though it is highly doubtful that the US will become a full signatory to the court. The ICC’s international reputation has suffered over the course of its existence, indicating the need for a substantial overhaul of its operations. In the year 2021, the world community appeared to be no closer to eliminating human rights violations than it had been at the time of the signing of the Universal Declaration in 1948. Yet, thanks to a global network of non-governmental human rights agencies, violations were publicized more widely, not only entering the public consciousness but also providing evidence that could be used to bring cases before the courts. Yet there still exists no consensus over the meaning of human rights, with various groups battling over what constitutes human rights, often reflecting political rather than moral or ethical interests. In an increasingly polarized world, at a time when the ideal of a shared canon of universal values is itself coming under attack, a universal understanding of human rights might be more elusive than it has been in more than seven decades.

Global Environments Consensus over environmental regulations also remains far from assured in the twenty-first century despite rapid advances in climate science. Since the celebration of the first Earth Day in 1970, awareness about environmental degradation has increased in the world, and the willingness of states to enter into global agreements to curb carbon emissions has followed suit. The growth of a global environmental consciousness was itself a product of cultural and economic globalization. Transnational communications networks, including the rise of the internet in recent decades, have provided vivid images of environmental disasters, among them the nuclear disasters at Chernobyl and Fukushima. In the aftermath of the Fukushima incident, support for nuclear energy declined markedly, leading many countries to halt the building of new nuclear power plants, phase out old plants, or wean themselves entirely from nuclear energy. The realization that environmental accidents could inflict irreversible damage to areas far beyond a single state helped galvanize support for renewed international agreements. Global grassroots movements emerged for a variety of causes, among them the protection of endangered species, the protection of ancient forests, or support for a sustainable, locally sourced agriculture. Environmental groups often constructed shrewd publicity campaigns, using social media or

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the internet to publicize their cause and galvanize support. For instance, the 2006 documentary, An Inconvenient Truth, about former US vice president Al Gore’s efforts to raise awareness about global warming, won several awards, including an Oscar for best documentary feature. A few years later, images of adorable polar bear cubs helped raise concern about global warming. The campaign was a collaboration between the World Wildlife Fund and the Coca-Cola company to raise funds for the protection of the Arctic, which was fast disappearing due to climate change. Environmentalists have also repeatedly drawn attention to the massive deforestation occurring in the Amazon rainforests of Brazil. After initial success in slowing the process, the pace of deforestation has quickened again since the election of Jair Bolsonaro, a right-wing populist, in 2018. Social media has helped to create some unusual superstars in the battle against climate change, such as the young Swedish high school student Greta Thunberg, who in 2018 began skipping school every Friday to demonstrate in front of the Swedish Parliament in order to force lawmakers to enact measures to slow global warming. Within months of starting her parliamentary strikes, Thunberg, aged fifteen at the time, was addressing the December 2018 United Nations Climate Change Conference, and a year later attended the UN Climate Action Summit. Her idea of a school strike led to the Fridays for Future movement, consisting mainly of high school students staging weekly strikes on Fridays. The outbreak of the Covid-19 pandemic in the spring of 2020 halted the movement’s momentum, and it remains to be seen whether it will return with new vigor after the end of the pandemic. Fridays for Future changed the dynamic of the environmental movement by framing the problem in generational rather than political or geographical terms. Here was a very young activist—Thunberg frequently referred to herself as a child—accusing the older generation of squandering the resources of the planet, depriving her and her generation of their childhood and a future. The movement delivered a new sense of urgency for action, but it did so amidst a powerful countercurrent of populist sentiment disputing the science behind global warming. While climate activists and climate deniers engaged in heated public debates over how real the problem was, mainstream political parties and international organizations were making gradual changes to slow the carbon footprint of the world’s human population. A succession of international climate agreements, spearheaded by the UN, brought environmental protection into the mainstream of global politics. At a first global Earth summit in Rio de Janeiro in 1992, participants signed the Framework Convention on Climate Change. From these early non-binding steps toward global environmental regulations, emerged further measures, such as the Kyoto Protocol of 1997, which made emissions cuts by the world’s richest countries binding. However, implementation of the agreement stalled as the US and China, the two largest emitters of greenhouse gases, fought over the

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guidelines and adjustments to the terms. China had not been subject to the Kyoto limits, but had since risen into the top tier of polluters in the world. The United States insisted that China, India, and Brazil should be included in the Kyoto protocol as rising industrial powerhouses. The disagreements largely pitted old against new industrial behemoths. Countries with a still expanding industrial infrastructure argued that they should be given greater margins of pollution compared to the highly developed industrial nations who had been in the business of polluting the atmosphere for much longer and had grown rich from it. These rich countries were also much better positioned to invest in carbon-reducing sustainable energy sources. A tentative resolution was reached in 2015 with the Paris Agreement, which committed all signatories—196 countries, including the United States, China, India, and Brazil—to reduce emissions to a level that would keep the increase in global temperature below 2°C, preferably below 1.5°C, compared to pre-industrial levels. In 2020, however, climate change monitors warned that the world’s four greatest emitters were failing to meet their targets, with China, the United States, and India increasing rather than reducing their greenhouse gas emissions. Among the top four, only the European Union, which was responsible for 9 percent of global emissions, had managed to reduce its share, but at a rate well below what was necessary. The world caught a glimpse of what was possible during the spring of 2020, when the global pandemic brought air and motorized land travel to a virtual standstill. The change was so dramatic that it became visible to the naked eye in the world’s most polluted regions. Residents in cities like Mumbai and Beijing saw clear skies and breathed noticeably easier. Scientists measured a decline in CO2 emissions of 12 percent in the United States, 11 percent in Europe, 9 percent in India, but only 1.7 percent in China. While the drop was temporary and did not change the long-term predictions about global warming, it did confirm the need for more permanent and dramatic measures to remove the global dependency on fossil fuels. In short, it showed what would be necessary to curb global warming. One promising development was the announcement of the US automaker General Motors in January 2021, to phase out gas-powered vehicles altogether by the year 2035, setting off a competition in the industry to announce similar commitments, potentially accelerating the development of electric vehicles. However, opposition to environmental protection measures still persists in many parts of the world, particularly in areas whose wealth depends on fossil fuels. The American fossil fuel industry has deep roots in political lobbying, and a few influential political voices aligned themselves with climate challengers, most prominently the former president Donald Trump. Under his administration, the United States left the Paris Agreement and dissolved many environmental regulations designed to reduce air and water pollution and preserve natural habitats. Even though President Joe Biden has rejoined the Paris Agreement and has made climate change a top executive priority, the challenge remains to determine precisely how much

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those living in the richest countries of the world are willing to give up to stem the tide of global warming and environmental destruction. Currently, most people and their political representatives are hoping that new technologies such as electric cars, wind farms, and solar panels can solve the problem of sustainability. But technology alone may not be enough to reverse the trend. More might be required, including a substantial transformation of how people live and work and travel. Despite greater awareness of the problem, the will to act is still lagging far behind the change needed to reverse the damage already done to the planet. The world can expect a further increase in droughts, record-braking heat waves, large-scale wildfires, floods, and other disasters once labeled “natural” but now known to be largely human-made, before the tide turns.

Global Refugees People continued to be on the move in the twenty-first century, traveling as tourists, for business purposes, or resettling permanently in other parts of the world. The latter group includes those who move involuntarily because of war, violence, natural disaster, or economic dislocation. In the immediate aftermath of the Cold War, the number of displaced persons in the world gradually declined, reaching a low of around 34 million in 1997. Yet since 2010, the trend reversed reaching a crisis point in 2015 with the arrival in Europe of around 1.3 million refugees fleeing civil war and violence in Syria, Afghanistan, Iraq, and North Africa. A 2019 UN report on global refugees counted almost 80 million displaced persons worldwide, around 40 percent of them children under the age of eighteen. By far the largest single group were 6.6. million Syrians who fled the prolonged conflict in their homeland. The second largest group consisted of an estimated 3.7 million people who fled the repressive regime of president Nicolás Maduro in Venezuela in 2019, mostly settling in neighboring Colombia and Brazil.95 The situation has been made more dire by the fact that unlike earlier waves of refugees, the recent groups have fewer options to return home, leaving them in limbo longer and creating major pressures on relief organizations to find them permanent places for resettlement. The refugee crisis of 2015 presented a major challenge to countries within Europe who were unprepared for the massive influx of people. After an initial wave of sympathy, many countries closed their borders to the new arrivals, leaving EU member states with an uneven distribution of refugees. Germany’s chancellor Angela Merkel agreed to take in the largest number of refugees, around one million, despite growing popular opposition and pushback from members within her own party. When measured in relation to population size, however, Hungary received the highest number of initial applications for asylum with 1,770 applicants per 100,000 citizens. Hungary had become a main point of entry into the European Union for refugees

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from Syria and Central Asia, and thus received the bulk of applications for asylum, even though most of the refugees intended to and did move on to other countries, with Germany and Sweden the most popular destinations. Nonetheless, Hungary’s political leadership fanned the flames of xenophobia and dramatically curtailed the flow of refugees into the EU, creating a humanitarian crisis at its borders. In the aftermath of the refugee crisis, anti-immigrant sentiments increased markedly in other parts of Europe as well, with more than half of Europe’s populations disapproving of the way the EU was handling the crisis, according to a 2016 report by the Pew Research Center. Anti-refugee sentiment was highest in Greece (with a 94 percent disapproval rating) and Sweden (88 percent). Among the dominant fears were that refugees posed a greater risk for terrorist attacks, that they would take jobs and benefits away from citizens, that they would become an economic burden on the state, and that they would not integrate well into domestic society.96 However, as the massive wave subsided and refugee populations were dispersed across towns and cities in Europe, the refugee debate gradually subsided, occasionally flaring up whenever an incident involving immigrants made national news. Anti-immigrant sentiment also increased markedly in the United States, largely fanned by the inflammatory rhetoric of Donald Trump. Upon taking office, the president issued an executive order to suspend the US Refugee Admission Program and ban entry of refugees from several countries, including Iran, Iraq, Syria, and Libya. Called the Muslim ban, it immediately drew sharp criticism from human rights advocates and opposition leaders. The order and several amended versions that followed were challenged in court, yet only parts of it were struck down, making it much harder for asylum-seekers to gain entry into the United States. Already as a presidential candidate in 2016, Trump had vowed to ban all Muslims from entering the United States should he be elected, because they posed a risk of terrorist attacks. Terrorism experts widely dismissed this notion because the vast majority of known terrorists in the United States were either US citizens or came from countries other than those listed on the ban. Most of those affected by the ban were refugees fleeing war and violence in their home country. Under international law they have the right to seek asylum in other countries, and the US had traditionally been the country with the highest number of refugee resettlements since it established a formal program in 1980. Upon taking office, the Trump administration immediately announced a temporary freeze on refugee admission. The cap that year had been set by the Obama administration at 110,000 refugees. After the freeze was lifted, close to 54,000 refugees were allowed to enter the country later in the year. In 2018, the number of admitted refugees dropped to 22,000, reaching an all-time low a year later with a cap of 18,000 admissions.97 This sharp reduction occurred at a time when overall refugee numbers were at an all-time high in the world.

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The US also took measures to crack down on undocumented immigrants in the United States and reduce the flow of migrants coming into the country from Mexico. The Trump administration suspended the Obama-era program, Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals (DACA), which had granted temporary immunity to those who had been brought to the country illegally as children. The immunity had allowed them to apply for college, receive drivers’ licenses, and seek legal employment in the US. Trump’s visually most dramatic anti-immigrant gesture was the promise to build a wall along the southern border with Mexico, claiming initially that Mexico would pay for it. Other measures included the separation of children from their parents and detention in separate facilities upon entry into the US, as well as an increase in deportations of undocumented immigrants. The administration’s policies affected not only refugees and potential immigrants, but also resulted in a significant drop in the number of temporary migrants to the United States, above all students and workers on temporary visas. The visa application process for these individuals became a lot more complex, and many highly qualified workers and students simply decided to seek employment or education elsewhere. The reduction hurt American universities financially, since a portion of their annual revenue came from the tuition payments of international students. It also caused problems for employers who had relied on a steady stream of international workers, ranging from low-wage agricultural and service industry workers all the way to highly qualified tech specialists and corporate managers. Even if some companies were able to gain exceptions for their employees and universities shored up their administrative capacity to deal with more complex visa applications, they could not overcome a general sentiment that the United States no longer welcomed international visitors. Its retreat from internationalism was visible in all sectors of international relations, but particularly in the area of people-to-people exchanges. The closing of America was exacerbated by the pandemic of 2020, which effectively shut down all international travel indefinitely. This was, of course, a global phenomenon, with many countries closing their borders to foreign travelers. In a somewhat ironic twist, though, the borders remained open for those who held more than one passport or held permanent residency in one country and citizenship in another. Thus, as nations turned toward protectionism and nationalism, and some even blamed globalization for the global health crisis, its transnational citizens were able to maintain and nurture the ties that bind people from different cultures together. More importantly, despite a growing sense of protectionism, most people recognized the global nature of both the problem and the solution. Countries had to coordinate their responses to the health crisis and pooled their financial and scientific resources to find a vaccine. The first successful vaccine was developed in a German research lab and produced in the United States, a result of a partnership between the German company BioNTech and the American pharmaceutical giant Pfizer. Of the three individuals at the helm

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of these two companies, only one was born in the country in which she worked. BioNTech co-founder Özlem Türeci was born in Germany to Turkish immigrant parents; her husband and co-founder Ugˇur S¸ahin had moved to Germany with his family at the age of four; and Pfizer’s CEO Albert Bourla was born and raised in Greece. Another company with an approved vaccine, Astra-Zeneca, is a British-Swedish biotech company. These transnational collaborations demonstrate that even if the global flow of people most certainly has contributed to the rapid spread of the virus, the same flow of people also contributed to finding a rapid solution.

