Bulletin n. 1/2012 | ||
June 2012 | ||
Albers Martin |
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Between the crisis of democracy and world parliament: the development of the Inter-Parliamentary Union in the 1920s | ||
in Journal of Global History , Volume 7 - Issue 02 - July , 2012 | ||
The Great War created new challenges for the proponents of pre-1914 cosmopolitanism. This article explores this theme by studying the Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU), an international association of members of parliament active in the interwar period. The IPU is first taken as a case study to discuss the difficulty of clearly differentiating between national politicians and agents of international civil society during the years between the wars. The article then shows how pre-war liberal internationalists had to reorient after the First World War, and how socialists and nationalists brought new agendas to the realm of international cooperation at the non-governmental level. These new perspectives shaping the international system even led to far-reaching plans for a world parliament. However, the IPU's history also shows how domestic political polarization contributed to the failure of interwar internationalism. | ||