Chapter 1 offers a historical introduction as well as an overview of existing research in the field. It argues that by mapping out the trajectories of former volunteer soldiers, it is possible to see the many ways in which the Spanish Civil War and the broader anti-fascist engagement of the inter-war period could constitute a transformative experience and event; an event that expanded volunteers’ political horizons and gradually opened up possibilities for border-crossing political engagement in the post-war era. Thus, it sets the stage for the case studies constituting the main part of the book, showing that the political and military influence of the volunteers in Spain did not necessarily come to an end in 1938/1939 or even in 1945. In a few yet significant cases, it stretched across the globe far into the Cold War period.

This chapter examines the crucial seven-year period between Stimson’s resignation as secretary of state in March 1933 and his return to the War Department in June 1940. Although Stimson did not anticipate he would ever return to Washington to serve in the federal government, some of his most important public service occurred when he was a private citizen in this period. Particularly, this chapter advances two critical arguments. The first is that Stimson had both a much wider definition of national security than most of his contemporaries did and came to those conclusions before nearly any other American leader or opinion maker. The second argument is that attempting to neatly define Stimson’s internationalism is difficult. Stimson borrowed ideas from the legalistic, moralistic, and New Deal-style categories of internationalism and repackaged them into his own fusion that called for US leadership to manage the world.

This chapter interrogates the South–South internationalism of renowned US Nuyorican poet Miguel Algarín. It argues that the abjection in Morocco featured in his poem “Tangiers” reacts to French coloniality. More specifically, Algarín’s Orientalist evocations of underage child prostitution operate under a French hegemony, coming into crisis when a Third World alliance fails. Although his engagement with African self-determination exhibits residues of a French hegemony undergirding and undercutting what I term a poetic Latin-African solidarity, his South–South approach enriches postcolonial studies, in which Latin American – and, by extension, Latinx – identities have been sidelined.

This chapter examines the brief but formative pontificate of Benedict XV, the most important in the early twentieth-century history of the papacy: Benedict’s return to the policies of Leo XIII (r. 1878–1903) and, above all, his responses to the challenges of the First World War and its aftermath, transformed the scope and impact of Vatican diplomacy, restoring its prestige and influence on the international stage. More broadly speaking, Benedict set the agenda of the next two pontificates, those of his successor Pius XI (r. 1922–39) and Pius XII (r. 1939–58). They continued the policy of seeking to implement the new Code of Canon Law, and where possible by concordats with states, they would continue to seek reunion with the Orthodox Churches and Benedict’s postcolonial vision for the missionary outreach of the Church. They would also continue to follow the broad outlines of his initiatives in Vatican diplomacy through his commitment to seeking to play a role in international peace and security. Benedict’s policy of impartiality in war was not a passive one, but active and constructive, aimed both at providing humanitarian relief to victims and encouraging peace negotiations between the belligerents. His peace-making and humanitarian efforts reflected new forms of papal humanitarian diplomacy and have become a permanent feature of the papacy’s role in promoting international peace and security.

This chapter discusses the role of Imelda Marcos in the diplomatic practice and foreign policy of the government of Ferdinand Marcos. At the outset, Imelda is cast not only as a First Lady but as a vital colleague and co-operator in running the affairs of the Philippine state from the 1960s through the 1980s, the other half of the so-called conjugal dictatorship. At one point in time, she was simultaneously governor of Metro Manila, Minister of Human Settlements, member of the Interim Parliament, and Ambassador Plenipotentiary and Extraordinary. This being said, her status as First Lady and Patroness of the Arts is not dismissed as mere tangent or appendage; it was as First Lady that Imelda became a compelling presence in the political theatre. The combination of her beauty and her charisma formed a particular aesthetic that inevitably evolved into a policy of culture and democracy so central in the formation of a post-independence nation-state in Southeast Asia.

How did those Britons who believed that free trade and the gold standard had effortlessly made Britain a world hegemon in 1885 lose the faith by 1931 when their Empire was the largest in the world?

Chapter 10 explores democracy versus autocracy. It offers a frequency-based fitness analysis of the political regimes in the world, demonstrating the superior fitness of democracy, represented by the United States in time and place, but also revealing the resilience of non-democratic forms of government, represented by China. Countering the larger historical trend, democracy has retreated and autocracy has gained in recent years. It is difficult to tell whether this is a temporary setback for democracy or the start of a longer trend. Evolution does not assume constant progress, so the chapter dives deeper into the performance criterion for competing political regimes by peeling off the labels and examining different components of a political regime. In addition, the chapter offers a discussion of how East Asians have lived with the liberal international order, which most current American and Western leaders view as central to their fight against autocracy.

Drawing on the burgeoning scholarship on the Global 1960s, this chapter argues that the Vietnam War was a key historic event that internationalized radical social movements. The war did so in three main ways. First, through the conflict, activists in different parts of the world formed a global public sphere. Opposition to the war helped to transcend Cold War and colonial divisions, but the political movements that emerged resonated differently through various parts of the First, Second, and Third Worlds. Second, resistance against the Vietnam War fostered internationalism by foregrounding the agency of the marginalized. The war featured a David versus Goliath competition between a presumably backward, peasant society against the mightiest military in the world. Third, the wars in Southeast Asia helped to internationalize antiwar resistance by illuminating the interconnectedness of various systems of inequality. Imperialism and colonization became part of the activist lexicon, utilized to interpret cultural, racial, class, gender, and other forms of exploitation. The chapter concludes by reflecting on the agency of the Democratic Republic of Vietnam and the National Liberation Front in consciously cultivating these antiwar internationalist affiliates.