Transcultural Production Collaboration in the field of research and economic production on display during the Covid-19 crisis is only one aspect of the much larger sphere of transcultural production in the contemporary world. For centuries, people all over the world have debated whether indigenous cultural productions could be shared worldwide. Is culture indigenous to specific traditions, or is it a universal phenomenon to be shared and appreciated by all people? In art, music, literature, and other fields, are perceptions of beauty and aesthetics universal or particular to different cultures? Is the idea of “sharing” cultural products fundamental to understanding the contemporary world? Material products were relatively easy for people to appreciate and replicate everywhere, whereas culture belonged to the “soul” of specific communities and therefore was territorially bound and not easily transferrable. As people migrated to different places, they created diasporic cultures, but those cultures usually faded with each successive generation. Factories could produce goods that were interchangeable all over the world, but cultural productions such as art, music, and literature were specific to where they were created and developed; their meaning not easily transferable from one community to another. In his 1935 essay, “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” Walter Benjamin argued that each work of art or cultural product contained an aura unique to the time and place of production. Transferring that work of art to a different time and place would mean a loss of authenticity and authority. Cultural theorists in the twenty-first century have focused much more than Benjamin on the process of cultural hybridization as a product of cultural globalization. Cultural authenticity has given way to what may be called “transculturalism”—that is, the idea that cultural productions could be transmitted to and appreciated in all parts of the globe. A Chinese pianist could play Beethoven, just as an American architect could incorporate Japanese design elements in the construction of a house. Their interpretation and alteration of cultural texts originally produced elsewhere in the world gave these texts an aura specific to the time and place where they were performed. The interchangeability of cultural productions may thus be

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considered one of the key phenomena of the world today, a result of decades of cultural exchange, borrowing, adaptation, and hybridization. The contemporary practice of shared transnational cultural pursuits marked a departure from earlier conceptions of world cultures, which were more likely to emphasize cultural difference over similarities. Particularly the western gaze on non-western cultures emphasized the exotic, often under cover of scholarly pursuits. Ruth Benedict, one of the most influential anthropologists of the mid-twentieth century, had popularized such a perspective in her 1946 book, The Chrysanthemum and the Sword, a study of Japanese culture. Written to acquaint American readers with the society and culture of the country they had just defeated, she pointed to what she considered the dual character of the Japanese nation: its military power and its fine arts and culture. This was, of course, a feature not unique only to Japan but also common in all nations and cultures, representing the confluence of power and culture. For Benedict and for most other anthropologists after her, this dualism of power and culture provided a good way to understand the world, past and present. Today, however, most people recognize that there is a great deal of overlap among cultures. Indeed, in contrast to Benedict’s generation, who viewed culture in essentialist terms, recent scholars have developed a more “universalistic” idea of cultural transnationalism. Philosophers, cultural theorists, and anthropologists refer to this phenomenon as cosmopolitanism, the principle of coming together in a single community without losing one’s own sense of cultural identity. Kwame Anthony Appiah described the figure of the rooted cosmopolitan as someone who is “attached to a home of one’s own, with its own cultural particularities, but taking pleasure from the presence of other, different places that are home to other, different people.”98 Appiah drew from his own experience as the son of a Ghanaian father and a British mother, simultaneously rooted in several cultures and countries. He sensed the tension that existed in the pursuit of a universal cosmopolitan culture while preserving cultural diversity in the contemporary world. In a 2006 New York Times article, he noted the contradictions inherent in the recently adopted UNESCO “Convention on the Protection and Promotion of the Diversity of Cultural Expressions,” which simultaneously tried to protect the distinctive nature of cultural expression in different national communities and encourage the free flow of cultural ideas and products across national boundaries. A solution to that contradiction would be, in his estimate, to focus not so much on cultures or nations, but on individuals and the choices they make.99 If we accept that national, regional, and local cultures are continuously evolving, then we can appreciate the simultaneity of the seemingly contradictory processes of cultural homogenization and heterogenization occurring in a single geographic space. These dual trends are visible in many areas of cultural production, particularly in popular culture. For instance, the 2019 Academy Award for best motion picture went to the Korean movie, Parasite. Foreign language

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films were traditionally considered only in the category “Best foreign feature film,” artificially separated from the main category of best movie. Established in 1947, the category of foreign film had been an acknowledgement that there existed a movie industry outside the Anglophone world, yet with the caveat that foreign films could (and should) not compete with Englishlanguage films. There had been nominations of foreign language films in the best motion picture category before, most recently Roma a year earlier, but none had ever won. The success of Parasite was thus a powerful acknowledgement of the globalization of motion picture production. The boundaries between domestic and foreign have become blurred to a degree that is making the separation seem increasingly outdated. The setting, the acting, and the language of the movie were Korean, but the movie did not so much tell a “Korean” or “Asian” story as a global one. Even if the film were set in another part of the world, viewers would recognize the themes as universal. In other words, a cultural product like this is less national or regional than universal, global. The movie is no more “Korean” than Shakespeare’s plays are “British.” Significant transnational borrowing, hybridization, and adaptation are occurring as well in the popular music industry. For decades, American and Anglophone artists had dominated the international charts, but beginning in the 1970s waves of influences from other parts of the world created new trends and new genres, from the Jamaican infused reggae music of Bob Marley in the 1970s to German techno music reaching a global audience in the 1980s. Because the emphasis of techno was on non-vocal rhythmic performances, it easily translated into different cultural environments. The international music scene became more diverse in the twenty-first century through a significant increase in Latinx performers, many of whom sang in Spanish. Some first became popular in the United States before reaching an international audience, such as the American-born Jennifer Lopez. Others first gained fame in their own country, before becoming popular in the United States and elsewhere, such as the Colombian singer Shakira. Shakira has drawn on various ethnic influences to blend her musical style. For instance, the 2019 song “Ojos Así” incorporates Middle Eastern musical elements and features Arabic lyrics. For the song “Waka Waka,” commissioned for the 2010 Soccer World Cup in South Africa, she collaborated with the South African band Freshly Ground. More recently, the Korean pop music genre K-pop gained worldwide popularity. It had been a domestic phenomenon since the 1990s and burst on the international music scene with the hit song “Gangnam Style” by the performer Psy in 2012. K-pop meshed different styles borrowing from hip hop, techno, rock, and jazz. The lyrics are Korean, interspersed with English phrases, or all English, and performers accompany their songs with a complex choreography, incorporating various transnational elements, such as hip hop. The global success of K-pop is part of what culture critics have

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called the “Korean Wave,” the transnational spread of Korean cultural products that included television shows, music, and fashion throughout Asia. K-pop achieved worldwide success, in large part because of its hybrid nature bridging regional cultural differences. K-Pop followed in the footsteps of the successful spread of anime, which originated in Japan yet has acquired a worldwide fan base of mostly young people since the 1990s. The global fusion of popular music, culture, and entertainment seems to run counter to the growth of cultural nationalism in many parts of the world in recent years. In the United States, the Trump administration’s slogans “America First” and “Make America Great Again” encouraged strong antiforeign, anti-immigrant sentiments. In Germany, the black, white, and red flag of the pre-First World War German Empire reappeared in public, became a popular symbol of extreme right-wing groups such as the “Reichsbürger” (citizens of the empire). In France, the right-wing party of Marine Le-Pen gained popularity through nationalist and anti-immigrant rhetoric and policy proposals. And Brexit, the British decision to leave the European Union in 2016, was in part fueled by nationalist anti-European, antiimmigrant sentiment. The supporters of these movements consisted of a mixture of older lower-middle class and young working-class people who saw their opportunities diminish in the neoliberal globalized economy of the twenty-first century. As jobs and social safety nets disappeared in many countries, those who experienced economic insecurity increasingly blamed outsiders rather than their own political leadership for their malaise, in large part fueled by the extremist rhetoric of ultra-conservative political parties. Their plight stood in stark contrast to that of young middle-class people who benefited most from the transformations brought about by cultural globalization and who were able to take advantage of the opportunities afforded by easy access to a broad variety of information and entertainment through the internet, enabling them to transcend the geographic confines of their physical environments. They were more willing to embrace new cultural trends and less concerned than their elders with preserving an imagined cultural heritage. This does not mean that they represented a homogeneous group of globalists. Instead, they actively participated in the transnational debates about globalization. They were as likely to support cultural globalization as they were to support efforts to protect local cultural identities. They used the tools of cultural globalization to strengthen niche cultural communities. Anime, for instance, remains a marginal cultural trend in most countries, yet because of its global diffusion, the fan community has grown into a powerful global network that is being recognized by commercial and cultural elites. It is through these global networks that we can recognize both cultural homogenization and heterogenization operating side by side in today’s world. Transculturalism has long been integral to scientific and intellectual knowledge production. Indeed, scholarly exchanges may have paved the way for universalizing standards and criteria for excellence. Scholarship

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provides an excellent example of transnationally shared cultural pursuits. It brings people together across national boundaries and promotes encounters and interactions, resulting in a constant process of renewal, adaptation, and hybridization. As people increasingly recognize cultural hybridization as a real phenomenon, cultural historians have begun the work of tracing the historical roots of both transnationalism and cultural hybridization. They have pointed out that cultures were never purely contained within a national cocoon, that cultures were in a constant state of flux, and that cultural change was maybe the only constant (and common) aspect of cultural communities everywhere in the world. Only with the advent of the nation-state and the perceived need to define a common national identity did opinion makers begin to fix a particular national culture in place and make it seem more static than it had ever been in people’s lived experiences. At the height of the era of the nation-state, historians have played a part in creating the myth of static, unchanging national cultures. More recently, however, with the relative decline in the power of the nation-state and the ascent of non-governmental globalizing historical agents, an increasing number of them have de-centered the nationstate and instead focused on borderlands, borderlessness, and transnational interactions. The cultural approach to international history has facilitated this transformation, yet the economic, political, and social aspects of international relations have also received new scrutiny outside the nationstate framework of analysis. Globalization came under assault when twenty years into the twenty-first century the world was gripped by a global pandemic, affecting all people and nations, but affecting each in different ways. The spread of the pandemic from China to the United States and Europe and eventually to all parts of the globe highlighted in unmistakable ways the level of global entanglements that had become a reality of human interactions. As international travel was suspended, people resorted to alternative ways to communicate and to “see” each other, making use of new technologies and developing a new global vocabulary, among them “zoom,” “lockdown,” and the category of “essential worker.” Class, race, and geography mattered, often determining who became sick, who survived, and who died. And while many blamed globalization for the outbreak and advocated for a new kind of protectionism, globalization also contributed to alleviating the effects of the pandemic. The rapid development of a vaccine against the virus was made possible by the well-established networks of international scientific, financial, and corporate collaboration. The twenty-first-century world has become a kaleidoscope of transnational beings, constituting layers of cross-border activities and connections. Many people took advantage of the new opportunities offered by the lowering of territorial barriers and the availability of cross-border information and communication to build a better future for themselves and for others. A significant portion of the world’s people, however, still remain outside these

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networks of transnational connections, some because they reject them but many more because, being poor or living in remote rural areas, they cannot gain access. But even people in those areas saw an influx of new technologies, such as televisions and cell phones, thereby catching at least a glimpse of the global community outside their local environment. National sentiments and nationalistic attitudes will not disappear even as the world is becoming more interconnected and interdependent. Yet progress has occurred toward embedding layers of national consciousness within a transnational cultural framework. The major problems of our age—poverty, economic inequality, and climate change—are global as well as local. Finding solutions to these problems will remain a major challenge for the generations coming of age in the new millennium and will depend on how well they can cooperate despite their differences.

Conclusion

Over the past two centuries, the world has become a much smaller place. Today, people from far-flung places know much more about one another as a result of the global networks that link them together. Because of the multitude and diversity of these networks, the concept of international relations has been redefined to encompass not only states and state representatives but also private individuals, groups, corporations, and organizations. Taking this new understanding of international relations as its premise, this book has focused on the cultural contexts in which they unfolded, on the ways in which people and processes beyond the realm of high-power politics have shaped those relations, and on the ways in which agents beyond the halls of government acted as transnational conduits. Our aim has been to write a more inclusive history of international relations through the application of a cultural lens. Before offering some general conclusions, it might be useful to briefly review the concepts that are central to our approach. The first is to clarify again what we mean when we talk about culture or the “cultural approach.” We understand it in the broadest sense to include those aspects of transnational interactions that involve emotions, values, and ideas. When we have examined transnational processes in commerce and politics, we have done so with an eye toward the cultural underpinnings that have shaped those processes. We do not treat culture as separate from economics or politics but as an integral aspect of economic and political processes. The second is to clarify the role of the state as an institution in this book. Throughout we have interrogated the extent and limits of the state as historical agent in international relations. The historical era under review in this volume overlaps with the rise of the nation-state, and therefore state institutions have been central to international relations. But even at the height of its power, the nation-state was not the exclusive agent in the conduct of international relations. And while it is too early to declare the era of the nation-state over, we found indicators in recent history that suggest the waning of the predominance of the nation-state in international relations. This does not mean that the state no longer matters in the history of foreign 287

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relations. To the contrary, a guiding principle of our approach has been to historicize the nation-state, to show the extent and limits of its powers, to examine how the state’s power interacted with other sources of power in the transnational realm, and thus to open our eyes to alternative ways in which power was waged in the international arena. Each section of the book has focused on historical developments that made that period unique. At the same time, it has drawn attention to important themes and continuities that spanned across several eras or remained crucial throughout the two centuries that make up this history. In the following we will tease out some of these continuities and their evolution over time. These continuities can be found within the three broad categories that have helped us structure our narrative: people, ideas, and material goods. Their transnational movements over time have shaped international relations in significant ways. Within the category of the movement of people, attention to race relations is woven through the entirety of our history of international relations. The concept of race emerged once people from different parts of the world encountered one another. By the early nineteenth century, it was already a well-defined characteristic in the formation and formulation of national identity in Europe and the Americas. It served as justification for colonialism and imperialism even though enlightenment ideas of liberty and equality appeared to be incompatible with the possession of colonies. Equality and self-determination became principles reserved for white people and white nations only. Race remained at the center of international relations throughout the twentieth century. It shaped the flow of migration from the late nineteenth century to the present; it lay embedded within extremist political ideologies of the twentieth century; it influenced the conduct of the Second World War, as well as most major wars since; and it affected the global power balance through the momentous wave of decolonization that occurred in the 1950s and 1960s. Race became integral to the human rights debates emerging in the last third of the twentieth century and affected the global war on terror in the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks on the United States. The persistence of racial disparities in global society became all too obvious when the world became engulfed in the deadly coronavirus pandemic in 2020. Racial minorities within countries suffered disproportionately and experienced far higher death rates than whites. And countries in the Global South suffered more acute shortages in medical aid, equipment, and vaccines than those in the highly industrialized Global North. Within the field of international relations history, attention to race as a category of analysis has helped reveal its central role in shaping major historical developments over the course of the last two centuries. A second factor in the people category is gender. It is no longer possible to write a comprehensive history of international relations over the past two hundred years without attention to gender. Gender as a category has shaped how we approach foreign relations history in two distinct ways. One

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involves increased attention to women as active participants in international relations. The cultural approach has helped reveal the contributions of women by expanding the focus beyond state-centered agencies and archives to include non-state agencies such as women’s organizations and individuals who forged independent transnational connections. Among those were the transnational temperance movement, the international struggle to gain the vote for women, and involvement of women in international politics and the international peace, civil rights, and environmental movements. The other involves gender as a category of historical analysis as suggested by Joan Scott in her influential 1986 article in the American Historical Review. Her two-part proposition regarding gender—first, as “a constitutive element of social relationships based on perceived differences between the sexes,” and second, as “a primary way of signifying relationships of power”—has enabled historians of international relations to draw attention to the gendered context of international power relations.100 Unequal power relations were naturalized and legitimized through their symbolic representation in gendered terms. We can find gendered analogies within nineteenth-century discourses on imperialism and colonialism; within twentieth-century demands for and denials of de-colonization; in the forging and breaking of alliances among countries; in debates about political and social relations both in the domestic and transnational context; and in the waging of war and negotiations of peace. Assumptions about strength and weakness in the international realm were often coded in gendered terms, yet gender has also been employed in challenging those assumptions. Of central importance in the use of gender as a category of analysis is to take into consideration the spatial context as well as change over time. In other words, gendered categories operated differently in different locations, and they were in a constant state of flux. Within the realm of ideas, our study has devoted considerable attention to the role of ideology in international relations. Included are not only overtly political ideologies such as socialism, communism, or fascism, but also cultural and social ideologies, such as nationalism, modernism, fundamentalism, or racial ideologies. Ideas traveled transnationally, aided by the flow of migrants across borders, but also through the creation and expansion of a transnational literary canon. The ideologies of communism and socialism understood themselves as internationalist from their inception, built on the assumption that class interests transcended national interests. Nationalism as an ideology, on the other hand, emphasized difference. States became increasingly active in building national cultural cohesion among their own citizens by suppressing minorities within their own borders and defining identity in opposition to neighboring states. Yet, as we have shown, nationalism also became instrumental in the creation of an ideology of internationalism toward the latter part of the nineteenth century as individuals, organizations, and national governments sought common ground with other nations and within supra- and transnational communities.

