These illustrated the phases through which backward, warlike societies had evolved into civilized, peaceful ones. The pictorial narrative began with a tranquil Primitive Age peopled by hunters, shepherds, and harvesters living in communion under the astrological signs of the zodiac, a moment of innocence that came crashing to an end with the invention of metallurgy.
A bloody Age of Conquest, in which Bellona, goddess of war, held sway, followed. French jurists delineated the new frontiers of p.
Internationalism in the Age of Nationalism (Electronic book text)
These provided a basis for international cooperation, rationales for international organization, or arguments in favour of a world run by technocratic elites. Although the minorities treaties posed politically sensitive challenges for interwar international institutions, they did not alter the underlying cultural assumptions of international law. For centuries before the First World War, non-Western states such as the Ottoman Empire had signed treaties with various European great powers for the protection of the rights of Christians on its territory. These minorities, by virtue of their relative immaturity, were not entitled to national self- determination, but rather a degree of collective cultural autonomy, particularly regarding the use of minority languages, though it was expected that they would one day be assimilated into the majority culture.
Scholars writing in this vein allow for a plurality of means to realize economic integration initiatives, as well as a plurality of motives behind them. Histories of the European project have for the most part lavished attention on the technocrats at the expense of the romantics, considering the latter not to be the stuff of serious scholarship. Traditionally scholars located the origins of European integration in the domains of international relations or political economy, with the interests of state actors and national preferences as the point of departure.
In doing so, they have overlooked another split: The overwhelming concentration on economic integration has buried concomitant efforts to realize the cultural and ethical http: From the mids to the early s, the liberal French statesman alternated roles as foreign minister and delegate to the League of Nations.
In September , he made a dramatic appeal to the League Assembly in Geneva for new measures to promote international peace. Briand stressed the economic advantages of federation in order to gain support from French and German industrialists who wished to form a Continental customs union in order to protect their business concerns from competition with the United States.
British businessmen and advocates of imperial preference also warmly received his proposals, as they wished to undermine the free trade system favoured by both the United States and the dominant factions in Whitehall. Like romantic nationalists, he spoke not of the invention of a united Europe but of its regeneration, rebirth, and resurrection. In stark contrast to his hostility towards the Nazi regime, Coudenhove-Kalergi made great efforts to persuade Fascist Italy to join his cause. Now the forces of the Fascist International are rising. More practically, they envisioned a European federation as a vehicle for promoting Franco-German reconciliation and undermining the harsh terms of the Treaty of Versailles.
Adolf Hitler, however, resisted endorsing projects for European economic and political union. Mainstream accounts locate the deeper origins of human p. Beginning with early natural rights ideas and revolutionary rights declarations, most such narratives move onwards to nineteenth-century movements for greater civil liberties, democratization, humanitarian causes, and social protections, in addition to those on behalf of the rights of minorities, women, and workers.
These histories typically draw a direct line from nineteenth-century activism to interwar liberal internationalism and the League of Nations rights regimes. The invocation of human rights in statements of Allied war aims and the Charter of the United Nations gave birth to the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, which in turn inspired the human rights texts, movements, and politics of the following decades.
As regards the genesis of the Universal Declaration, the causal linkages it describes have great explanatory value. There can be no disputing, moreover, that these factors generated the preconditions essential for the creation of the European human rights system as well. Even so, tracing the genesis of post-war human rights norms along a linear trajectory that terminates with the Universal Declaration offers only a partial rendering of their origins.
Any historical account that focuses too heavily on unearthing component parts of the Universal Declaration in the past risks becoming teleological and essentialist—that is, a history that ignores the many sources, meanings, and uses of human rights discourse that did not conform to the Universal Declaration paradigm or contribute to its formulation. This is not to say that evolutionary narratives fail to account for the plural origins of post-war human rights. Indeed, many scholars writing in that vein stress the polygenetic quality of human rights discourse to such an extent that human rights ideas and practices appear common to every society across the globe—if not in the deeper past then certainly by the time of the adoption of the Universal Declaration.
Histories of the drafting of the Universal Declaration have demonstrated how the http: Foremost among these were Anglo-Saxon common law principles; Christian communitarianism, natural law, and social thought; early modern theories of natural rights; republican doctrines of the rights of man; Latin American socialism; and constitutional rights texts from around the world, from the US Bill of Rights to the socio-economic rights provisions of the Soviet constitution.
This was not only due to contributions made during the drafting process by delegates representing nations outside the West. Many Western delegates echoed their non-Western counterparts in conjoining human rights with human duties, positing that p. This new emphasis on historical ruptures, often arrived at through a functionalist analysis that stresses practical outcomes, has shed much-needed light on how rights texts have differed from one era to the next as well as the contingent circumstances in which they have arisen.
This is useful as a rubric with which to distinguish past understandings of fundamental rights from the prevailing mainstream understanding of human rights today as supranational individual civil liberties that all human beings are entitled to enjoy in equal measure. Proponents of the discontinuity thesis have privileged diachronic comparison over synchronic comparison, searching for differences over time rather than within a particular era.
Unlike earlier statements of fundamental rights, the Universal Declaration unambiguously and unequivocally stipulated that all human beings regardless of the social group or category to which they belong—including their colonial status—enjoyed the same fundamental civil, political, economic, social, and cultural rights.
