Space, Knowledge and Power

Nationalism has long excited debate in political, social and cultural theory and remains a key field of enquiry among historians, anthropologists, sociologists as well as political scientists. It is also one of the critical media issues of our time. There are, however, surprisingly few volumes that bring together the best of this intellectual diversity into one collection.

The SAGE Handbook of Nations and Nationalism

In this thought-provoking new book, Anthony Smith analyses key debates between historians and social scientists on the role of nations and nationalism in history. In a wide-ranging analysis of the work of historians, sociologists, political scientists and others, he argues that there are three key issues which have shaped debates in this field: first, the nature and origin of nations and nationalism; second, the antiquity or modernity of nations and nationalism; and third, the role of nations and nationalism in historical, and especially recent, social change. Anthony Smith provides an incisive critique of the debate between modernists, perennialists and primordialists over the origins, development and contemporary significance of nations and nationalism. Drawing on a wide range of examples from antiquity and the medieval epoch, as well as the modern world, he develops a distinctive ethnosymbolic account of nations and nationalism. This important book by one of the world's leading authorities on nationalism and ethnicity will be of particular interest to students and scholars in history, sociology and politics.

The Nation in History: Historiographical Debates about Ethnicity and Nationalism

The end of capitalism (as we knew it): a feminist critique of political economy

Imagined Communities, Rational Choosers, Invented Ethnies

Nationalism and internationalism are twinned liberal ideologies which became embedded throughout the twentieth century - their realistic and idealistic ventures are inspired by similar stories of freedom and peace, their histories entwined.

Internationalism in the Age of Nationalism

The United Nations has become the object of new and exciting historical research because of historians' renewed interest in themes that have preoccupied the UN from the outset, including questions of race and racism, the global implications of anticolonial nationalism, the problem of development in relations between North and South, and the gendered nature of the postwar international order. In this article we survey the state of histories of the UN and reflect on some of the ways in which the history of the UN has a place in international as well as world history as a site of cultural contestation, influence, continuity, and change.

New histories of the United Nations

Identity, Gender, and the History of European Nations and Nationalisms

In that curiously utopian moment bracketed by the end of the Second World War and the onset of the Cold War, cosmopolitanism made its debut on the new international stage of the United Nations in its literal translation as ‘World Citizenship’ (from the Greek cosmos or world, and polites, or citizen). At the UN special agency, the United Nations Educational, Scientific, and Cultural Organization or Unesco, world citizenship was celebrated as the adjunct of an anti-chauvinist raison d’etre and as a cultural manifestation of the Enlightenment premise that humanity was evolving socially, politically, technologically, and even psychologically, towards a ‘World Community’. Although the international legitimacy of the language of world citizenship, like the idealism invested in the United Nations itself, was short-lived, from at least 1945 to 1950 a cosmopolitan view of the future of internationalism dominated intellectual and political visions of an anticipated new world order circulating around the creation of Unesco. This essay examines the almost forgotten and historically-specific features of the cosmopolitan language of internationalism spoken from the organization. I argue that for all Unesco’s weakness as an international institution, its short-lived venture with the language of cosmopolitanism offers an important entree into the intellectual history of that idea and its changing political and social significance. From an historical perspective, the Unesco experience of cosmopolitan internationalism suggests the political relevance for the twentieth century of the longue duree history of cosmopolitanism, that is as both a form of cultural identification and as a utopian world-scale political ideal. As importantly, it is indicative of the ways in which late nineteenth-century conceptions of race and empire remained uneasily at the heart of cosmopolitanism and internationalism.

https://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/Delivery.cfm/SSRN_ID1701442_code1548884.pdf?abstractid=1701442&mirid=1

UNESCO and the (One) World of Julian Huxley

This article investigates the idea of cosmopolitanism associated with internationalism and the origins of UNESCO at the end of World War II. In the first few years of UNESCO's operation, delegates and functionaries portrayed "world citizenship" as the path to permanent world peace and as a necessary step in the evolution of human society from tribes to nations, from national consciousness to "one world." A key figure in that history was Julian Huxley, UNESCO's first director-general. This article argues that Huxley's conception of cosmopolitan internationalism provides an important link between the history of postwar international organizations and a long nineteenth-century vision of historical and political progress and of imperial policies and practices.

Glenda Sluga

Papers

Internationalism in the Age of Nationalism

New histories of the United Nations

Identity, Gender, and the History of European Nations and Nationalisms

UNESCO and the (One) World of Julian Huxley

UNESCO and the (One) World of Julian Huxley