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’.

Marx’s thought on nationhood emerged from the cosmopolitan legacy of the “radical Enlightenment.” It took shape in the crucible of European nationalisms, the persistence of dynastic multinational empires, and the appearance of socialism as a new political actor.1 In 1848, the national question was deeply intermingled with the question of class. As a minority current of socialism, at least until the end of the nineteenth century, Marxism promoted a new form of political internationalism of which the most significant expression was the foundation of the International Workingmen’s Association in 1864. A constitutive tension quickly appeared between this cosmopolitan aspiration – well synthesized by The Communist Manifesto’s sentence: “the workers have no country”2 – and the growing tendency of the nascent socialist movements to inscribe themselves into national patterns made of inherited cultures, languages, traditions, and social practices.

There is a rather obvious convergence point between the Cold War, decolonization, and nationhood. The end of formal European colonial rule across most of the globe in the mid-twentieth century precipitated new states, on old territory, which required a national identity for legitimacy. In colonies where colonial rule ended through violent armed struggle, that armed struggle required a particularly potent vision of what people were fighting for. Once independence came, the consolidation of the state also demanded an answer to the question: who are we as a people, what binds us together? The Cold War, founded on an assumed clash between ideas and cultures even if activated as military and strategic conflict, prompted the same questions. The Cold War demanded a statement of national identity in two respects. First, as an ideological conflict the Cold War influenced the language by which nations articulated the belief systems that supposedly bound them together and informed their relationship with others.

This chapter examines the relationship between nationalism, ethnic cleansing, and genocide from the perspective of Eastern Galicia, a multiethnic and multireligious region populated for 400 years by Poles, Ruthenians, and Jews, which was transformed by the advent of nationalism from a society of never-harmonious but rarely violent interethnic coexistence into one of extreme violence. Special attention is given to the town and district of Buczacz as representative of what is now known as western Ukraine. In writing this chapter, I have drawn on the research conducted for my recent study, Anatomy of a Genocide: The Life and Death of a Town Called Buczacz.1 But while the book provides a heavily documented narrative of events in this locality, it largely refrains from explicitly discussing the theoretical and methodological concepts that undergird it.

Did 1968 – a major moment of political and cultural revolt when young people across the globe rallied under the banner of “international solidarity” to challenge the Cold War consensus as well as the authorities of governments, institutions, and ways of thought – spell the end of nationalism?1 The symbolic shorthand “1968,” perhaps more than any other event of the twentieth century, quickly became synonymous with the triumph of internationalism. “National frontiers mean less than generational frontiers nowadays,” the London Times noted with astonishment in May 1968.2 Since then, the notion that the international trumped the national in this era has only become more firmly established in assessments of 1968.

This chapter shows how the crisis of the early 1920s and the intellectual relief that followed were essential to shaping European discourses about intellectuals and their roles in democratic societies. It begins by exploring well-known inter-war polemics by Julien Benda, Karl Mannheim, and Antonio Gramsci against the social backdrop of intellectual crisis and reconstruction. The chapter centres on Geneva as a crucible for bureaucracy and home to bodies that sought to categorize and organize international intellectual life. The chapter shows how a wide range of national and international organizations emerged in the 1920s to codify and protect the status of intellectuals and intellectual workers, and argues that all of this activity was motivated and conditioned by the post-war humanitarian crisis. While, by the late 1920s, the rights of intellectuals were increasingly – but unevenly – protected by international legislation, the rise of totalitarianism showed the vulnerability of intellectuals.

Chapter 13 reviews Staël’s contributions to her second husband John Rocca’s memoirs of the Peninsular War. When we consider the new Europe of nations that Staël bequeaths us, Romantic Spain seems striking in its absence. Her article “Camoëns” of winter 1811 has more on exiled genius than on Iberia; in Delphine, 1802, Léonce and the family of his Spanish mother are proud and devout to excess; and finally, the description in De la littérature (1800) of Spain’s inability, in contrast to Italy, to fuse the Arab South and the Christian North – a sterility born of priests and despotism – is fundamental for the 1813 debates of Staël, Schlegel, and Sismondi (DL 164–166). But here stands proof that she revised the war memoirs of her husband Rocca to show a popular struggle that checkmated Napoleon’s troops.