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While some ideas and ideologies were particularly influential during certain moments in history, others remained influential over the entire course of our study, albeit evolving over time. One of those is the idea of modernity that emerged in the mid-nineteenth century and remained an important cultural and social current throughout much of the twentieth. It became part of overt transnational debates about the structuring and restructuring of modern societies, about art and music, about the role of technology in people’s lives, and about concerns over the loss of local traditions and local control. These concerns were strongest at the turn of the twentieth century but resurfaced in various iterations throughout the twentieth and into the twenty-first century in different parts of the world. Religion is another constant whose impact has resonated in different forms throughout the last two centuries. Religion was at times summoned to bolster existing power structures, as in the case of the Christianizing efforts of missionaries in colonial Africa and Asia; but also as a source of protest against foreign rule, for instance during the Boxer rebellion in China in 1900. Religious identity and religious diversity became part of transnational debates about cultural homogenization and heterogenization in the latter part of the twentieth century, as different religious groups existed in closer proximity to one another and religious fundamentalist movements gained strength. Many international conflicts were framed in religious terms, including the western framing of the Cold War as a fight against “godless” communism or the more recent global war on terror that targeted militant Islamist groups. Religion was often pressed into service for ulterior political motives, demonstrating its power as emotional and spiritual motivator for individuals to take up arms against a perceived outside threat. As a clearly defined system of ideas and values, it played an integral role in the conduct of international and transnational relations throughout modern history. A third common theme within the realm of ideas was the rise of human rights as a historical force in international relations. Talk of rights existed as early as the eighteenth century, and shaped history in dramatic ways through the age of revolutions. But historians have argued that these rights discourses differed in significant ways from the twentieth-century concept of human rights that came to dominate the post-Second World War era. The post-war rights discourse has focused increasingly on the rights of individuals rather than collective rights of citizens for self-determination. In the early post-war period, particularly during the phase of decolonization, rights debates remained closely connected to the project of state-building, as the 1955 Bandung Conference demonstrated. Yet already during the conference individual rights emerged as a key battleground among the delegates, as some called for support of individual rights such as free speech within the colonial and post-colonial states. The rights revolution of the 1960s and 1970s brought individual rights to the forefront, thus making them the defining characteristic of the new human rights movement.

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Nonetheless, we can discern some continuities that connect the nineteenthcentury rights discourse to the present. One of them is the long trajectory of minority rights from the movement to abolish slavery in the nineteenth century to the recent Black Lives Matter movement that began in the United States but soon went global. While jurists, political theorists, and human rights advocates might have distinguished between individual and collective rights, that distinction was not as rigid to those whose rights had been deprived. In most cases, states denied rights on a systemic level, and thus challenges to human rights violations occurred on a systemic or collective level. Self-determination, for instance, operated both on an individual and a collective level. Another continuity was the struggle for gender equality, which women had been waging since before the nineteenth-century formation of women’s rights groups and which continues to this day. Gender inequality persists in modern societies everywhere, ranging from subtle forms of discrimination such as wage differentials between men and women to overt ones such as denying women the right to education, the right to vote, or the right to control their own bodies. The third category consists of the movement of goods, which we understand broadly as “material” transactions. Those can include tangibles, such as consumer products but also intangibles, such as financial or environmental transactions. While these might not intuitively be considered part of a cultural approach to the history of international relations, they nonetheless are occurring within a cultural context, have cultural values and ideas attached to them, and have cultural causes and consequences. For instance, the transnational production and consumption of consumer products became a material way for people to engage with other cultures. Artisanal products, works of art, fabrics, or foods carried cultural meaning and acquired new meaning as they were transferred from one locale to another. While they were associated with foreign cultures these products also integrated into domestic cultures, a process that became known as creolization or hybridization. This was particularly visible in the adoption of foreign foods, with striking continuities over the past two centuries (and much longer). Consumption was also closely tied to colonialism, with food items such as tea, coffee, chocolate, fruits, and vegetables imported from the colonies into the metropole. Over time these foods became integral to the metropole’s culinary national identity. Examples include English tea and Belgian chocolates. In the twentieth century, global consumption became multidirectional, particularly after the expansion of global trade in the 1970s. Today, goods are produced and assembled in multiple countries and sold globally. Malls and shopping centers have sprouted up across the world and they often resemble each other more than their local physical environments. Consumption has done more to homogenize the world’s cultures than any other political or cultural event. At the same time, it has created heterogeneity, offering individuals more choices for dressing, furnishing their homes, or eating.

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Consumption is also intimately connected to the process of globalization, another theme that has run through this entire volume. Globalization itself is not material in the traditional sense, since it refers to the process of making global connections rather than actual material transactions. Yet, because the term first originated in the realm of economics in the 1970s, it is worth emphasizing its close connection to material transactions. The international world of 1800 already included many global connections that facilitated the movement of people, ideas, and goods. Yet during the 1970s, the process accelerated at such a rate that economists and politicians gave it a name. We have focused on the cultural aspects of globalization in our discussion because we see them as fundamental to understanding globalization’s political and economic manifestations. It is impossible to separate the political-economic from the cultural variations of globalization, and therefore the best path to understand these global entanglements is to discuss them together. Globalization took off exponentially in part because of the breakthrough of neoliberalism beginning in the late 1970s, characterized by the ascendance of a free trade ideology within the international community. After the end of the Cold War, neoliberalism expanded further, facilitating economic globalization but also harming the lives and livelihoods of local producers and consumers. These developments had cultural roots and cultural consequences, contributing to the increasing cultural polarization that has taken root in most countries directly connected to globalization in recent years. The pandemic that began in 2020 has put on full display both the economic and cultural disparities brought about by globalization. The virus’s rapid global spread was also a direct consequence of globalization, appearing to confirm all its negative aspects. A map of the early hotspots in the spring of 2020 could be mistaken for a map of the parts of the world that were most connected to economic globalization. In short, globalization meant the easy and fast spread of the disease: the more a country’s citizens travelled, the greater the chance of catching and spreading the virus. The multicultural cosmopolitan city of New York was hit particularly hard in the early phase of the pandemic, and it was here that the contradictions of globalization first emerged in stark relief for all who cared to look closely. The disease was brought into the city by international business travelers who had been jetting among cities, countries, and continents. They were the ones most connected to and constantly interacting with a global network of partners. But the ones who ended up dying from the disease came in disproportionate numbers from other population groups: the poor, the aged, the chronically sick, and ethnic minorities. In other words, the pandemic not only mirrored the path of globalization but also separated out the winners and losers of globalization. The losers were at much higher risk of dying from the disease than the winners. The winners had much better means to protect themselves from exposure. Managerial and white-collar workers were much less likely to lose their jobs, they could afford to stay home, and they could even have their groceries delivered in some of the wealthiest

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areas. The poor, on the other hand, either lost their jobs or continued to work outside the home, often relying on public transportation, and were thus far more likely to catch the virus. The inequalities became even more pronounced when comparing Europe and the United States to countries in the Global South. The pandemic showed that inequalities ran right through every society, every city, every community. These inequalities had existed for a long time, but there is no doubt that the gulf between rich and poor had become deeper since the 1970s, exacerbated by the confluence of neoliberalism and globalism. These developments help explain why protest movements like Black Lives Matter in the US broke out into the open in the midst of the pandemic. The killing of minorities by the police revealed yet another layer of inequality and it became inextricably linked to the pandemic. The movement and the protests spread to Europe, not just as a sign of sympathy with the American cause, but also to highlight similar forms of discrimination against minorities in the largely homogeneous countries of Europe. At the height of the pandemic, globalization appeared to be shifting into reverse gear. People rediscovered the local, appreciated the neighborhood, isolated themselves. But it also turned communities and states against one another. The virus was blamed on others; and a new and uglier kind of nationalism resurfaced, with countries hoarding resources and prohibiting the export of certain vital goods. Later, when the first vaccines became available, governments struck exclusive deals with vaccine manufacturers that favored, yet again, rich countries over poorer ones. But globalization had also created the networks that enabled multinational research labs and pharmaceutical corporations to collaborate on developing a vaccine. Despite the nationalist fervor that had been spreading over years, there existed a fundamental understanding that, unless the nations worked together, the pandemic would not disappear but would simply recirculate in an endless loop of waxing and waning infection rates. In this moment of international crisis, states began to reassert authority in the international realm through acts such as funding research, not just in their own country, but also internationally. Existing international organizations, such as the World Health Organization, have yet to step up to create a global system to coordinate financial support, care, testing, and vaccinations. Yet in the middle of the second year of the pandemic, there emerged encouraging signs of international cooperation. At the June, 2021, meeting of G7 countries, leaders agreed to make available one billion vaccines for poorer nations. Whether the experience of the pandemic is reversing, stalling, or accelerating globalization in the long term remains to be seen. If there is a global retreat from globalization, the question will be which form this retreat will take. Will individual countries retreat into nationalist, xenophobic, protectionist policies, or will they retool the globalization process to ensure greater economic and social equity? Will they agree to

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greater coordination to tackle some of the larger problems the world faces in the twenty-first century? Problems that cannot be tackled by one nation alone but require cross-border collaboration. The pandemic has been a short-term acute problem; the climate crisis is a chronic long-term problem. The environment, or rather people’s relationship with the natural environment, forms another key theme of the cultural approach to international relations. Current environmental crises, including droughts, floods, massive wildfires, heat waves, and severe storms are affecting every corner of the world. These changes are material, yet they are interpreted and evaluated in a cultural context. People’s relationship to nature has always been rooted in cultural assumptions and often expressed through cultural veins, including literature, music, paintings, and other art forms. The modern environmental movement had historical antecedents, not just in the western world but in non-western cultures as well. More importantly, environmental problems are fundamentally of a transnational nature and thus require transnational efforts to solve them. Air pollution in one country affects the air quality of its neighbors. Overfishing of the seas affects the availability of resources for all countries. The building of river dams creates shortages for communities downriver, regardless of national borders. Deforestation in the Amazon River region results in rising temperatures in the rest of the world. International cooperation has become increasingly urgent as natural resources dwindle and the Earth’s temperature increases. Global commitments to the conservation of resources and to the development of renewable energy resources requires a change in cultural attitudes before it can yield political results. Globalization can be redirected to tackle these kinds of problems, but it will require a mindset that acknowledges the interdependence among people across the world as well as the interdependence between people and their natural environment. The 2015 Paris Climate Agreement was a significant step in that direction; it illustrates one instance of the convergence of culture and power within the international sphere. Examining the dynamic relationship between culture and power, and among cultural, geopolitical, and economic processes as it evolved over time helps us understand the world we live in today. We study the past to understand the present and contemplate the future. The history of international relations therefore fulfills a crucial civic function. However, a history that focuses exclusively on those in leadership positions, or on states without attention to individuals, will only fulfill part of that civic function. It leaves out the powerless, sub-cultures, and marginalized groups, including women and minorities. A cultural approach integrates those individuals and groups in the grand narrative of the history of international relations, giving us a more complete and accurate representation of the past. Understanding how these forces operated in the past helps us get a deeper understanding of what is happening in our world today and offers suggestions for our collective future.

NOTES

1

Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, ed. and trans. Quintin Hoare and Geoffrey Nowell Smit (New York: International Publishers, 1971).

2

Clifford Geertz, The Interpretation of Cultures (New York: Basic Books, 1973), 312.

3

Jacques Derrida and Michel Foucault developed their ideas in several books and essays. Pierre Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993).

4

J.R. McNeill and William H. McNeill, The Human Web: A Bird’s Eye View of World History (New York: W.W. Norton, 2003).

5

Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism (London: Verso, 1983).

6

Kristin Hoganson, Consumer’s Imperium: The Global Production of Domesticity, 1865–1920 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2007).

7

Sven Beckert, Empire of Cotton: A Global History (New York: Penguin Random House, 2014).

8

Andrea Wulf, The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt’s New World (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2015).

9

Charles Darwin, Narrative of the Surveying Voyages of His Majesty’s Ships Adventure and Beagle, 4 vols. (London: Henry Colbourn, 1839).

10 Alfred Russel Wallace quoted in Peter Raby, Alfred Russel Wallace: A Life (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001), 177. 11 Umbro Apollonio, ed., Documents of 20th Century Art: Futurist Manifestos, trans. Robert Brain, R.W. Flint, J.C. Higgitt, and Caroline Tisdall (New York: Viking Press, 1973), 19–24. 12 Ulf Hannerz, Cultural Complexity: Studies in the Social Organization of Meaning (New York: Columbia University Press, 1992). 13 Adam McKeown, “Global Migration, 1846–1940,” in Journal of World History, vol. 15, no. 2 (June 2004), 155–189. 14 Thomas Piketty, Capital and Ideology, trans. Arthur Goldhammer (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2020), 154. 15 Renan quoted in The Nationalism Reader, ed. Omar Dahbour and Micheline R. Ishay (Amherst, MA: Humanity Books, 1995), 153, 183. 16 Paul Kennedy, The Rise and Fall of Great Powers: Economic Change and Military Conflict from 1500 to 2000 (New York: Vintage, 1987). 295

296

NOTES

17 Lat Dior quoted in Robert Tignor et al., Worlds Together, Worlds Apart, vol. 2, 5th edition (New York: W.W. Norton, 2018), 650. 18 Quoted in Brian J. Peterson, Islamization from Below: The Making of Muslim Communities in Rural French Sudan, 1880–1960 (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011), 24. 19 Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York: Knopf, 1993), xxv. 20 Frank Guridy, Forging Diaspora: Afro-Cubans and African Americans in a World of Empire and Jim Crow (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2010). 21 Krista Molly O’Donnell, “The First Besatzungskinder: Afro-German Children, Colonial Childrearing Practices, and Racial Policy in German Southwest Africa 1890–1914,” in Patricia Mazón and Reinhild Steingröver, eds., Not so Plain as Black and White: Afro-German Culture and History 1890–2000 (Rochester, NY: University of Rochester Press, 2009), 61–64. 22 Said, Culture and Imperialism, 69. 23 Phillip Mallett, Rudyard Kipling: A Literary Life (New York: Palgrave, 2003), 4. 24 Zoreh T. Sullivan, Narratives of Empire: The Fictions of Rudyard Kipling (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993). 25 Cited in introduction to Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness, ed. Paul B. Armstrong, 4th edition (New York: Norton Critical Edition, 2006), xiv. 26 Theodore Roosevelt, “The Strenuous Life,” April 10, 1899, in The Works of Theodore Roosevelt in 14 Volumes (New York: Colliers, 1900), 3–22. 27 Albert Beveridge, “March Of the Flag Speech, September 16, 1898. 28 Pettigrew quoted in Anders Stephanson, Manifest Destiny: American Expansion and the Empire of Right (New York: Hill & Wang, 1996), 103–104. 29 Franz Boas, entry December 23, 1883, from Observers Observed, Essays on Ethnographic Fieldwork, p. 33; Franz Boas’ Baffin Island Letter-Diary 1883–1884. 30 William Clark, Academic Charisma and the Origins of the Research University (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2006). 31 Clark, Academic Charisma, 465. 32 Ian Tyrrell, Woman’s World, Woman’s Empire: The Woman’s Christian Temperance Union in International Perspective, 1880–1930 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1991). 33 Quoted in Tyrrell, Woman’s World, Woman’s Empire, 103. 34 Erich Maria Remarque, All Quiet on the Western Front (Boston, MA: Little, Brown and Company, 1929). 35 Article 22 of The Covenant of the League of Nations, April 28, 1919 (accessed at https://www.un.org/unispal/document/auto-insert-199451/, June 23, 2021). 36 Norman Cousins, “Modern Man Is Obsolete,” Saturday Review of Literature, August 18, 1945.