Like the League of Nations rights regimes, the European Convention was meant to apply principally to a delimited social group—in this case Europeans—rather than the entirety of the human species. The ostensible universality of human rights and the territorial application of the European Convention were clearly in tension with one another in Article 63 of the original text Article 56 of the European Convention today, as amended by Protocol Here the European Convention established a double standard for the implementation of its provisions within colonial and non-colonial territories.
A state party could choose whether or not the European Convention applied to any one of its colonies.
Or, put another way, the human rights of Europeans were not to be confused with the human rights of humanity. Considered today as an aberration at odds with the remainder of the European Convention, this colonial exceptions clause was in fact at the heart of the construction of the European human rights system.
Post-war champions of a European human rights treaty envisioned it as a means of delineating the frontiers of what they p. This civilizational rhetoric, http: Both sides in the Second World War sought to inspire their populations through patriotic appeals coupled with calls for the defence of civilization against barbarism. The Continent was the site of bloody nationalist struggles against German occupation.
Though such phraseology could be invested with a number of meanings, it typically denoted a commitment to promoting economic and social rights alongside civil and political rights. The ceding of any degree of hard-won national and popular sovereignty to a new European organization of states did not have broad appeal. Western European economies may have emerged from the war crippled, as well as dependent on international cooperation and foreign assistance. Yet their enthusiasm for the nation state had surfaced stronger than perhaps ever before. In these circumstances, it was hardly surprising that calls for a supranational federation, or even a looser union of European states, were not met straight away with widespread enthusiasm.
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Many post-war statesmen considered such schemes to be impracticable and irksome distractions from more pressing domestic matters. Their focus rested squarely on economic reconstruction and social reforms, which they conceived as projects for national renewal to be implemented within the territorial framework of the nation state.
The leaders of the European unity movements were well aware that they faced nationalist headwinds and that Axis propaganda to the same effect had left a bitter taste.
They had equated national sovereignty with popular sovereignty and national belonging with national citizenship. Nineteenth-century nationalists had coupled—or substituted—this liberal revolutionary nationalism with an understanding of the nation as a historical people united through age-old bonds of culture and kinship. They imagined Europeans as sharing a long history of cultural unity that stretched back to the united Christian Europe of the Middle Ages.
This wider European community of peoples, they claimed, was also knit together by a shared commitment to individual freedom and the rule of law. The formation of a European union thereby would mark at once an end to the cataclysmic age of total war and a nostalgic return to the lost unity of a bygone era. To construct a European union on this basis was not to plunge Europeans into an unknown future or compel them to break with their deeper past.
Rather, it was to lead them back to the more enlightened, harmonious civilization of their ancestors. Its boundaries would not conform, however, to the old frontiers of Christendom until all the states of Europe were governed in accordance with the principles of human rights and democracy. Economic integration was to be accompanied by the adoption of a European human rights accord and the establishment of a European supreme court to implement its provisions.
Internationalism in the Age of Nationalism
The European unity p. Joining him, among others, were two neo-medieval Catholic intellectuals prominent in the European Union of Federalists: As a result of the triumph of parliamentary democracy over the medieval system of communal privileges, individuals had been left entirely at the mercy of an all- powerful state. The solemn declarations of individual rights enshrined in Continental constitutions meant little when they had neither binding legal authority over parliamentary majorities nor judicial mechanisms of enforcement.
The chief champions of a European human rights treaty were also among the most outspoken supporters of German participation in European integration initiatives. In so doing, these movements hoped to legitimize the exclusion of communists from European organizations at a moment when many on the Western European Left and Centre still held hopes of holding together the wartime anti- fascist coalition.
This was not dissimilar to how Europeans had deployed civilizational discourse to frame questions of international justice, law, and organization in earlier decades. Their aim had been not only to legitimate colonial rule, which the majority considered beyond dispute, but also to regulate which non-colonial societies could exercise full sovereign rights under international law. After the outbreak of the First World War, international lawyers and statesmen had been as likely to invoke civilization in order to place nations such as Germany, Russia, and Turkey outside the boundaries of what the Hague http: The Second World War witnessed not only a fracturing of this international community, but also a near fatal breakdown of the very idea of European civilization.
In recent decades, the language of human rights and democracy has served the same p. Although references to democracy and human rights were absent from the founding treaties of the European Communities, they have been ubiquitous in the treaty law of the European Union since its inception at Maastricht in These principles are said today to be at the heart of what it means to be a European.
Inventing the international - the origins of globalisation
Even so, their precise valence and the uses to which they are put continue to vary widely. Under the surface of a common political vocabulary, stark differences exist between European nations and within them. It has become apparent that to describe democracy and human rights as the cornerstones of European solidarity does little to bind together the diverse peoples of Europe if there is no deeply felt sense of a common European cultural and ethical heritage to give these words substance.
On the history of internationalism more generally, see Mark Mazower, Governing the World: University of Pennsylvania Press, The Reinvention of the League of Nations Oxford: Internationalism in the Age of Nationalism. Internationalism, as social scientists might say, is under-defined. This is especially evident when one considers the phenomenon of nationalism, with which internationalism is often paired. The theoretical and empirical scholarship on nationalism is massive.
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For this reason alone, Internationalism in the Age of Nationalism is welcome. In the book, which is more an extended essay than a monograph, Sluga explores the nature of twentieth-century internationalism. Scholars, accordingly, need to write internationalism back Most users should sign in with their email address. If you originally registered with a username please use that to sign in. To purchase short term access, please sign in to your Oxford Academic account above.
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