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ABSTRACT
In today’s internationalism-sceptical age, the pro-internationalism side is defended from liberal perspectives. Worries concern free trade, free movement, international representative institutions, and senses of global democracy. These are important issues. On the other hand, they cloud the reality that other forms of internationalism have been available to us, including in times not distant from our own. I’m interested to think through ‘red’ internationalisms – internationalisms held by social democrats on one hand and the communist world on the other. Arguing that though a previously close family clearly split, that split might look different than we think. Furthermore, even though one branch of that family lives on, it’s a different creature than it once was. These are ‘lost traditions of internationalism’ – internationalisms that were sometimes problematic yet might be worth remembering in times when we often think the options are either disbanding internationalism altogether or supporting the liberal institutionalisms against which populists often rail.
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Notes
1 Priestland, “What’s Left of Communism?”
2 See The Economist, “Millennial Socialism”; Harvey, “Age of Right-Wing Populism”; Mouffe, Left Populism.
3 Hardt and Negri, Empire, 60.
4 Ibid.
5 See Harvey, Condition of Postmodernity; Castells, Information Age; Boltanski and Chiapello, New Spirit of Capitalism; Smith, Imperialism in the Twenty-First Century; Zuboff, Age of Surveillance.
6 See Larrabee, “Perestroika Shakes Eastern Europe”; Stoneman, “Socialism with a Human Face.”
7 See Courtois et al., Black Book of Communism.
8 See Pipes, Communism; Pipes, The Russian Revolution; McMeekin, The Russian Revolution.
9 See Luxemburg, Socialism or Barbarism, 104, 118.
10 Lenin, Revolution, Democracy, Socialism, 165, 255.
11 Marx and Engels, German Ideology, 47.
12 See Esposito, Terms of the Political.
13 See Sluga, Internationalism, 79. See also Irwin, “Epilogue,” 238.
14 Newman, Socialism, 30.
15 Ibid., 17.
16 Brown, The Rise and Fall, 26, 102.
17 Hobsbawm, “Goodbye to All That,” 21.
18 Giddens, Third Way, 3–11.
19 Ibid., 8.
20 NTV, “Sozialistische Internationale.” Regarding the remarks about immigration, Denmark’s Social Democrats are an example. In contradistinction to positions traditionally taken by social democratic parties, the Danish social democrats found their way back to power by replicating hardline positions on immigration maintained by the far-right – positions with significant success for rightist parties. See Haugbolle, “Did the Left Really Win?”
21 Webster, “Internationalism,” 39.
22 Goldmann, Logic of Internationalism, 2; Duncan Bell in Armitage, Foundations, 7.
23 Sluga, Internationalism, 3, 86.
24 See Goldmann, The Logic of Internationalism, 2; Bull, Anarchical Society, 24–7.
25 See O’Connell, “Peace and War,” 278.
26 Anderson, Rise of the Modern State.
27 Rawls, Law of Peoples.
28 Armitage, Foundations of International Thought, 8.
29 Ibid., 7, 59.
30 Hobbes, Leviathan, 100.
31 See Ishay, History of Human Rights, 85.
32 Grotius, On the Law, 4.
33 Ibid., 68.
34 Ibid., 317.
35 Heraclides and Dialla, Humanitarian Intervention, 22. See also Dumbrell, Clinton’s Foreign Policy.
36 Niesen, “Restorative Justice,” 172; Tesón, “The Kantian Theory,” 89.
37 Tesón, “The Kantian Theory,” 55.
38 Kant, “What is Enlightenment,” 18, 19. Mention is made here of Locke a number of times. For brevity’s sake, I won’t descend into his international theory. Suffice it to say that Armitage points to him having one – derived largely from the universalism of his social contract theory. As Armitage notes, Locke’s thought as ‘non-hierarchical and inclusive’ summarized his vision of the international community of humankind. See Armitage, Foundations of International Thought, 129.
39 Kant, “Perpetual Peace,” 77, 74.
40 Kant, “Universal History,” 5; Kant, “What is Enlightenment,” 17.
41 Tesón, “The Kantian Theory,” 86.
42 I.e. without the vestige of legal authority in the people, their legal authority may shift – wherein, on what authority do the people act, or on behalf of whom does the state act beyond itself? Absolutism’s rationale was to ‘make the state lawful’, it’s been argued. That’s distinct from a global legality of the individual. Strakosch, State Absolutism, 115.
43 Murphy, War’s Ends, 27.
44 Hobbes, Leviathan, 99.
45 Sluga, Internationalism, 79.
46 United Nations, “Universal Declaration of Human Rights,” preamble.
47 Marx and Engels, Communist Manifesto, 502.
48 Engels, Socialism: Utopian and Scientific.
49 Newman, Socialism, 19. See also See Bensimon, Deluermoz and Moisand, ‘Arise Ye Wretched’; Draper, Marx’s Theory.
50 Brown, Rise and Fall, 18.
51 Marshall, Willy Brandt, 12. See also Taylor, Labour’s Renewal.
52 Kitschelt, “The Socialist Discourse,” 199.
53 Marx, Capital, Volume 1, 48.
54 Locke, Second Treatise on Government, 18.
55 Vis-à-vis the concept of damaging oneself through the oppression of others – the idea is simply that to the extent that one’s labour might rely on others, if one risks others’ ability to engage in that labour, one risks one’s own labour, and hence one’s own existence and value. See Roemer, Free to Lose.