NOTES

297

37 Modris Eksteins, Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1989). 38 V.I. Lenin, “The Immediate Tasks of the Soviet Government,” March 1918, reprinted in Lenin Collected Works, 2nd English edition (Moscow: Progress Publishers, 1971), 68.2–84 (accessed at https://www.marxists.org/archive/lenin/ works/1918/mar/23b.htm, June 24, 2021). 39 Julia Vairngut, Wonderlands of the Avant-Garde: Technology and the Arts in Russia of the 1920s (Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2013), 28–29. 40 Quoted in Vairngut, Wonderlands of the Avant-Garde, 158. 41 Kenneth L. Pomeranz, James B. Givens, and Laura J. Mitchell, eds., Worlds Together, Worlds Apart: A Companion Reader, vol. 2 (New York: W.W. Norton, 2011), 301–302. 42 Figures on purchasing power found in Victoria de Grazia, Irresistible Empire: America’s Advance Through 20th Century Europe (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005), 106. 43 Cited in de Grazia, Irresistible Empire, 111. 44 Adolf Halfeld quoted in Anton Kaes, Martin Jay, and Edward Dimendberg, eds., The Weimar Republic Source Book (Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 1995), 408. 45 Emily Rosenberg, Financial Missionaries: The Politics and Culture of Dollar Diplomacy, 1900–1930 (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999). 46 Quoted in McGregor Knox, “Conquest: Foreign and Domestic, in Fascist Italy and Nazi Germany,” in Journal of Modern History, vol. 56, no. 1 (March 1984), 16. 47 John Dower, War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War (New York: Pantheon, 1986), 20–23. 48 J. Glenn Gray, The Warriors: Reflections on Men in Battle (New York: Harper & Row, 1959), 61. 49 Text of the “Atlantic Charter” signed August 14, 1941 (accessed at https:// www.nato.int/cps/en/natohq/official_texts_16912.htm, June 25, 2021). 50 “Text Proposed by the United States for a Declaration on Liberated Europe, February 9, 1945.” In Foreign Relations of the United States, Diplomatic Papers: Conferences at Malta and Yalta, 1945 (Washington D.C.: Government Printing Office, 1955), Document 429 (accessed at https://history.state.gov/ historicaldocuments/frus1945Malta/d429, June 24, 2021). 51 These reactions were recorded in World Government News, September 1945, 3–9. Swarthmore College Peace Collection. See also Norman Cousins, Modern Man is Obsolete (New York: The Viking Press, 1945). The book is a reprint of an editorial originally published in The Saturday Review of Literature, August 18, 1945, 5–9. See also E.B. White’s list of quotes by famous advocates of world government in the December 8, 1945 edition of The New Yorker, reprinted in E.B. White, The Wild Flag (Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1946), 136–141.

298

NOTES

52 George Orwell, “You and the Atom Bomb,” Tribune, October 19, 1945. 53 Penny von Eschen, Satchmo Blows Up the World: Jazz Ambassadors Play the Cold War (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006). 54 David Riesman, “The Nylon War,” in Abdundance for What: Essays, new edition (London: Routledge, 1993), 67. 55 Nixon-Khrushchev debate transcript (accessed at https://www.cia.gov/ readingroom/docs/1959-07-24.pdf, June 24, 2021). 56 Frantz Fanon, The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Richard Philcox (New York: Grove Press, 1963), 212. 57 Lien-Hang Nguyen, Hanoi’s War: An International History (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2012). 58 See Laura Belmonte, The International LGBT Rights Movement: A History (London: Bloomsbury, 2021), 125–129. 59 Sarah Snyder, Human Rights Activism and the End of the Cold War (New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011). 60 Data accessed at https://www.ncdc.noaa.gov/cag/global/time-series/globe/ land_ocean/ann/12/1970-1979?trend=true&trend_base=10&begtrendyear=19 70&endtrendyear=1979 (June 25, 2021). 61 Data accessed at https://www.statista.com/statistics/264699/worldwide-co2emissions/ and https://ourworldindata.org/co2-and-other-greenhouse-gasemissions (June 25, 2021). 62 Data accessed at https://ourworldindata.org/co2/country/russia and https:// ourworldindata.org/co2/country/china?country=~CHN (June 25, 2021). 63 Data accessed at https://ourworldindata.org/co2-and-other-greenhouse-gasemissions (June 25, 2021). 64 Robert Hunter, The Greenpeace to Amchitka: An Environmental Odyssey (Vancouver, BC: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2005). 65 Donella H. Meadows, Dennis L. Meadows, Jorgen Randers, and William W. Behrens III, The Limits to Growth: A Report for the Club of Rome’s Project on The Predicament of Mankind (New York: Universe Book, 1972). 66 Wangari Maathai, Unbowed: A Memoir (New York: Knopf, 2006). 67 Data quoted in Ignacio Amigo, “When Will the Amazon Hit a Tipping Point,” Nature, February 25, 2020 (accessed at https://www.nature.com/articles/ d41586-020-00508-4, June 25, 2021). Data on Brazilian deforestation collected by the Brazilian National Institute for Space Research (INPE), annual data collection (accessed at http://terrabrasilis.dpi.inpe.br/en/home-page/, June 25, 2021). 68 IAEA (International Atomic Energy Agency) Annual Report 2019, p. 1 (accessed at https://www.iaea.org/sites/default/files/publications/reports/2019/ gc64-3.pdf, February 18, 2021). 69 Data accessed at https://www.theglobaleconomy.com/rankings/share_world_ exports/#China (June 25, 2021). 70 Data accessed at https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/NE.EXP.GNFS. ZS?locations=CN (June 25, 2021).

NOTES

299

71 Data accessed at https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/TRESEGCNM052N and https://www.mof.go.jp/english/policy/international_policy/reference/official_ reserve_assets/e0212.html#:~:text=Japan’s%20reserve%20assets%20 totaled%20%24%201%2C394%2C680,from%20the%20end%20of%20 November (July 1, 2021). 72 Data quoted in Hu Angang,Hu Linlin, and Chang Zhixia, China’s economic growth and poverty reduction (1978–2002) (accessed at https://www.imf.org/ external/np/apd/seminars/2003/newdelhi/angang.pdf (July 1, 2021). 73 Data accessed at https://www.theglobaleconomy.com/rankings/GDP_current_ USD/ (July 1, 2021). 74 Data accessed at https://www.un.org/en/development/desa/news/population/ world-urbanization-prospects-2014.html#:~:text=The%20urban%20 population%20of%20the,to%203.9%20billion%20in%202014 (July 1, 2021). 75 Data accessed at https://ourworldindata.org/urbanization#:~:text=More%20 than%204%20billion%20people,urban%20than%20in%20rural%20areas (July 1, 2021). 76 Tomozo Morino, “China-Japan Trade and Investment Relations,” in The China Challenge: American Policies in East Asia. Proceedings of the Academy of Political Science, vol. 38, no. 2 (1991), 87–94. 77 Data for this section retrieved from the following sites (all accessed July 1, 2021): https://wits.worldbank.org/CountryProfile/en/Country/JPN/Year/2000/ Summarytext#:~:text=Japan%20exports%20to%20China%20 worth,partner%20share%20of%205.67%20percent https://wits.worldbank.org/ CountryProfile/en/Country/JPN/Year/2000/Summarytext; https://trendeconomy. com/data/h2?commodity=TOTAL&reporter=Japan&trade_flow=Export,Import &partner=UnitedStatesOfAmerica,World&indicator=TV,YoY&time_ period=2009,2010,2011,2012,2013,2014,2015,2016,2017,2018,2019, 2020; https://www.adb.org/sites/default/files/publication/156032/adbi-wp177.pdf; https://www.adb.org/sites/default/files/publication/155977/adbi-wp122.pdf; https://mpra.ub.uni-muenchen.de/77990/1/MPRA_paper_77990.pdf; https://wits. worldbank.org/CountryProfile/en/Country/JPN/Year/1990/TradeFlow/Export. 78 Thomas Zeiler, “Opening Doors in the World Economy,” in Akira Iriye, ed., Global Interdependence: The World After 1945 (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2014), 336. 79 William O. Walker, “Drug Control and National Security,” Diplomatic History, vol. 12, no. 2 (Spring 1988), 187–199. 80 United Nations Office of Drugs and Crime (UNODC), Global report on trafficking in persons, 2020 (New York: United Nations, 2020), 9–17 (accessed at https://www.unodc.org/documents/data-and-analysis/tip/2021/ GLOTiP_2020_15jan_web.pdf, June 25, 2021). 81 Internet usage statistics can be found on the website of the ITU at https://www. itu.int/en/ITU-D/Statistics/Pages/default.aspx (accessed June 25, 2021). 82 Data accessed at https://www.unicef.org/media/88381/file/How-many-childrenand-young-people-have-internet-access-at-home-2020.pdf (July 1, 2021). 83 Joseph S. Nye, Jr., Bound to Lead: The Changing Nature of American Power (New York: Basic Books, 1990).

300

NOTES

84

Pew Research Center, Key facts about refugees to the U.S., October 7, 2019 (accessed at https://www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/10/07/key-factsabout-refugees-to-the-u-s/, June 26, 2021).

85

U.S. Census Report, 1990 (Washington, DC: Government Printing Office), 36 (accessed at https://www2.census.gov/library/publications/decennial/1990/ cp-1/cp-1-1.pdf, June 26, 2021).

86

Figures taken from Migration Policy Institute, International students in the United States, January 14, 2021 (accessed at https://www.migrationpolicy.org/ article/international-students-united-states-2020, June 26, 2021). Additional data found at https://educationdata.org/international-student-enrollmentstatistics.

87

Data accessed at https://www.e-unwto.org/doi/pdf/10.18111/unwtogad. 1981.1.l5l7gmm025220756 and https://www.e-unwto.org/doi/pdf/10.18111/ 9789284421152 (July 1, 2021).

88

Data accessed at https://www.e-unwto.org/doi/pdf/10.18111/9789284421152 (July 1, 2021).

89

Jane Desmond, Staging Tourism: Bodies on Display from Waikiki to Sea World (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1999).

90

Martin E. Marty and R. Scott Appleby, eds., The Fundamentalism Project, 6 vols. (Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 1994–2004).

91

Joan W. Scott, The Politics of the Veil (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007).

92

Martha Nussbaum, “Radical Evil in Liberal Democracies: The Neglect of the Political Emotions,” in Thomas Banchoff, ed., Democracy and the New Religious Pluralism (New York: Oxford University Press, 2007), 171–202, here 182–183.

93

Quote by Abdullahi A. Na’im, “Political Islam in National Politics and International Relations,” in Peter L. Berger, ed., The Desecularization of the World: Resurgent Religion and World Politics (Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1999), 103–122, here 103.

94

Samuel Huntington, The Clash of Civilizations and the Remaking of World Order (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1996).

95

UN Global report 2019 at https://www.unhcr.org/en-us/the-global-report. html

96

Figures from the Pew Research Center at https://www.pewresearch.org/global/ 2016/08/02/number-of-refugees-to-europe-surges-to-record-1-3-million-in-2015/.

97

Figures on the US asylum numbers from Pew Research Center at https://www. pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2019/10/07/key-facts-about-refugees-to-the-u-s/.

98

Kwame Anthony Appiah, “Cosmopolitan Patriots,” in Front Lines/Border Posts, Critical Inquiry, vol. 23, no. 3 (Spring 1997), 617–639, here 618.

99

Kwame Anthony Appiah, “The Case for Contamination,” New York Times Magazine, January 1, 2006.

100 Joan W. Scott, “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis,” American Historical Review, vol. 91, no. 5 (December 1986), 1053–1075.

FURTHER READING

General Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso, 1983. Bhabha, Homi K. The Location of Culture, 2nd edition. London: Routledge, 2004. Bourdieu, Pierre. The Field of Cultural Production. New York: Columbia University Press, 1993. Chakrabarty, Dipesh. Provincializing Europe: Postcolonial Thought and Historical Difference. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000. Geertz, Clifford. The Interpretation of Cultures. New York: Basic Books, 1973. Hannerz, Ulf. Cultural Complexity: Studies in the Social Organization of Meaning. New York: Columbia University Press, 1992. Hixson, Walter L. The Myth of American Diplomacy: National Identity and U.S. Foreign Policy. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2008. Iriye, Akira. Global Community: The Role of International Organizations in the Making of the Contemporary World. Berkeley, CA: University of California Press, 2002. Iriye, Akira. Global and Transnational History: The Past, Present and Future. Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2012. Mazlish, Bruce. Reflections on the Modern and the Global. London: Routledge, 2014. Preston, Andrew. Sword of the Spirit, Shield of Faith: Religion in American War and Diplomacy. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2012. Scott, Joan W. “Gender: A Useful Category of Historical Analysis,” American Historical Review, vol. 91, no. 5 (December 1986), 1053–1075. Tomlinson, John. Cultural Imperialism: A Critical Introduction. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1991.

Part One Beckert, Sven. Empire of Cotton: A Global History. New York: Penguin Random House, 2014. Breckman, Warren, and Peter E. Gordon, eds. The Cambridge History of Modern European Thought, vol. 1: The Nineteenth Century. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2019. Breuilly, John, ed. The Oxford Handbook of the History of Nationalism. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. 301

302

FURTHER READING

Buzan, Barry, and George Lawson. The Global Transformation: History, Modernity and the Making of International Relations. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2015. Byrd, Brandon. The Black Republic: African Americans and the Fate of Haiti. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2020. Cass, Jeffrey, and Larry Peer, eds. Romantic Border Crossings. London: Routledge, 2016. Conroy-Krutz, Emily. Converting the World in the Early American Republic. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015. Greenberg, Amy S. Manifest Manhood and the Antebellum American Empire. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Hart, Justin. Empire of Ideas: The Origins of Public Diplomacy and the Transformation of U.S. Foreign Policy. New York: Oxford University Press, 2013. Hobsbawm, Eric. The Age of Capital, 1848–1875. New York: Vintage Books, 1996. Hobsbawm, Eric. Nations and Nationalism Since 1780: Programme, Myth, Reality, 2nd edition. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012. Hunt, Lynn. Inventing Human Rights: A History. New York: W.W. Norton, 2007. Kolb, Anjuli Fatima Raza. Epidemic Empire: Colonialism, Contagion, and Terror, 1817–2020. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2021. Liebersohn, Harry. The Travelers’ World: Europe to the Pacific. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006. Makdisi, Ussama. Artillery of Heaven: American Missionaries and the Failed Conversion of the Middle East. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2008. Mueller-Vollmer, Kurt. Transatlantic Crossings and Transformations; GermanAmerican Cultural Transfer from the 18th to the End of the 19th Century. Frankfurt: Peter Land, 2015. Phelps, Nicole. U.S. Habsburg Relations from 1815 to the Paris Peace Conference: Sovereignty Transformed. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2013. Piketty, Thomas. Capital and Ideology, trans. Arthur Goldhammer. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2020. Sherry, Vincent. “Introduction: A History of ‘Modernism,” in Vincent Sherry, ed., The Cambridge History of Modernism. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017. Stephanson, Anders. Manifest Destiny: American Expansion and the Empire of Right. New York: Hill & Wang, 1996. Wulf, Andrea. The Invention of Nature: Alexander von Humboldt’s New World. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2015.

Part Two Clark, William. Academic Charisma and the Origins of the Research University. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press, 2006. Eksteins, Modris. Rites of Spring: The Great War and the Birth of the Modern Age. Boston, MA: Houghton Mifflin, 1989. Guridy, Frank. Forging Diaspora: Afro-Cubans and African Americans in a World of Empire and Jim Crow. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2010.

FURTHER READING

303

Hochschild, Adam. King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa. New York: Mariner Books, 1998. Hoganson, Kristin. Fighting for American Manhood: How Gender Politics Provoked the Spanish-American and Philippine-American Wars. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1998. Hoganson, Kristin. Consumers’ Imperium: The Global Production of American Domesticity, 1865–1920. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2007. Immerman, Richard. Empire for Liberty: A History of American Imperialism from Benjamin Franklin to Paul Wolfowitz. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010. Iriye, Akira. Cultural Internationalism and World Order. Baltimore, MD: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997. Kaplan Amy. The Anarchy of Empire in the Making of U.S. Culture. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005. Kaplan, Amy, and Donald E. Pease, eds. Cultures of United States Imperialism. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1994. Kramer, Paul. The Blood of Government: Race, Empire, the United States and the Philippines. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2006. Ninkovich, Frank. Global Dawn: The Cultural Foundation of American Internationalism, 1865–1890. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2009. Rodgers, Daniel T. Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 1998. Rosenberg, Emily. Financial Missionaries: The Politics and Culture of Dollar Diplomacy, 1900–1930. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1999. Rosenberg, Emily, ed. A World Connecting: 1870–1945. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press, 2012. Rotter, Andrew. Empires of the Senses: Bodily Encounters in Imperial India and the Philippines. New York: Oxford University Press. Said, Edward. Culture and Imperialism (New York: Knopf, 1993). Sullivan, Zoreh T. Narratives of Empire: The Fictions of Rudyard Kipling. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993. Tyrrell, Ian. Woman’s World/Woman’s Empire: The Woman’s Christian Temperance Union in International Perspective, 1880–1930. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 1991. Tyrrell, Ian. Reforming the World: The Creation of America’s Moral Empire. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010.

