Volume 10, Issue 3 - Editors’ Forum: Situating Internationalism 1919–1940s, Guest edited by Benjamin Auberer, Timo Holste and Carolin Elisabeth Liebisch

The article investigates the internationalist activities of a Turkish nationalist during his Swiss exile at the outset of the postwar settlements in early 1919. Reşit Saffet, a devoted Young Turk and Ottoman diplomat on leave, moved in the internationalist milieus in Berne while his agenda remained utterly nationalist. Drawing on pan-Turkic, pan-Islamic, anti-imperialist, socialist, and Wilsonian ideas, he adapted his rhetoric to the internationalist conferences he attended; he thus sought to disguise and to defend his otherwise discredited nationalist cause on these global stages. The article traces Reşit Saffet’s internationalist activities as a strategy to engage with the ‘Paris moment’ and the Ottoman question beyond official politics and governmental discourse. In a time when Ottoman diplomacy was in deadlock as a result of the Empire’s exclusion from the peace conference and Reşit Saffet’s career faced an unknown future in the face of the Ottoman collapse, internationalism seemed a promising option. The case illustrates the increasingly blurred border between state diplomacy and non-governmental influence, and thus questions exclusively state-centered approaches. It reveals the appeal and potential held by civil society internationalism, not only for Western pacifists and socialists, but also for anti-imperialist nationalists confronted with the disappointment of the ‘Wilsonian moment’.

This article examines the activities of international organizations in the field of music in the first half of the twentieth century. Despite the common association with music as a universal language and international art, it has not often been systematically investigated in the context of institutionalized international co-operation. By focusing on the International Musical Society, the International Society for Musicology, the International Society for Contemporary Music, the Permanent Council for the International Co-operation between Composers, and the activities of the League of Nations in the field of music, it analyzes common topics and different strategies to establish stable networks and co-ordinate the flow of information. By locating the activities of the experts involved along the two analytical axes of nationalization/internationalization and politization/standardization, it becomes not only possible to integrate the activities in the field of music into the history of international organizations, but also to gain important insights into the international and political origin of musicology as an academic discipline.

This article seeks to shed new light on the complex nature of Italian agency in the League of Nations (LoN) and the Italians’ involvement in the international community that characterised Geneva in the interwar period. By analysing the actions and the networks of the Italians who worked in the League’s machinery, this article reveals the extent to which they were part of an international society emerging in Geneva. Through the experiences of Alberto Theodoli, chairman of the Permanent Mandates Commission, and Pietro Stoppani, director of the Economic Relations Section, this study concludes that Italian experts were fully part of the international society that flourished in interwar Geneva, being members of international networks and using their position to promote their agendas. However, these Italians were influenced in different ways by the Fascist regime and their attachment to the League’s internationalism varied. The article shows how the Fascist government realised the potential of the LoN world for promoting its foreign policy goals and legitimising the regime. Fascist Italy valued Geneva as a central forum for international relations and as a place where it could further its imperial ambitions.

This article uses the example of the purpose-built Palais des Nations in Geneva to trace how conceptions of internationalism were used for propaganda purposes by local institutions such as the Association des Intérêts de Genève, (AIG) by the League of Nations’ Information Section and Internal Service, and by private actors surrounding the international organization. The American Committee, whose work was financed by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace (CEIP), will serve as one example of the latter. Scrutinizing interwar-internationalism through the lens of tourism, this article not only examines the impact of the global features of internationalism on the local level and reveals how the League used the popularity of the Palais des Nations to circumvent the ban on propaganda, it also reassesses the notion of American non-involvement in the League.

Any study of the League of Nations should pay close attention to the minimal representation of the imagined “Muslim world” in this organization during its first decade. While the Eurocentric imperial internationalism of the League was criticized by interwar Pan-Islamic internationalist networks, there were frequent attempts by Muslims to engage the League, make it hear Muslim demands and discontents, and, later on, to make it more inclusive of Muslim polities. The Muslim global imaginary of the world order then lacked any dominant unitary pattern. In this chaotic political space, subaltern Muslim networks tried to revive earlier Pan-Islamic notions of solidarity to empower the demands of weak Muslim populations. When the Axis empires of the Second World War tried to utilize some of these Pan-Islamic networks for propaganda purposes, their failures revealed the illusion of Muslim unity. It was the eventual failure of a global illusion of a Pan-Islamic alliance with an imperial sponsor during the Second World War that made the United Nations the international venue of choice for post-war global Muslim political imaginaries.

This article examines the emergence of the Red Swastika Society, a Chinese faith-based humanitarian organization, and its development during the 1930s when political changes and war enforced a transformation of the organization and saw a strengthening of its adherence to Red Cross relief activities and Red Cross principles. This article suggests that despite growing similarities with the work of a national Red Cross Society throughout the 1930s, the organization retained its religious founding principles and practices, which distinguished its faith-based humanitarian mission from the larger Red Cross Movement.

This article examines the administrative debates on the structure of the post-war international order that took place during the Second World War. By focusing on a multinational study group composed of former high ranking League of Nations civil servants affiliated with the Royal Institute of International Affairs at Chatham House, it elucidates the activities of international civil servants after they left the League. It is shown how the group claimed to represent the experiences of the international secretariat of the League of Nations on a comprehensive scale by publishing a report on the evaluation of the League’s secretariat. An examination of the report investigates how the group defended the League of Nations and their own participation in the League.