56 Marx and Engels, Communist Manifesto, 493.
57 Marx, Critique of the Gotha Program, 87.
58 Berger, Companion to Nineteenth-Century Europe, xx. See also Eley, Forging Democracy.
59 Lenin, Revolution, Democracy, Socialism, 136, 137.
60 Bernstein, Preconditions of Socialism, 190.
61 Ibid., 118.
62 See Luxemburg, Socialism or Barbarism, 46–68.
63 Bernstein, Preconditions of Socialism, 206.
64 See Marx, Capital, Volume 1, 176–86.
65 Gietinger, Murder of Rosa Luxemburg.
66 Vivekanandan, Concerns of European Social Democrats, 72–3.
67 In Imlay, “Practice of Socialist Internationalism,” 22; Imlay, Practice of Socialist Internationalism, 161.
68 Branting, “Fraternity among Nations.”
69 Tosstorff, “The International Trade-Union Movement,” 418.
70 Imlay, Practice of Socialist Internationalism, 5.
71 Vivekanandan, Concerns of European Social Democrats, xiii.
72 Ibid., 132–65. See also Vivekanandan, Global Visions, 198–256.
73 Vivekanandan, Concerns of European Social Democrats, xiv.
74 Czarny, Sweden, 78.
75 Imlay, Practice of Socialist Internationalism, 311.
76 Brandt’s unwillingness to openly criticize American actions in Vietnam – never mind his interest in maintaining a close relationship with the US generally – was controversial in all this. Still, as characterized in his memoirs, Brandt viewed Vietnam as a tragedy and morass. Moreover, his interest in the US was based partly on his admiration for the system’s capacity for change on the civil rights front. See Brandt, My Life, 155, 360, 363.
77 See Elkner, “The Changing Face of Repression,” 142–61.
78 See Pavlowitch, Tito.
79 Mazower, “Violence and the State,” 1167.
80 Marx and Engels, German Ideology, 59.
81 Ibid., 51.
82 See Kulic, Parker and Penick, Sanctioning Modernism, 11–89.
83 See Appelbaum, “The Friendship Project,” 485. See also Babiracki and Jersild, Socialist Internationalism.
84 Farnsworth, “Black Panthers Open Office.” See also Pons, Global Revolution.
85 Though that changed in 1944.
86 See Morsink, The Universal Declaration, 284–302.
87 United Nations, “Charter of the United Nations,” preamble.
88 For more on this, see Ishay, “Socialist Contributions to Human Rights.”
89 Normand and Zaidi, Human Rights at the UN, 200.
90 Ibid., 177–96.
91 “Verfassung der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik,” articles 17, 19; Bucknell University, “1936 Constitution,” article 118; National Assembly of the Republic of Bulgaria, “Constitution of the People’s Republic,” article 6, 10.
92 “Verfassung der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik,” articles 3, 8, 9.
93 “Verfassung der Deutschen Demokratischen Republik vom 6. April 1968,” article 19.
94 Lewis, Glajar, and Petrescu, “Introduction,” 1, 2.
95 In Molloy and Hetherington, Socialist Paradise.
96 Kaplan, “Development: Western Europe,” 374.
97 See Willis, Daily Life.
98 Brezhnev, Socialism, Democracy and Human Rights, 147.
99 Rousseau, Social Contract, 166.
100 Ibid.
101 Ibid.
102 See Butler, “Socialist International Law,” 797; See also Osakwe, “Socialist International Law Revisited.”
103 Brown, Rise and Fall, 3, 8.
104 Brezhnev, Socialism, Democracy and Human Rights, 4.
105 Ibid., 72.
106 In Ostrowski, Eduard Bernstein on Social Democracy, 378.
107 Abeshouse and Tooke, Death of American Civility.
108 The essential tension hurting German Social Democrats, Die Zeit editor Jochen Bittner wrote in his post-mortem of the 2017 election, is that ‘you can’t promote a borderless world and the welfare state at the same time’; ‘how can you convey to your electorate that you are opening the doors of your country to a million refugees and migrants who are entitled to welfare payments’? Bittner, “What Happened.”
109 In Berman, The Social Democratic Moment, 50–1.
110 Welt, “Willy Brandt gehört ab uns”; Fürstenau, “Linke beruft sich auf Willy Brandt.”
111 Prestholdt, Icons of Dissent, 22.
112 Socialist International, “Congress,” 2.
113 Ibid.
114 Knight, “Collectivization Remarks.”
115 Marx, Economic and Philosophic Manuscripts, 275–6.