Part Three Anderson, Carol. Eyes off the Prize: The United Nations and the American Struggle for Human Rights, 1944–1955. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2003. Anderson, Carol. Bourgeois Radicals: The NAACP and the Struggle for Colonial Liberation 1941–1960. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Borstelmann, Tim. The Cold War and the Color Line: American Race Relations in the Global Arena, revised edition. Cambridge, MA. Harvard University Press, 2003.

304

FURTHER READING

Burke, Roland. Decolonization and the Evolution of International Human Rights. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2013. Cobble, Dorothy Sue. For the Many: American Feminists and the Global Fight for Democratic Equality. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2021. Cohen, Lizabeth. A Consumer’s Republic: The Politics of Mass Consumption in Postwar America. New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 2003. Costigliola, Frank. Roosevelt’s Lost Alliances: How Personal Politics Helped Start the Cold War. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2013. De Grazia, Victoria. Irresistible Empire: America’s Advance Through 20th Century Europe. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2005. Dower, John. War Without Mercy: Race and Power in the Pacific War. New York: Pantheon, 1986. Dower, John. Embracing Defeat: Japan in the Wake of World War II. New York: W.W. Norton, 1999. Dudziak, Mary. Cold War Civil Rights: Race and the Image of American Democracy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000. Fanon, Frantz. The Wretched of the Earth, trans. Richard Philcox, reprint edition. New York: Grove Press, 2005. Goedde, Petra. GIs and Germans: Culture, Gender, and Foreign Relations 1945–1949. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2003. Goedde, Petra. The Politics of Peace: A Global Cold War History. New York: Oxford University Press, 2019. Hazard, Anthony Q., Jr. Postwar Anti-Racism: The United States, UNESCO, and “Race,” 1945–1968. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012. Hazard, Anthony Q., Jr. Boasians at War: Anthropology, Race, and World War II. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2020. Hixson, Walter L. Parting the Curtain: Propaganda, Culture, and the Cold War, 1945–1961. New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997. Iriye, Akira, ed. Global Interdependence: The World Since 1945. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press, 2014. Iriye, Akira, Petra Goedde, and William I. Hitchcock, eds. The Human Rights Revolution: An International History. New York: Oxford University Press, 2012. Keys, Barbara. Globalizing Sports: National Rivalry and International Community in the 1930s. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006. Lee, Sangjoon. Cinema and the Cultural Cold War: U.S. Diplomacy and the Origins of the Asian Cinema Network. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2020. Link, Stefan. Forging Global Fordism: Nazi German, Soviet Russian, and the Contest over the Industrial Order. Princeton, NJ, Princeton University Press, 2020. McKevitt, Andrew. Consuming Japan: Popular Culture and the Globalizing of 1980s America. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2017. Nguyen, Lien-Hang. Hanoi’s War: An International History. Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2012. Oyen, Meredith. The Diplomacy of Migration: Transnational Lives and the Making of U.S. Chinese Relations in the Cold War. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2016. Rosenboim, Or. The Emergence of Globalism: Visions of World Order in Britain and the United States, 1939–1950. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2017.

FURTHER READING

305

Shibusawa, Naoko. America’s Geisha Ally: Reimagining the Japanese Enemy. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006. Thompson, Michael G. For God and Globe: Christian Internationalism in the United States between the Great War and the Cold War. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2015. Vairngut, Julia. Wonderlands of the Avant-Garde: Technology and the Arts in Russia of the 1920s. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press, 2013. von Eschen, Penny. Satchmo Blows Up the World: Jazz Ambassadors Play the Cold War. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2006. Wu, Judy Tzzu-Chun. Radicals on the Road: Internationalism, Orientalism, and Feminism during the Vietnam Era. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2013

Part Four Banchoff, Thomas, ed. Democracy and the New Religious Pluralism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2007. Barber, Benjamin. Jihad vs. McWorld. New York: Ballentine, 2001. Belmonte, Laura. The International LGBT Rights Movement: A History. London: Bloomsbury, 2021. Berger, Peter, ed. The Desecularization of the World: Resurgent Religion and World Politics. Grand Rapids, MI: Eerdmans, 1999. Canclini, Néstor García. Consumers and Citizens: Globalization and Multicultural Conflicts, trans. George Yúdice. Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press, 2001. Getachew, Adom. Worldmaking After Empire: The Rise and Fall of SelfDetermination. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2020. Ghodsee, Kristin. Second World, Second Sex: Socialist Women’s Activism and Global Solidarity during the Cold War. Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2019. Keys, Barbara J. Reclaiming American Virtue: The Human Rights Revolution of the 1970s. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2014. Mohanty, Chandra, Anne Russo, and Lourdes Torres, eds. Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism, 4th edition. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press, 1991. Moyn, Samuel. The Last Utopia: Human Rights in History. Cambridge, MA; Belknap Press, 2010. Olcott, Jocelyn. International Women’s Year: The Greatest Consciousness-Raising Event in History. New York: Oxford University Press, 2017. Ritzer, George. The McDonaldization of Society: Into the Digital Age, 10th edition. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage Publications, 2020. Scott, Joan W. The Politics of the Veil. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2007. Shannon, Kelly. U.S. Foreign Policy and Muslim Women’s Rights. Philadelphia, PA: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2017. Slobodian, Quinn. Globalists: The End of Empire and the Birth of Neoliberalism. Cambridge, MA; Harvard University Press, 2020. Snyder, Sarah. Human Rights Activism and the End of the Cold War. New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011.

306

FURTHER READING

Turek, Lauren Frances. To Bring the Good News: Evangelical Influence on Human Rights and U.S. Foreign Relations. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2020. Walker, Vanessa. Principles of Power: Latin America and the Politics of U.S. Human Rights Diplomacy. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 2020. Watson, James L., ed. Golden Arches East: McDonald’s in East Asia. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press, 2006.

INDEX

Addams, Jane 82, 129 Africa European-educated leaders of 194, 196 Ghana and 194, 203 indigenous elites of 100, 193–195 Kwame Nkrumah and 194, 203 Leopold Senghor and 195–196 negotiated independence and 193–195 persistence of white rule in 194–195 see also non-aligned community African Americans, and colonialism in Africa 105–106 African Progress Union see APU Afrikaners 98 AFSC (American Friends Services Committee) 131 Agassiz, Louis 50 Age of Exploration 16, 36, 95 Aguinaldo, Emilio 114 al-Qaeda 264, 267, 269 Alcott, Louisa May 69 Ali, Muhammad 73 All Quiet on the Western Front 131, 138 American Board of Commissioners for Foreign Missions 32 American Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy see SANE “American Progress” 53–54 anarchists 61, 161 and Seneca Falls Convention 65 Anderson, Benedict 17, 18, 22, 59 Anglo-Saxonism 89, 108 Anthony, Susan B. 128 anthropology and early theories about race 51 foundations of 119–121 and racial theories 119

anti-colonialism African National Congress and 194, 209 after the First World War 138 Algerian National Liberation Front and 194–195 and the Belgian Congo 110 Comintern and 136, 153–155 communism and 153–156 and indigenous resistance 101–104 League Against Imperialism and 154–157 new international consensus of 171 Nelson Mandela and 194 student activists and 205–206 violent suppression of 194–195 women’s rights and 195 see also decolonization, selfdetermination anti-imperialists United States 99, 117 anti-nuclear movement Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament (CND) and 183, 202 Chernobyl and 229–230, 275 green parties and 229 Greenpeace and 227 nuclear energy and 178–179, 229–230, 275 Nuclear Test Ban Treaty and 226 nuclear testing and 202, 279, 226–227, 237 radiation poisoning and 183, 202, 229–230 Ronald Reagan and 231 Soviet Union and 230 The Day After and 230–231 307

308

INDEX

Three Mile Island and 229–230 transnational environmental consciousness of 231 see also environmental movement anti-Semitism and capitalism 195 concentration camps and 166–167 in Eastern Europe 166 and Henry Ford 166 in Italy 166 in Nazi Germany 165–167 Night of the Broken Glass and 165–166 in the United States 164 anti-slavery movement 60 and women’s participation in 65–66 APU (African Progress Union) 136 Arab Soring 217, 248–249 Arabian Nights 68–69 Arbeiter-Zeitung (Chicago) 87 art and ballet 69–70 and colonialism 106 and Dadaist movement 146–147 and expressionism 106 French Impressionism 74–75 Japonisme 74–75 and nature 47 political polarization and 142 and Romanticism 69–70 and Schumann, Clara 69 social and cultural experimentation in the 1920s 147–148 technological modernism and 142–143 Weimar-era Berlin and avant-garde art 142, 147 ASEAN (Association of Southeast Asian Nations) 241–242 atomic bombs see nuclear weapons atrocities China and 167, 262 in the Congo Free State 109–110 crimes against humanity and 180–181, 260 ethnic violence and 260–261 human rights activists and 260–261 International Criminal Tribunal and 181, 261

Japanese commitment of 170–171, 176 minorities and 260–262 Nazi German commitment of 122, 176, 180–181 post-Cold War period and 261 Rwanda and 261 religion and 262 the Second World War cycle of 170 United States’ commitment of 169–170, 176, 180 Yugoslavia and 261 see also genocide, racism; Holocaust Austen, Jane 69 Austria Hungary as empire 17, 19 and ethnic diversity 57 and modernity 25 and nationalist movements 78 Baker, Josephine 106 Bandung Conference 290 Bauer, Otto 90, 91 Beethoven, Ludwig van 75 Belgium 96 Benedict, Ruth 121 Bentham, Jeremy 26 Berlin Congress 1884 96 Bismarck, Otto von 22, 86, 94, 96 Blumenbach, Johann Friedrich 119 Boas, Franz 120–122 Boer Wars 98–99 Boko Haram 264, 269 Bolsheviks 133, 162 Bourdieu, Pierre 5 Boxer Rebellion 104 Brazil and 1848 revolution 58 and nationalism 89 Brexit 284 British Empire 17, 37–38 and modernization 71 see also Great Britain Brothers Karamazov, The 74 Buddhism and attitude toward death 45–46, 108 and humanism 25

INDEX

and proselytization 34 and religious conflict 262 in South Vietnam 198 Burroughs, Edgar Rice 111 Burty, Philippe 74–75 Bush, George H.W. 246 Bush, George W. 267, 271, 274 Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament see CND capitalism and anti-Semitism 165 and Cold War 184 crisis of 159, 163 critique of 150, 187, 204 hybrid with socialism in India 155 and imperialism 94, 153, 189 and international trade 85 and Soviet Union 144 spirit of (Max Weber) 40 in the US 144, 146, 163, 184–185, 204 Casement, Roger 110 Catholic Church and anti-slavery movement 36 in Europe 35 and missionary work in Asia 32 and social ills 36 Cavour, Camillo de 22 CCF (Congress for Cultural Freedom) 186 Central Institute of Labor see CIT Cézanne, Paul 74 Chateaubriand, François-René De 43 Chemical Warfare in the First World War 126, 132 children 68–69 Chile 58 China and art 47 and Boxer rebellion 104, 290 and centralization of power 78 cheap labor from 231 Chiang Kai-Shek and 154, 156 and Chinatowns in the US 62 Christian missionaries in 32–34 as a colonial power 38 and Confucianism 26, 34–35 and the Covid-19 pandemic 285

309

and cultural influence 28 and international trade 27, 37, 62, 116 and empire 17, 93 and European colonization efforts 38, 71 and food 63 global capital and 231, 242 global market and 231–232, 242 and globalization 285 Kuomintang Party in 154, 156 and language 61–62 “Made in China” label 232 and medicine 46 and migration 41–42, 85 and modernization 12, 72 and nationalism 21 one child policy of 232 and the Open Door Notes 116 and the Opium Wars 38 People’s Republic of 156, 231–232, 262 during the Qing dynasty 15, 17, 21, 93–94, 104 state planning and 232 and Taiping rebellion 32–33, 72 technology and 251 tourism and 257 and “treaty ports” 37 and women’s rights 129 see also Zedong Mao cholera see pandemics Churchill, Winston and the Anglo-American alliance 173–174 and Atlantic Charter 168, 173, 237 and the Cold War 175, 179, 181 and Franklin Roosevelt 168, 173–174 and Percentages Agreement 174 and postwar planning 168, 173–175 CIT (Central Institute of Labor) 143–144 citizenship and African Americans 59, 66 as birthright 256 and colonialism 106

310

INDEX

and minorities 78 as national identity 59 racial exclusions to 89, 105–106, 165 civil rights movement 136–137, 201–203, 206 Brown vs. Board of Education and 203 Civil Rights Act and 203 Jim Crow and 203 desegregation and 203 Dwight D. Eisenhower and 203 Martin Luther King and 203, 206 Kwame Nkrumah and 203–204 Montgomery Bus Boycott and 203 newly independent nations and 203 Pan-Africanism and 137, 203–204 the Second World War and 202 civilization and colonialism 93, 96 in contrast to nations 75 and cultural relativism 120 defined as a western 16, 53, 54, 128, 134, 270 as embodiment of modernity 12, 25, 72–73, 75 global 269 and narratives of savagery 109–112 and nature 50 as mission 28, 115 and racial hierarchies 28, 37, 48, 54, 79, 93, 96, 109, 197 and Samuel Huntington 268–269 climate change 229, 276–278, 286, 294 CND (British Campaign for Nuclear Disarmament) 183, 202 CND (United Nations Commission on Narcotics Drugs) 247 Cold War as cultural confrontation 184–189 competing ideologies in, 185 consumerism and 188–189 cultural exchanges and 200 détente and 208, 211, 213, 216, 245, 253, 259 domestic resistance to 184–185, 200–203

economic globalization and 231–232, 245, 253 end of 216, 223–224, 253–254, 259, 267, 292 end of cold-war consensus 207–208 fundamental realignment during the 1970s 200, 208, 212–213, 231, 253 general realignment of 200, 208, 212, 231, 253 George Orwell and 179 NATO and 184 non-state networks and 224 nuclear weapons and 178–179, 200, 212 Sino-Soviet relations and 199, 208 spheres of influence and 174–175, 183, 191 surveillance and 184, 205 Three World Order of 184–185 transnational challenges to 191, 205–208 transnational dissidents’ networks and 202–203, 211, 223–224 Warsaw Pact and 207–208 colonial soldiers Assembly of Greater East Asiatic Nations and 171 decline of colonialism and 170–171 imperial armies of the Second World War and 170–171 India and 171 Japanese brutality against 171 racism and 171, 189 Subhas Chandras Bose and 171 Vietnam and 170 colonialism administrative structures of 99–101 and Africa 97–98 Cold War and 157 colonial leaders and 153, 155, 157 cultural aspects 95 and cultural change 79 different forms of 71–72 and education 100–101 imperial powers and 153 inter-war period and 153, 157 in the metropole 79, 105–112 nineteenth century 94–99

