Inter Nationalism

“The age of transnational humanities has arrived.” According to Steven Salaita, the seemingly disparate fields of Palestinian Studses and American Indian studies have more in common than one may think. In Inter/Nationalism, Salaita argues that American Indian and Indigenous studies must be more central to the scholarship and activism focusing on Palestine. Salaita offers a fascinating inside account of the Boycott, Divestment, and Sanctions (BDS) movement—which, among other things, aims to end Israel’s occupation of Palestinian land. In doing so, he emphasizes BDS’s significant potential as an organizing entity as well as its importance in the creation of intellectual and political communities that put Natives and other colonized peoples such as Palestinians into conversation. His discussion includes readings of a wide range of Native poetry that invokes Palestine as a theme or symbol; the speeches of U.S. President Andrew Jackson and early Zionist thinker Ze’ev Jabotinsky; and the discourses of “shared values” between the United States and Israel. Inter/Nationalism seeks to lay conceptual ground between American Indian and Indigenous studies and Palestinian studies through concepts of settler colonialism, indigeneity, and state violence. By establishing Palestine as an indigenous nation under colonial occupation, this book draws crucial connections between the scholarship and activism of Indigenous America and Palestine.

Glenda Sluga traces internationalism through its rise before World War I, its mid-century apogee, and its decline after 9/11. Drawing on archival material and contemporary accounts, this innovative history restores internationalism as essential to understanding nationalism in the twentieth century.

It is commonplace that the modern world is more international than at any point in human history. Yet the sheer profusion of terms for describing politics beyond the nation state—including “international,” “European,” “global,” “transnational” and “cosmopolitan,” among others – is but one indication of how conceptually complex this field actually is. Taking a wide view of internationalism(s) in Europe since the eighteenth century, Nationalism and Internationalism Intertwined explores discourses and practices to challenge nation-centered histories and trace the entanglements that arise from international cooperation. A multidisciplinary group of scholars in history, discourse studies and digital humanities asks how internationalism has been experienced, understood, constructed, debated and redefined across different European political cultures as well as related to the wider world.

Would there have been a Third World without the Second? Perhaps, but it would have looked very different. From Internationalism to Postcolonialism recounts the story of two Cold War-era cultural formations that claimed to represent the Third World project in literature and cinema, and offers a compelling genealogy of contemporary postcolonial studies.

The twentieth century, a time of profound disillusionment with nationalism, was also the great age of internationalism. To the twenty-first-century historian, the period from the late nineteenth century until the end of the Cold War is distinctive for its nationalist preoccupations, while internationalism is often construed as the purview of ideologues and idealists, a remnant of Enlightenment-era narratives of the progress of humanity into a global community. Glenda Sluga argues to the contrary, that the concepts of nationalism and internationalism were very much entwined throughout the twentieth century and mutually shaped the attitudes toward interdependence and transnationalism that influence global politics in the present day. Internationalism in the Age of Nationalism traces the arc of internationalism through its rise before World War I, its apogee at the end of World War II, its reprise in the global seventies and the post-Cold War nineties, and its decline after 9/11. Drawing on original archival material and contemporary accounts, Sluga focuses on specific moments when visions of global community occupied the liberal political mainstream, often through the maneuvers of iconic organizations such as the League of Nations and the United Nations, which stood for the sovereignty of nation-states while creating the conditions under which marginalized colonial subjects and women could make their voices heard in an international arena. In this retelling of the history of the twentieth century, conceptions of sovereignty, community, and identity were the objects of trade and reinvention among diverse intellectual and social communities, and internationalism was imagined as the means of national independence and national rights, as well as the antidote to nationalism. This innovative history highlights the role of internationalism in the evolution of political, economic, social, and cultural modernity, and maps out a new way of thinking about the twentieth century.

The political history of modern Europe may be seen in terms of continuous interaction between rivalling forms of internationalism and diverse kinds of nationalism. This book distinguishes, analyses and presents the different kinds and varieties of internationalist and nationalist ideology that have played significant parts in the international politics of the region, particularly since the Second World War. It indicates the origins of each pattern of thought, traces its development, brings out its relationship with other strands of thought and outlines its major political influences. The emphasis is on internationalist support for and nationalist opposition to the principal regional international organizations.