Existing research on the ISCM tends to focus on the ‘centres’ in Western and Central Europe and North America. Although the membership included countries in Latin America and Asia from early on – for instance, Argentina joined in 1924, and Japan in 1935 – and eventually in Africa (South Africa, 1948), much less attention has been paid to the role the ISCM played in these regions. As this chapter argues, it is in the ‘peripheries’ that the ISCM proved particularly influential in stimulating diverse conceptions of musical modernism within specific local contexts. However, the significance of the ISCM for its far-flung members was rarely reciprocated. The ISCM’s inflexible structure and flawed conception of internationalism, founded on the unquestioned sovereignty of the nation state, perpetuated the imbalances between centre and periphery. Using quantitative data on national and regional representation at various levels, complemented by qualitative data, such as interviews with key players and archival records, I formulate a critique of the ISCM as an institution that struggled to overcome the systemic Eurocentrism of its foundation.

States-in-waiting are territories that claimed statehood but had not (yet) received independence. By foregrounding the nationalist insurgent movements that arose from these regions, States-in-Waiting illuminates the un-endings of decolonization – the unfinished, messy, and improvised way that the state-centric system of international order replaced empire. Nationalist claimants from communities left out of the global order (as it was radically expanded by decolonization) were forced to work through unofficial channels to advance their claims in international politics. Therefore, the ambiguous and at times unreliable role of their advocates, the intermediaries they used to navigate these channels, highlighted the uncertainties of the transitions from empires to states. This uncertainty, and the political weakness of particular nationalist demands, left certain claimants seemingly perpetually awaiting international recognition.

The place of minority peoples in new postcolonial states presented the international community with a quandary: if national liberation presumed that dependent peoples deserve self-rule, what should be the response to peoples within newly independent states who demanded political autonomy? In order to move their claims onto the international stage and win the support they required, nationalist claimants – on the African continent, in India, and elsewhere across the globe – had to find and work with advocates outside their communities. In 1960, Angami Zapu Phizo, the Naga nationalist leader who claimed independence from India, journeyed to London in search of such advocacy. The history of internationalized Naga nationalist claims-making emerges through the complex of correspondence, journeys, identities, and friendships that made possible Phizo’s journey to London.

Looking at London, a relatively prosperous area between the wars, this chapter points to the persistence of ambiguous memories of the inter-war period, with partial achievements in social reform, efforts to halt international conflict, and decent standards of consumption recognised alongside poverty, unemployment, and the slide towards war. This chapter establishes some of the challenges that people faced in passing on stories about the past to younger generations shortly after the Second World War, in a landscape in which different political parties were competing to ‘fix’ the memory of the inter-war decades in place.

The introduction sketches the history of literary internationalism in the communist East. Throughout much of Central Eurasia, South Asia, and the Middle East, modern socialist and anticolonial revolutionary movements have drawn on a shared non-European political, intellectual, and artistic culture whose canonical forms and models were born in Persian. For this reason, throughout the twentieth century, the fate of Persianate culture was deeply intertwined with the fate of communist internationalism in Eurasia. This introduction establishes the basis for the book’s basic conceptual categories: Persianate, Eastern, transnational, multinational, international, and world poetics. The Persianate functions in this book as a repertory of cultural forms rather than a civilizational unity. The distinction between transnational and international is also crucial to the book that narrates the process by which a transnational cosmopolitanism of ordinary people was replaced by an international friendship between nations performed by an elite corps of literary representatives and the practical commons of Persianate forms turned into the reified political unity of the revolutionary East. For this process, the introduction provides a periodization based on generations of Eastern internationalist writers, each illustrated by several short biographical examples.

The poet Rabindranath Tagore linked the scholarly quest for ‘India in Asia’ to visions of an Indian cultural renaissance, Asianist agendas and the Visva-Bharati project to inaugurate a global civilizational dialogue. This chapter examines the relationship between Orientalist scholarship, interwar Asianism and emerging visions of Indian exceptionalism. Tagore and like-minded GIS-members mobilized the ancient, transregional circulation of Buddhism to pitch Greater India as an internationalist template with contemporary relevance. Epitomizing India’s civilizational legacies abroad, the ancient Pan-Asian Buddhist ecumene was evoked as a cultural counter-geography and harmonious ‘empire of culture’. Reinforcing Theosophical visions of ancient India as Asia’s spiritual fount, and drawing on the visionary writings of the Japanese art historian Okakura Tenshin, this Buddhist past, and especially the legacies of the Mauryan emperor Ashoka, were contrasted with the aggressive mode of past and present Western colonizing schemes. The topos of ‘ancient bonds’ energized calls to unite under the spiritual banner of a ‘Greater India’ and a rejuvenated ‘East’.