INDEX

non-aligned model of 155–157 and Pan-Africanism 105–106 resistance to 101–104 in Western art 106 in Western literature 107–112 Coming of Age in Samoa 121 Comintern 133, 136, 153, 155 communism and anti-colonialism 153, 155–157 anti-communism 146, 160, 162, 165, 184, 186–187, 199, 201 Challenges to in Eastern Europe 205, 207–208 in China 154, 208, 232 and Comintern 133, 136, 153, 155 during the Cold War 181–187, 199–201 and eastern Europe 184 fall of 224 and Gamal Abdel Nasser 191–192 and Ho Chi Minh 156, 197–198 ideology of 9, 86, 159, 289 and Jawaharlal Nehru 192 in Korea 156, 241 in Metropolis 150 and the New Left 204–205 and non-aligned nations 184 origins of 56–57 and Sino-Soviet split 208 Soviet 145–146 women under 188 Communist Manifesto 56, 57 Computer technology big tech industry and 250–251 consumption and 217 democracy and 217, 249 diasporic groups and 249–250 English language of 251 globalization and 217, 249–250, 284 government funding for 248 imagined communities and 217, 249–250 industrial nations and 250–251 marginalized groups and 250 marketplace of information from 250–251 regulation and 251

311

United States and 248, 251 young people and 250 Confucianism 21, 25, 26, 34–36, 209 Congo Free State 96 in Heart of Darkness 108–110 Congo Reform Association 110 Congress for Cultural Freedom see CCF Conrad, Joseph 107, 108–110 Conservation see environment Consumption advertisements and 151–152 as cultural agent 291–291 and leisure time 152 women’s role in 152, 188 “Council for Propaganda and Action of the Peoples of the East” 136 Court of International Justice (League of Nations) 135 Cousins, Norman 139, 178, 202 Covid-19 pandemic citizenship and 280 cross-border communication and 285 and globalization 10, 292–294 international financial networks and 285 international travel and 277, 280, 285 protectionism and 280, 285 transnational scientific research and 280–281, 285 CPP (Convention People’s Party) 194 Creolization 84, 196–197, 291 Crimean War 73 cross-cultural relations in borderland communities 240, 285 and colonialism 99–104 cosmopolitanism and 250, 282 film and 282–283 hybridization and 282–285 indigenous cultures and 192, 197, 281–282 international audience for 197, 240, 283 material products and 282–283 in the nineteenth century 31 popular music and 283–284 scholarly exchanges and 284–285

312

INDEX

scholarly exoticism and 282 see also globalization Cuba 52, 99, 113–116, 226 cultural diplomacy competing models of 184–188 Hollywood and 185–186 Kitchen Debate and 187–188 material goods and 185, 187–188 propaganda and 184–186, 189 racial discrimination and 189 United States Information Agency and 185–186 Voice of America and 185–186 women and 188 cultural relativism 121–122 culture and colonial encounters 79, 99–105 defined 4–6, 287 and geopolitics 78–80 in international relations 2–4 and movement 77–80 in relation to power 79 Da Vinci, Leonardo 75 DACA (Deferred Action for Childhood Arrivals) 280 Dadaist movement 146–147 see also New Objectivity; art dance as transnational cultural form 69–70 Darwin, Erasmus 48 Darwin, Charles 42 and The Origins of Species 48 and “scientific racism” 50–51, 113 and the voyage of the Beagle 48–50 Darwin, Leonard 120 Debussy, Claude 74 “Declaration of Sentiments” 65 decolonization communism and 155–156 and the Cold War 191–197 cultural foundations of 212 European powers and 156, 192–193 Gamal Abdel Nasser and 191–192 and human rights 290 movement after WWI 136–137, 153

United States’ racism and 195, 203, 288 and Vietnam 197–200 women’s rights and 221–222 see also self-determination; independence; anti-colonialists Delacroix, Eugène 42 Democracy in America 42 Derrida, Jacques 5 détente Cold War realignment and 208, 211, 213 globalization and 245, 243 human rights groups and 211, 215 in Eastern Europe 223-224, 253 Dewey, Commodore George 114 Diagne, Blaise 136 Dickens, Charles 42, 46, 74 Die Nibelungen 91 disability nineteenth century ideas about 66–67 disease infectious 44–45 transnational spread of 44–45 Dostoevsky, Fodor 74 Douglass, Frederick 65 drug trade authoritarian states and 273 Global South and 247, 274 International Criminal Court and 273–274 United Nations and 247 United States and 273–274 Du Bois, W.E.B. 105, 121, 136 Dunant, Henry 131–132 DWB (Doctors Without Borders) 244 Earth Day environmental degradation and 275 as transnational movement 216, 226 see also environmental movement East India Company 33 Eastern Europe anti-Semitism in 166–167 Cold War economic tensions and 182, 188–189

INDEX

détente in 223–224, 253 economic globalization and 232–233, 253 fall of the Berlin Wall and 224 free speech and 184, 282 Prague Spring and 207–208 Red Army control of 175 spheres of influence and 174–175, 179, 186 Warsaw Pact and 207–208 EC (European Community) 238 ECHR (European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms) 223, 272 education 123 and colonialism 100–101, 104, 194 emergence of compulsory 68 and equality 86, 91, 146 and European consolidation 239 and international exchange 123–125, 254, 256–258 and nation-building 266 in the Ottoman Empire 73 and racial discrimination 50–51, 83 women and 65, 86, 129, 291 EEC (European Economic Community) 238 Egypt and modernization efforts in the nineteenth century 73 and Suez Crisis 191–192 Einstein, Albert 178–179, 183 Eliot, George 69 Engels, Friedrich 56, 86, 90 enlightenment age of 12 and idea of civilization 72–73 ideas 12, 24, 240, 254 and internationalism 23, 60 and racist ideology 54, 95, 99, 101, 113, 288 and rationality 67 environment Asian attitudes toward 47 and nature in art and music 47

313

and nineteenth century notions of nature 43, 46–48 environmental movement China and 225, 276–277 and climate change 294 climate science and 275, 277 communications technology and 275–276 as conservation movement 47–48 corporations and 258 Covid-19 pandemic and 277–278 ecological preservation and 229, 258, 277 ecotourism and 258 environmental diplomacy and 216 environmental disasters and 229–231, 275, 278 Environmental Protection Agency and 226 environmental regulations and 228–229, 276–277 Fridays for Future movement and 276 and the Global South 228–229 globalization and 216–217, 258 greenhouse effect and 225–226, 276–277 industrialized countries and 277 international agreements and 228, 276–277 Kyoto Protocol and 228, 276 Organization of the Petroleum Exporting Countries and 229 Paris Agreement and 228, 277 pollution and 225–228, 258, 277–278 populist backlash against 276 regional communities and 238, 241 rise of 211, 216, 225–226 Soviet Union and 225, 231 Silent Spring and 226 United Nations and 228, 258, 276 United States and 225, 276–277 see also Earth Day EPA (Environmental Protection Agency) 226 Equiano, Olaudah 60 Esperanto 61 Essay on Population 49

314

Ethiopia 94, 95 and resistance against colonialism 103–104 EU (European Union) globalization and 216 Brexit and 284 and environmental regulations 238 formation of 233, 238 and global pollution 225, 277 and global trade 240–242 and international crime 246 migration into 278 see also EC, EEC eugenics 119–120 Europe aristocratic elite of 141, 146, 152, 160, 162 Bologna process and 239 and colonialism 38, 39, 48–49, 94–101, 106–112 conservative nationalist parties of 141–142, 152, 159–163 economic globalization and 232, 234–235, 238, 245–246 and empire 93–94 European Court of Human Rights and 223, 272–273 European Union and 216, 233, 238–239, 246, 278–279, 284 European University Institute of 238–239 and the First World War 129–132, 136–137 Green parties in 229 and higher education 124–125 and industrialization 39–40 and international trade 36–38 and internationalism 23–29, 135 lower classes of 141, 152 and migration 40–42, 81–84 and modernity 12, 71–72, 75–77 and nationalism 11, 17–21, 90–92 political polarization of 147–148, 150, 159 as regional community 216, 233, 238–239, 242, 272–273 religion and 262, 265–266, 269–270

INDEX

and scientific racism 48–51, 119–120 socialist parties of 141–142, 146, 152, 160–161, 189 tourism and 257–258 and Versailles Peace Treaty 134–135 and Vienna System 15–18 see also regional communities European Community see EC European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms see ECHR expressionism 106 Fanon, Frantz 195–196, 205 Farr, William 45 fascism anti-communism and 160 anti-Semitism and 165–167 consumption and 160 in Germany 160, 162–163, 165– 167 in Great Britain, 164 ideology of 159–160 in Italy 160–162, 166 mass appeal of 150, 160, 166 mass production and 160 and modernity 160 nationalism and 160 technology and 160 in the United States 164 Vichy regime and 165 youth and 160 see also National Socialists; Mussolini, Benito Fawcett, Millicent Garrett 128 FGM (Female Genital Mutilation) 222, 266 FIFA (Federation Internationale de Football Association) 244 First World War aftermath of 141–142, 144, 159–160, 162 and chemical warfare 126, 132 international order and 141–142, 159 origins 129–130

INDEX

and submarine warfare 133 and technology 130–131, 132 Fodio, Usman Dan 35 food and cultural globalization 234, 259, 291 cultural hybridization and 62–63 food shortages 100, 132 and international trade 37, 58 as national symbol 63 Ford, Henry anti-Semitism of 166 consumption and 143, 152 Fordism and 142–143 Inter-war years and 152 and scientific management 143 workers and 143 Foucault, Michel 5, 67 Fourteen Points 134, 145 France and African colonies 94–98, 101–102 and Asian colonies 106 and de-colonization 194 and enlightenment ideas 24 and the First World War 130 and Franco-Prussian War 86 French Revolution 18, 19, 24, 25 and the Great Depression 163 and higher education 125 and Muslim immigrants 265–266, 270 and Napoleonic wars 15, 24, 25, 26 and nationalist fervor after the Revolution 18 Paris Commune 86 Revolution 24 and right-wing populism 284 Second Republic 57 and the Second World War 165, 175 and student movements 205 and women’s vote, 129 and Versailles Peace Treaty 134–135 and Vietnam 197 Franco-Prussian War 86 free speech Cold War rivalry and 183–184, 203–205 human rights and 211, 220, 290

315

self-determination and 209, 211, 220 social media and 217, 248–251 French Revolution 18, 19 French Workers Party 86 Friedan, Betty 201, 221 Fundamentalist Project, The 264 Futurist movement 77, 81–82, 137 Galton, Sir Francis 120 Gandhi, Mohandas (Mahatma) as anticolonial leader 100, 155, 192 human rights and 209 modernity and 193 Garibaldi, Giuseppe 22 Garvey, Marcus 105 Gast, John 52–53 GATT (General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade) 245 Gauguin, Paul 106 gay rights movement homosexuality and 221 International Gay Association and 221 religion and 264–265 sexual liberation and 221–222, 264–265 Stonewall riots and 221 Geertz, Clifford 5, 79 gender relations the Beats and 201 Simone de Beauvoir and 201 as category of analysis 288–289 Cold War and 188–189, 201–202 consumption and 210–211, 188–189 female genital mutilation and 222, 266 feminism and 146, 201–202, 221–222, 265–266 Betty Friedan and 201, 221 homosexuality and 201, 221 propaganda and 146, 188–189 sex trafficking and 247–248, 267 sexual liberation and 201 women’s liberation and 147, 201–202, 211 see also Women’s Rights Geneva Convention 1864 44, 132

316

INDEX

genocide Herero and Nama 122 Armenian 122 Rwandan 181, 255, 261 see also atrocities; Holocaust geopolitics defined 1–4, in relation to culture 13, 79–80 European dominance in nineteenth century 81 US dominance in twentieth century 81 Germany and 1848 revolution 57 1871 unification 90 1990 unification 224 and African colonies 96–97, 106 Berlin and 142, 147–148, 182, 187, 202 as modernist nation 141–142, 147–178 National Socialism in 160, 162– 163, 165–167 and nationalism 60 nineteenth century nationalism 17–18 and occupation 175 and the Second World War 171 socialist revolution and 141 Weimar Republic 141–142, 147, 165 see also postwar occupations; Hitler, Adolf Global South after the First World War 138 and cultural relativism 221 and decolonization 192–200 economic globalization and 234–235 environmental problems and 228 global Cold War and 185, 192 human population and 227–228 human rights and 221, 274, 290–291 international corporations and 235 international trade agreements and 245–246 local cultures of 192–194, 196

and persistence of inequality 235, 257, 288, 293 post-colonial leaders of 192 pre-colonial rivalries and 192–193 religion and 264 and the Second World War 170 tourism and 257–258 and women’s rights 217, 221 see also non-aligned community globalization alienation and 269–270 Americanization and 253–254 big tech industry and 246 capital and 233 communications technology of 246, 248–251, 259 connection between economic and cultural 37 consumerism of 217 corporations and 231, 246 cross-border movement and 216, 254–255, 257–258, 271 cultural 40, 61–64 and cultural history 292 defined 7 diversity and 234–235, 258–260, 266 during the 1970s 9, 213, 216–217, 233–234, 245, 256, 283 economic 36 ethnic restaurants and 233–234, 271 and food 37 hybridized products of 219, 234 identity politics and 263–264 and industrialization 36, 39–40 inequality of 235–236, 250, 286 individuals and 269–270, 388 interdependency and 269 international brands and 234, 245–246, 271 International Monetary Fund and 241, 245 international policing and 246–248 international students and 256 international trade agreements and 239, 241, 245–246 large cities as spaces for 234–235, 258, 271

INDEX

liberalization and 216, 232, 253, 365 local production and 290, 292 low labor costs and 231–232, 245–246, 255 manufacturing centers for 232, 245–246 and migration 40 modern amenities of 235, 257–258 modern nation-state and 216, 233, 259–260 national borders and 219, 259 nationality and 236, 238, 244, 249, 259 non-state actors and 233, 266–267, 273, 289 post-Cold War acceleration of 253 protectionist responses to 218, 255, 259–260, 280, 285, 293 radicalization and 268–269 rural populations and 232, 235–236, 247, 286 shadow economy of 246–248 The Plaza Accord and 233 tourism and 257 and trade 85 transnational research collaboration and 280–281, 293 women and 247 World Bank and 245 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von 18 Gogh, Vincent van 74 Gramsci, Antonio 5 Great Depression attacks on liberal capitalism from 158, 163 Dawes Plan of 1924 and 145, 153 in Europe 158 free markets model and 145, 158 global financial networks and 145, 163 London Economic Conference and 164 protectionist responses to 163–165, 168 retreat from internationalism and 164 Smoot-Hawley Tariff and 164 stock market crash and 145, 163

317

US Congress and 164, 168 Versailles Treaty and 163 Grieg, Edvard 90 Grimm’s Fairy Tales 68–69 Grotius, Hugo 27 Grotto, Sybil 120 Guantanamo Bay, and Spanish American War 115 Guevara, Che 205–206 “Guo”, “Guojia” 21 Habsburg Empire see Austria-Hungary Hague Conventions, The (1899 and 1907) 132 Harlem Renaissance 105 Harnack, Adolf von 125 Hawaii, annexation 1898 105 Haymarket riot, Chicago 57, 87 Heart of Darkness, novel 107, 108–110 “Heavenly Kingdom of Great Peace” 33 Hegel, G.W.F. 20 Herder, Johann Gottfried 18 Herskovitz, Melville 121 Hiroshige, Utagawa 47, 74 Hitler, Adolf anti-communism and 162, 165 anti-Semitism and 162, 165, 171 the First World War and 162 and idea of Lebensraum 160, 162, 167 Mein Kampf and 162, 165, 169 Munich beer-hall putsch and 162 National Socialist Workers’ Party and 162 Ho Chi Minh disillusionment with the United States 156, 271 anti-colonialism of 100, 134, 153, 192 and communism 153, 156 as nationalist 197 as revolutionary icon 205 the Second World War and 197 and Vietnam War 197–200 and Vietnamese Declaration of Independence 156, 197 see also Vietnam; anti-colonialists

