Bulletin n. 2-3/2012
October 2012-February 2013
CONTENTS
  • Section A) The theory and practise of the federal states and multi-level systems of government
  • Section B) Global governance and international organizations
  • Section C) Regional integration processes
  • Section D) Federalism as a political idea
    • Goswami Manu
    Imaginary Futures and Colonial Internationalisms
    in American Historical Review , Volume 117, Issue 5, December 2012 ,  2012 ,  1461-1485
    Internationalism is commonly heralded as a central political force of the twentieth century. Yet its status as an analytical and historical category is profoundly ambiguous. While its valence stems from Karl Marx's institution of the First International in 1864, the year the term entered the Oxford English Dictionary, its subsequent career has largely derived as a “back construction,” through reference to its semantic other, namely, nationalism. The Communist Manifesto, a founding text of political modernism, helped instill the idea that anti-systemic politics required conjuring an alternate world order. The temporal referent of radical politics was the future. The specific content of the manifesto's imagined future, and of later liberal internationalisms associated with John Hobson and Woodrow Wilson, lost effective purchase during the cataclysmic decades of the interwar era. In Europe and North America, internationalism devolved into a residual category, an object, by turns, of moralizing judgment and regressive nostalgia. This conceptual framing—figuring internationalism as the failed negation of nationalism and in normative rather than analytical terms—refracts a specific regional history. Yet it also defines studies of anti-imperial internationalisms that acquired an unprecedented global prominence during the 1920s and 1930s. In fact, interwar internationalism in colonial worlds encompassed a range of projects that were explicitly anti-imperial yet neither reducible nor opposed to nationalism. Elaborated by dispersed groups, without a determinate place in a given geopolitical order, colonial internationalism improvised a distinct future-oriented politics. Anti-imperial internationalists amplified political modernism into a global formation, sounding the …
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