318

INDEX

Hobbes, Thomas 23, 48, 50 Hokusai, Katsushika 74 Holocaust 122, 166–167 homosexuality nineteenth century 66 see also gay rights movement Hong Xiuquan 32–33 Hoover, Herbert corporatism of 201 and Great Depression 224 retreat from internationalism 223–224 Hughes, Langston 105 Hull House 82 human rights anti-colonialism and 209, 220, 222 Bush administration and 274–275 collective versus individual debate on 209, 220 colonial abuses and 209, 211 colonies and 171 contestations over 220–223 détente and 211 early anthropologists and 121–122 enforcement of 180, 219, 222–224, 248, 261–262, 272 European Convention for the Protection of Human Rights and Fundamental Freedoms and 223, 272 fall of the Berlin Wall and 224 female genital mutilation and 222 free speech and 209, 220 and the French Revolution 19 gender equality and 211, 222 Mikhail Gorbachev and 223–224 grassroots groups and 210–211, 223–224 Helsinki Accords as turning point for 211, 223 individual citizens and 210–211, 225 in international relations 290 minorities and 209 national sovereignty and 223–224, 272 regional courts for 225, 272–273 rights revolution, general 290–291 shadow economy and 247–248

Soviet Union and 182, 211 self-determination and 208–209, 220, 222 transnational activism for 210–211, 223–224, 244, 248, 272 UN tribunals and 261–262, 272 United Nations and 209–210, 213, 219–220, 274 United States and 182, 272, 211, 273–275 Universal Declaration of 171, 208–209, 213, 219–220, 244, 275 universality of 209, 221, 275 voting rights and 209, 211 world community and 249, 271, 275 see also free speech Humboldt, Alexander Von 42, 46–47 Hume, David 24 Hurston, Zora Neale 105–106 IACHR (Inter-American Commission on Human Rights) 225, 272 Ibn ‘Abd-al-Wahhab, Muhammad 34 Ibsen, Henrik 90 ICRC (International Committee of the Red Cross) and the First World War 131–132 founding of 44 as non-governmental organization 36 ICTR (International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda) 261 Nuremberg Trials and 181 ICTY (International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia) 260–261 human rights enforcement and 272–273 ICW (International Council of Women) 128–129 ideology as aspect of culture 5–6 and the Cold War 177, 181–185 fascist 159–160, 162 ideology of empire 94–95, 107–108 internationalism as 23, 26 Marxist-Leninist 133, 144 nationalism as 17–22, 88–89, 197 New Left 204

INDEX

racial 48, 54, 55–59, 99, 113–114, 165–166 role of in international relations 289–290 socialist 86–88 totalitarian 9 IGA (International Gay Association) 221 imagined community defined 8 and diversity 260 and nationalism 17, 18, 22, 59 and transnational communities 55–70 IMF (International Monetary Fund) 241, 245 immigrant experiences late nineteenth century 82–84 imperialism European 81 ideology of 94–95 and racial ideology 48 United States 113–118 impressionism, French 74–75 independence Africa and 189–190, 194–195, 203 colonial modernity and 153–157 colonial troops and 170–171, 189 competing visions for 153, 156, 189 Cuban, Filippino in 1898 114–115 cultural transformation of 196, 209 hybrid culture of 192 India and 155, 170–171, 193 modernization and 195 nationhood and 195, 197 post-colonial strife and 193–196 struggle for 153 traditionalism and 195 Vietnam and 156, 197–198 see also postcolonial cultures; decolonization; selfdetermination India and Buddhism 34 Jawaharlal Nehru and 155–157, 192–193 modernity and 157, 193 Muhammad Ali Jinnah and 193

319

Mohandas Gandhi and 192–193, 209 and the Mughal Empire 16, 21 Pakistan and 193 the Second World War and 170–171 and the Sepoy Rebellion 33–34 technological innovation in 215 industrialization 16–17, 36–40 and colonialism 37–38 industrial elites 148, 227 industrial society 148–150 and Irish potato famine 57-58 and labor 40 in late nineteenth century 81 and migration 40–43 production and 143–144, 160, 235, 245–246 and the rise of Marxism 55–57 INGOs (international nongovernmental organizations) 237 intellectuals Cold War competition and 142, 186, 201 East-West relations and 183, 253 nuclear weapons and 178–179 Inter-American Commission on Human Rights see IACHR International Committee of the Red Cross see ICRC International Council of Women see ICW International Criminal Tribunal for Rwanda see ICTR International Criminal Tribunal for Yugoslavia see ICTY International Women’s Conference 87 International Women’s Day 87–88 International Women’s Suffrage Alliance see IWSA International Workingman’s Association, 87 internationalism 12, 22–29 after the First World War 135–138 cultural 123 and culture 27–29 decline during the First World War 129–130 defined 23 economic aspects of 26

320

INDEX

an international law 26–28 and nationalism 22, 23–24, 28–29 and travel 42 and war and peace 23 and the Westphalian System 27 interwar period Hollywood and 150 mass consumption and 142, 150–151 mass technology and 143–144 modernity in 141–143, 146, 150, 153 Paris and 148 transnational cultural exchange and 148 United States and 148 Ireland and 1848 revolution 57 and nationalism 18 and potato famine 57–58 Isis 264, 269 Islam 25 and European values debate 266 and Fulani people 35 and fundamentalism 264, 268 Islamic Cosmopolitanism 26 and proselytization 34–35 and terrorism 268–269 in West Africa 35, 102 Italy and fascism 160–162, 166 and national unification 18, 22, 89 and nationalism 60 IWSA (International Women’s Suffrage Alliance) 128–129 Janissaries 73 Japan anti-nuclear movement in 202, 226, 230 and artistic influence on the West 74–75 and colonization of Korea and Manchuria 38 and “Dutch Learning” 46, 61 economic globalization and 232–234, 241–242, 246, 257, 284 Emperor Meiji 94 the First World and 184, 229

Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere and 167 imperialism and 156, 171 and international trade 27 and modernization 72–73 and political modernization 38–39 racism and 167 regional cooperation and 241–242 the Second World War and 139– 140, 156, 167–171, 178–179, 197, 241 and trade in the nineteenth century 39 Japonisme 75 Jaurès, Jean 87 jazz civil rights and 186 Cold War cultural diplomacy and 186 transnational cultural exchange and 148, 185, 283 Jingoists 116 John Hay 114 and the Open Door Notes 116 Joseph IV 94 Jünger, Ernst 138 Jungle Book 111 Kaiser Wilhelm Gesellschaft (Society) 126 Kant, Immanuel 24 Kennedy, John Fitzgerald 198–199, 215 Khrushchev, Nikita 187–188, 205 Kim, Rudyard Kipling novel 108 King Jr., Martin Luther 203, 206 Kinglake, Alexander William 43 Kipling, Rudyard 107–108 Knudsen, Hans 67 Koch, Robert 45 Korea colonialism and 38, 78 Japanese occupation of 156 and Korean War 184 and nineteenth-century missionaries 32 religion 34 Soviet Union and 156 see also South Korea Kroeber, Alfred 121

INDEX

Labour Party, British 86 LAFTA (Latin American Free Trade Association) 239 laissez-faire economy 26, 58 language acquisition of foreign 61 hybridization of 61 as part of modernization effort in the Ottoman Empire 73 Lat Dior 101–102 law, international in the nineteenth century 26–28 International Criminal Court (ICC) 273–275 and International Tribunal for Rwanda (ICTR) 261 and International Tribunal for Yugoslavia (ICTY) 261 and Nuremberg Tribunal 180–181, 261 and the Peace of Westphalia 27 Laws of War and Peace, The (1625) 27 League Against Imperialism 155–157 League of Nations African and Asian disappointment with 135–138, 154–155 establishment of 134–135 and internationalism 138 legacy of 173 US rejection of 153 Lenin, Vladimir Ilyich and anti-colonialism 153–155 and embrace of Taylorism 143–144 and ideas about imperialism 94, 189 and Russian revolution 132–133 Leopold, King of Belgium 96, 110 Leviathan (Thomas Hobbes) 23 LGBTQ (Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transexual, and Queer) 263 liberalism European model of 216 the First World and 184 as ideology 19, 24 war on terror and 271 literature and colonial culture 107–112 women and 69 Little Women 69

321

Locke, John 24 “Lost Generation” (after the First World War) 138 Lusitania, RMS 132–133 Ma Ba 101 Madness and Civilization 67 Mahmud II 73 Maine, battleship 114 Maji-Maji Uprising 103 Mali 102 Malthus, Thomas 49 Manchu Dynasty 33 Mandate System (League of Nations) 135 Manifest Destiny 99, 118 Mann, Thomas 74 Mansfield Park 107 Marinetti, F.T. 77 Martí, José 114 Marty, Martin 264 Marx, Karl 11, 56, 86, 90 Marxism 11 Matisse, Henri 106 May, Karl 111–112 Mazzini, Giuseppe 22 Mead, Margaret 121 Medical science and disability 66–67 nineteenth century 43–45 non-western 46 and pathologizing homosexuality 66 Meiji Restoration 72–73 Mein Kampf 162, 165, 169 Menelik II of Ethiopia 103 Metropolis (movie) 148–150 Metternich, Prince Clemens von 19 Mexican-American War 52 Mexico and 1848 revolution 58 and Mexican-American War 52 Michelet, Jules 20 Middle Kingdom, The 32 migration of academic 256 age of 16 anti-immigrant sentiment and 217, 255, 271, 279, 284

322

in Asia 41, 85 and assimilation 82–84 to Brazil 89 cheap labor from 255 Chinese 41–42 deportations and 255, 280 domestic opposition to 217, 255 economic globalization and 233 from Europe 40–41, 82–84 European 255, 266, 269–270, 278–279, 284 formation of transnational nations and 255 human trafficking and 247–248 hybrid cultural products of 219 immigrant communities and 249–250, 268, 281 and industrialization 82 industrialized urban centers and 255, 271 international students and 280 and international travel 42–43 international workers and 255, 280 and labor 40–41 Muslim ban and 279 neoliberal global economy and 254–255, 284 numbers in late nineteenth century 82, 85 post-Cold War acceleration of 253 racial heterogeneity and 217 rural-urban 85 and slavery 41 tourism and 254 transnational interactions through 148, 217, 240, 254, 259, 265 see also refugees Mill, John Stuart 26 Mind of Primitive Man, The 121 missionaries Buddhist 34–35 Christian 31–34 and colonialism 96–97, 104, 290 and cultural interaction 3, 31, 36, 37 and internationalism 123 Muslim 35 Mitchel, John 58

INDEX

modern consciousness and cultural hybridization 74–75 defined as western 71–72 non-western forms of 72–74 modernism as ideology 123 nineteenth century 123 modernity aesthetics of 146 and belief in peaceful cooperation 25 and belief in racial superiority 25 competing visions of 141–143, 145 defined as progress 140 disillusionment with 140, 146, 149–150 hybridization and 155, 157 and ideas about civilization 25 inter-war years and 142–143, 146, 148, 156 as modern consciousness 11–13 technology and 140, 142, 146 Molière, J.B.P. 18 Monroe Doctrine 52, 115, 116 Morel, Edward Dene 110 Morton, Samuel George 50 Mott, Lucretia 65 Mott, Manuel 58 movement and colonization 78–79 and consolidation of nation states 78 of goods 77 as an idea 81–82 and modernity 77–79, 81–82 as spatial and temporal concept 77 and transportation revolution 78, 85 and urbanization 78–79 Mughal Empire (India) 16, 21 museums and cultural internationalism 28 music and cultural globalization 283–284 as expression of nationalism 20 as instrument of cultural internationalism 29 and nature 47 and romanticism 69 women’s contribution to 69 Mussolini, Benito 160–162 see also Fascism

INDEX

NAACP (National Association for the Advancement of Colored People) 136–137 NAFTA (North American Free Trade Agreement) 239, 242 Napoleon Bonaparte 15, 18–19 Napoleon, Louis 57 Napoleonic Wars aftermath of 25, 26, 60, 73 as cultural history 15, 16 as geopolitical event 8 and nationalism 18, 19, 60 nation state decline of 9, 216, 237, 243, 259 historicization of 287–288 rise of 17, 22 nation defined 17 as an idea 18, 90 National Association for the Advancement of Colored People see NAACP national identity defined 17, 20 and tolerance of diversity 259–260 National Liberation Front (Algeria) see NLF National Socialist Workers’ Party see NSDAP National Women’s Suffrage Association see NWSA nationalism 12, 14, 17–22 anti-colonialists and 153 as backlash against globalization 260 in Brazil 89 Cold War end and 259 Covid-19 pandemic and 280 cultural intolerance and 271 defined 18 détente and the weakening of 259 as a European ideology of 17, 22 extremist rhetoric of 284 fascism and 160 in Germany 89 globalization and 260, 263, 271, 284 identity politics and 217, 263, 266

323

and imagined communities 59–60 the importance of language in the formation of 18 and internationalism 22, 23–24, 28–29 in Italy 89 and literature 18, 20 movements 11–13 and music 20 and national identity 91–92 non-national identities and 259, 262–263, 271 in the non-western world 21 and the origins of the First World War 129–130 post-Cold War eruptions of 260–261 protectionism and 164, 271 and racial ideology 48 separatism of 260–261, 263 and socialism 88, 90 as threat to international peace 92 transnational exchanges and 153, 259 as a transnational phenomenon 153, 244, 261–262 Donald Trump and 284 United States and 168, 271, 284 in the United States 88–89 and war 22, 23 war and 259 négritude 195–196 Nehru, Jawaharlal anti-colonialism of 153 competing models of modernity and 155, 193 decolonization and 193 education of 100 India and 192–193 Indian National Congress (INC) and 155 political economy of 155–157 Soviet Union and 153 Netherlands as colonial empire 38 “New Imperialism” 94 “New Negro Movement” 106 “New Objectivity” 147

324

INDEX

NGOs (Non-governmental organizations) and challenge to the Cold War order 223–224, 347, 253 Covid-19 pandemic and 244 Doctors Without Borders and 244 during the Cold War, 182–183, 185, as challenge to the nation state 216, 237, 242 economic globalization and 233, 235 and environmentalism 226–227, 237 and globalization 285 growth of in the 1970s, 9, 237–244 and human rights 211, 272, 275 humanitarian aid of 244 and illicit trafficking 246–248 multinational corporations and 235, 237, 245–246 in the nineteenth century 36, 60 sports competitions and 243–244 and terrorism 266–270 Ngwale, Kinjikitile 103 Nicholas II, Czar of Russia 93, 132–133 NIEO (New International Economic Order) 245 Nixon, Richard anti-nuclear movement and 227 environmental movement and 226 Kitchen debate and 258–259 Madman strategy of 200 Vietnamization and 199–200 Watergate scandal 200 see also détente Nkrumah, Kwame civil rights and 203–204 decolonization and 194 NLF (Algerian National Liberation Front) 194–195 non-aligned nations 1955 Bandung Conference of 209, 220 anti-Americanism of 191 anti-communism of 191–192 and the Cold War, 184, and decolonization 184, 192 corporate internationalism and 245 economics of 184 see also anti-colonialism

North American Free Trade Agreement see NAFTA North Korea 241 NSDAP (National Socialist Workers’ Party) Aryan supremacy ideology of 160, 162–163 European imperialism of 162 and denazification 180 German political regime of 147–148, 162, 165–166 see also fascism; Hitler, Adolf nuclear weapons atomic age and 139–140, 177 Atomic Energy Commission and 178 destructive power of 139–140, 177–178, 202 dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki 139, 177, 202, 226 fears of 230–231 international control of 178–179 Manhattan Project and 179 postwar planning and 175, 178 scientific community and 178–179, 182–183 Soviet Union development of 179 transnational peace activism networks and 182–183, 202, 226–227 US Congress and 178–179 see also anti-nuclear movement Nuremberg Laws 165 Nussbaum, Martha 266 NWSA (National Women’s Suffrage Association) 128–129 O’Sullivan, John 52–53 OAS (Organization of American States) 225, 273 occupations iron curtain and 179, 181 Japanese occupations during the Second World War 156, 171 Nazi occupations 180–181 Nuremberg Trials and 180–181 occupation of Japan 181, 186 US occupation of Germany 172, 175, 179–182, 186–187

INDEX

OFF (Office of Facts and Figures) 185 Olympic Games 187, 243 OPEC (Organization of Petroleum Exporting Countries) 229 Open Door Notes 116 Origins of Species, The 48 Ottoman Empire 15, 17 and Christian missionaries 32, 34 and cultural hybridization 28 and international trade 27 and Islamic expansion 34 and modernization 12, 73 and nationalism 21, 25 Ovington, Mary White 121 Owen, Robert 61 OWI (Office of War Information) 169, 185 pacifism 131, 138 Pacini, Filippo 45 Pakistan 34 Pan-African Congress 136 Pan-African movement African diaspora and 196–197 Afro-Caribbean intellectuals and 195–196 civil rights and 203–204 Frantz Fanon and 195–196 formation of 137 Haitian Revolution and 195 Harlem Renaissance and 194, 196 western cultural power and 195–196 pandemics Cholera 44–45 Covid-19 170, 280–281, 285 global 10, 292–294 nineteenth century 44 Paris Commune 86 Paris Peace Negotiations 1898 115 Pasteur, Louis 45 Peer Gynt 90–91 Perpetual Peace 24 Perry, Commodore Matthew C. 12, 73 Pettigrew, Richard 118 Philippines and American intervention 1898 113–116 and Philippine-American War 114–115, 122

325

Picasso, Pablo 106 Platt Amendment 115 PNF (Partito Nazionale Fascista) 161 political extremism in Europe 141, 159–162 global depression and 162, 164 interwar period 141, 210–211 nationalism and 284 in Metropolis 149–150 Polyglott Petition Campaign 127 population and climate change 276 growth in the nineteenth century 40, 45 and Thomas Malthus 49 populism Fascism and 150, 159–160 global depression and 159 in the twenty-first century 276 postcolonial cultures colonial cultural canon and 197 hybridization and 196–197 language and 196 liberation and 195–196 tribal cultures and 195–196 see also independence Poulenc, Francis 74 Principles of Scientific Management (Taylor) 143 propaganda Cold War and 185–186, 189–190 Japanese use of 170 Hollywood and 169 Office of War Information and 169, 185 Dr. Seuss and 169–170 Soviet Union and 150, 189–190 Protocols of the Elders of Zion 166 Proust, Marcel 74 PSB (Psychological Strategy Board) 186 Puccini, Giacomo 91 Quakers 36 and anti-slavery movement 60 as category of analysis 288 and colonialism 79 during the Cold War 182; see also AFSC; race

326

INDEX

ideology of 113, 118 racial identity 99 Races of Mankind, The 121 racism Bataan Death March and 170 colonial legacies of 189–190 global 288 Greater East Asia Co-Prosperity Sphere and 167 Japanese expansion into Manchuria and 167 Japanese-American relocation camps and 167 massacre in Nanjing and 167 Nisei military service and 167 Pearl Harbor and 167–168 in the United States 202–203, 206 see also atrocities; fascism; antiSemitism RAF (Red Army Faction) 207 refugees anti-immigrant sentiment and 266, 279 Europe and 255, 266, 278–279 international aid organizations and 210, 244, 255 international law and 279 post-Cold War waves of 255, 385 terrorist attacks and 266, 279 in the twenty-first century 278–281 United States and 279–80 Vietnam War and 200, 255 regional communities African Union and 273 Association of Southeast Asian Nations and 241 Atlantic world and 240 border control and 233, 238, 240 corporations and 242 education and 239 entertainment and 242 environmental protection and 238–239, 241 European model of 216, 233, 238–239 human rights and 248, 272–273 North American Free Trade Association and 239–240

North Atlantic Treaty Organization and 240 Organization of American States and 273 policing and 246, 248 shared language and 240 shared markets of 240–242 shared memory and 240–241 transnational consciousness of 239, 241 trans-Pacific community and 240 see also supra-national communities religion assimilation and 266 backlash against globalization and 264–265 and colonialism 33 fundamentalist 264–266, 268 gay rights and 265 in international relations 290 migration and 265–266 and modernization 25 religious pluralism 264–266 and separation from the state 35 terrorism and 264–266, 270 and transnational encounters 31–36 United States and 265 women’s rights and 265 see also missionaries, Islam, Buddhism, Wahhabism religious communities operating transnationally 59, 60 Remarque, Erich Maria 131, 138 Renan, Ernest 90, 91 revolution 1848 in Europe 56–58 1848 in Latin America 58 American 19 French 18, 19, 24, 25 Russian 132–134 Revolutionary Socialist Workers’ Party, France 86 Ricardo, David 26 “Risorgimento” 22 Rite of Spring (Igor Stravinsky) 137 Robert, Issachar Jacox 33 romanticism, in music and literature, 69–70, 90

INDEX

Roosevelt, Franklin Atlantic Charter and 168, 173–174 and New Deal programs, 164 as opponent of isolationism 167–168 postwar planning of 174, 181, 185 Roosevelt, Theodore 114–116 and ideas about masculinity 117 and Roosevelt Corollary 115 and the “Rough Riders” 112 Russian Revolution 132–133 international order and 141 Said, Edward 75, 105, 107 SANE (American Committee for a Sane Nuclear Policy) 183, 202 Schengen Agreement 238 Schiller, Friedrich 18 Schurz, Carl 118 scientific management 143–144 Alexei Gastev and 143–144 Americanization and 144 centralized experts and 144 industrialization and 143–144 V.I. Lenin and 143–144 modern technology and 143–144 in the Soviet Union 143 scientific racism 48–51, 118–119 and enlightenment ideas 54 “Scramble for Africa” 95–96, 98–99 SDS (Sozialistischer Deutscher Studentenbund) 206 SDS (Students for a Democratic Society) 204 Second International 87 Second World War aftermath of 175–176 business and 168, 246 colonial troops and 170–171 Global South involvement in 170–171 as global war 142, 167, 170 as race war 167, 170–171 Yalta Conference and 174, 181 self determination 113 after the First World War 134–137 Atlantic Charter and 173 postwar planning and 189 and Wilson’s Fourteen Points 153–155

327

see also decolonization; independence; anti-colonialists; human rights; hierarchy of rights Senegal 101 Senghor, Leopold 194–196 Sepoy Rebellion 33–34, 104 September 11th terrorist attacks 264, 266–269, 271 Shakespeare, William 18, 20, 75 slavery abolitionist movement and 60 and creolization 84 and cultural hybridization 41 as forced migration 41 and triangular economy 36 Smetana, Bedrˇich 47, 91 Smith, Adam 24, 26 Snow, John 45 Social Democratic Party, German 86 Social Welfare 68 socialism and the British Labor Party 86 and fight for eight-hour day 87 and the French Workers’ Party 86 and the German Social Democratic Party 86–87 as ideology 11, 24, 56 and the Haymarket riot 87 and the International Workingman’s Association 87 and labor organizations 86–88 and May 1 Labor Day 87 and nationalism 88, 90 and opposition to child labor 87 origins of 55–57 and the Paris commune 86 and the Second International 87–88 in the United States 87–89 and women’s rights 87 “Society for Assistance to the Maimed, Crippled and Injured” 67 South Korea cultural globalization of 282–284 and global pop culture 242 membership in ASEAN, 241–242 and tourism 257 see also Korea

328

INDEX

Soviet Union after the First World War 138 collapse of 9, 232 communist system 142, 181, 185, 205 economic globalization and 232–233 equality and 142 free speech and 183–184 gender equality and 146, 188–189 Gulag Archipelago and 205 Hungary and 183–184, 189, 205, 223 V.I. Lenin and 143–144, 153 mass industrial production and 144 origin 132–133 Poland and 175, 189, 205, 223 popular unrest in 183–184, 207–208, 223–224 property reforms and 142, 144 revolutionary intelligentsia and 142 samizdat in 205 Second World and 168, 172 welfare programs of 146 space exploration as Cold War competition 215 John F. Kennedy and 215 moon landing and 215 transnational unity and 216 Spain and colonial rule in Cuba, Philippines 113–116 and fascism 159 Spanish American War 105, 113–118, 122 Spiess, August 87 “spirit of capitalism, the” 40 Stalin, Josef 144, 146, 173–175 Stanton, Elizabeth Cady 65, 128 Storm of Steel (Ernst Jünger) 138 student movements counter culture and 201 in Europe 205–207 free speech movement of 205 international New Left and 203–204 national liberation movements and 207 and Port Huron Statement 204

Students for a Democratic Society and 204–207 Vietnam War and 205 Students for a Democratic Society see SDS sub-cultures organized around identity 64–70 Suez Canal 12, 28 crisis 190, 191–192 Sultan Selim III 73 Sun-Yat-sen 94 supra-national communities common canon for 240 decline of the nation-state and 242–243 European Community as 238 individual states and 210, 238 national sovereignty and 210, 219–220, 238, 272 transnational consciousness of 239, 240 Universal Declaration of Human Rights and 244, 272 see also regional communities sustainability climate change and 275–277, 398 Club of Rome and 227 deforestation and 228–229, 275 development and 228–229 endangered species and 258, 275 environmental degradation and 228–229, 258, 275 food insecurity and 228, 275 materialist consumer model and 219 Stockholm Declaration and 228–229 see also environmental movement Tagore, Rabindranath 10 Taiping rebellion 32–33, 72 Taliban, the 267, 269, 274–275 Tanzania 103 Tarzan of the Apes 111 Taylor, Frederick Winslow (Taylorism) 143 technology and China 231 communications 217–218, 248–251, 259–260, 267–268 and fascism 160

INDEX

the First World War 130, 132 and industrialization 39 nineteenth century and 16–17 and trade 85, 124 telegraph as communication network 124 Teller Amendment 114–115 Tocqueville, Alexis De 42 Tokugawa regime 73 Tosca 91 Touré, Samori 102–103 Toynbee Hall 82 trade, international 26 and migration 85–86 transnationalism defined 6–7 travel and cultural internationalism 123 and globalization 254, 257–258 increase in the 1970s 233 international 42–43 narratives 42 Treaty of Brest Litovsk 133 “Triangular Economy” 37 Trollope, Frances 42 Truman, Harry 175, 186, 203 Trump, Donald 256, 274–275, 277, 279–280, 284 Tsungli Yamen 72 Tuskegee Institute 105 UGCC (United Gold Coast Convention) 194 ukiyo-e 74 Ulrichs, Karl Heinrich 66 UN (United Nations) charter of 121, 171, 173, 189, 209 colonial liberation and 171, 173–174, 185, 209–210 corporate internationalism and 245 Environmental Program of 227–228 human population and 227 human rights and 182, 209–210, 219–220, 223, 244, 272–273 Office of Drugs and Crime 247 post-imperial order and 173 racial equality and 171 tourism and 258

329

Universal Declaration of Human Rights and 171, 209, 219–220, 223, 272 UNDHR (Universal Declaration of Human Rights) 171, 209, 219–220, 222–223, 244, 272 UNEP (United Nations Environmental Program) 227–228 unequal treaties 38 UNESCO (United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization) 121, 282 UNFDAC (United Nations Fund for Drug Abuse Control) 247 United Gold Coast Convention see UGCC United Nations Commission on Narcotics Drugs see CND United Negro Improvement Association 105 United States “American Century” and 254 baby boom generation and 201 capitalist system of 142, 248 consumption and 151–152, 186–189, 234 credibility in Africa and Asia 145, 191, 199–200, 203 Jim Crow system of 145, 203 culture of conformism and 201 and dropping of the atomic bombs 177–179 economic globalization and 150–51, 186–187, 234, 245–246, 250–251, 254 European critics of 152, 163 and the First World War 132, 134–135 free trade and 142 global rhetoric of 145, 184–186, 295 great migration and 145 and higher education 125–126 Hollywood 148, 150, 185–186 and imperialism 95, 99, 115, 117 international trade agreements and 245 and League of Nations 134–135 Lend-Lease Act and 168

330

INDEX

and Manifest destiny 52–54 mass culture of 151 mass industrial production and 143–144 mass participation and 145 middle-class materialism of 201 model of modernity 142, 145, 163, 185 and Monroe Doctrine 115–116 and national consolidation after Civil War 88–89 and nationalism 18 NATO and 184, 240 neutrality of 168 and “New Negro Movement” 105–106 and nuclear monopoly and 140 Nye Committee and 168 and occupation of Germany 179–182 post-Cold War superpower status of 253–254 and postwar planning 173–176 protectionist model of foreign relations 164 racism in 167–170, 191 the Second World War and 167–170 and slavery 60, 88 soft power of 184–188, 254 and Spanish-American war 105, 113–118, 122 technology and 53, 142–144, 248–251 tourism and 254, 257 and westward expansion 51–52 and women’s movement 65–66, 127–129 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) 121 universities British universities 124–125 French 125 German model of 124 and international exchange 123 United States 125–126 urbanization, 55–56 USIA (United States Information Agency) 185–186 utopian movements in the nineteenth century 60–61

Verdi, Giuseppe 28 Versailles Peace Treaty 134–135 Victor Emanuel III 22 Vienna Congress 1815 15, 18–19, 26, 91–92 Vietnam anti-war movements and 199, 205 Dien Bien Phu and 198 French colonialism in 156, 170, 197 Japan and 170 independence and 192, 197 National Liberation Front (NLF) in 198 Ngo Dinh Diem and 198 religious conflict in 273 Sino-Soviet split and 199 Tet Offensive and 198 United States and 156, 184, 197 US disillusionment and 199–200 US policy of credibility toward 199–200 Vietnam War 197–200 see also Ho Chi Minh Vindication of the Rights of Women, A 65 VOA (Voice of America) 185–186 Voltaire 12 Voyage of the Beagle 49–50 Wagner, Richard 91 Wahhabism 34 Wallace, Alfred Russel 50–51 Washington, Booker T. 105, 121 WCTU (Women’s Christian Temperance Movement) 127–128 Wealth of Nations, The (1776) 26 Weber, Max 40, 125 “White Man’s Burden” 107 Whitman, Walt 66, 69 Wilde, Oscar 66, 69 Wilhelm I, Emperor of Germany 22, 90 Wilhelm II, Emperor of Germany 93, 126 Willard, Frances 127 Williams, Samuel Wells 32

INDEX

WILPF (Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom) 129, 131 Wilson, Woodrow 133–135, 145, 153, 156 Wollstonecraft, Mary 65 women international women’s movements nineteenth century 127–129 and literature 69 origin of rights organizations 65 role in the Paris commune 86 and socialist movements 87–88 Women’s Christian Temperance Movement see WCTU Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom see WILPF women’s rights Simone de Beauvoir and 201 and environmental movement 228–229 feminism and 146, 201–202, 221–222, 265–266 in the Global South 217, 221–222, 266 homosexuality and 201, 221 sexual liberation and 201 women’s liberation and 147, 201–202, 211

331

working class and internationalism 56–57 nineteenth century conditions 56 World Fairs 28 and exposure of racialized hierarchies 28 Paris 1889 119 WPC (World Peace Council) 183 WTO (World Trade Organization) 245 Xenophobia, 260, 264 Yohannis IV of Ethiopia 103 Young Irish 58 Young Women’s Christian Association see YWCA YWCA (Young Women’s Christian Association) 128 Zamenhof Ludwik Lazar 61 Zedong, Mao anti-colonialism and 153, 156 Chinese Communist Party and 156 Kuomintang Party and 156 Marxist-Leninism of 156 revolution and 156, 205 see also China Zimmermann Telegram 133–134 Zola, Émile 74

332