1. Nationalism and Internationalism
Mundial, Lima, 10 October 1924
The boundaries between nationalism and internationalism are not yet well clarified, despite the fact that both ideas have existed for a long time. Nationalists categorically condemn internationalist trends. But in practice they make some concessions, sometimes hidden, sometimes explicit. Fascism, for example, collaborates with the League of Nations. At least it has not defected from this league built on pacifism and Wilsonian liberalism.
It so happens, in truth, that neither nationalism nor internationalism continues in an orthodox or intransigent line. Furthermore, one cannot exactly indicate where nationalism ends and where internationalism begins. Elements of one parallel, and sometimes intertwine, with elements of the other.
The cause of this vague demarcation in theory and practice is very clear. Contemporary history continually teaches us that the nation is not an abstraction, not a myth. Neither are civilization and humanity. Evidence shows that national realities are not necessarily in conflict with international realities. The inability to understand and acknowledge this second and higher reality is a simple myopia, a functional limitation. Dated, mechanical forms of intelligence employed in former national perspectives are incapable of understanding the new, vast, complex international perspective. They reject and deny it because they cannot adapt to it. The mechanistic nature of this attitude is the same as rejecting Einstein physics in an automatic and a priori fashion.
Internationalists, except for some extreme right-wingers and some quaint and harmless romantics, act in a less intransigent manner. Similar to relativists before Galileo‘s physics, internationalists do not discard the entire nationalist theory. They recognize what corresponds to reality, but only in its first approximation. Nationalists understand a part of reality, but nothing more than a part. The reality is much broader, less finite. In short, nationalism is valid as a claim, but not as a negation. The current historical setting has the same values of provincialism and regionalism as before. Nationalism is a new style of regionalism.
Why, in our time, is this feeling so exacerbated and overly stimulated that it should long ago have become a bit more passive and less passionate? The answer is easy. Nationalism is one face, one side of a vast reactionary phenomenon. The reaction is called, successively or simultaneously, chauvinism, fascism, imperialism, etc. It is not by chance that the monarchists of L‘Action Française are at the same time aggressive, jingoistic, and militaristic. They currently operate in a complicated process of adjustment, of adaptation of nations and their interests in a mutually supportive manner. It is not possible that this process can be completed without meeting extreme resistance from a thousand centrifugal passions and secessionist interests. The desire to give the people an international discipline causes an exasperated erection of nationalist sentiments that, romantically and anachronistically, isolate and differentiate the interests of the nation from the rest of the world.
The accomplices of this reaction rate internationalism as a utopia. But obviously the internationalists are more realistic and less romantic than it seems. Internationalism is not merely an idea or a feeling. It is, above all, a historic event. Western civilization has been internationalized, has solidarized with the life of most of humanity. The ideas and passions spread fast, fluidly, universally.
Every day currents of thought and culture spread more quickly. Civilization has given the world a new nervous system. Transmitted by cable, Hertzian waves, newspapers, etc., any human emotion can sweep instantly around the world. Regional habits gradually decline. Life tends toward uniformity, toward unity. It has the same style in all major urban centers. Buenos Aires, Quebec, Lima—they all copy the fashion of Paris. Their tailors and stylists mimic models from Paris. This solidarity, this uniformity, is not exclusively Western. European civilization gradually attracts all peoples and races into its orbit and customs. It is a dominating civilization that does not tolerate the presence of any concurrent or rival civilization. One of its key features is its power of expansion. No culture ever conquered such a vast expanse of the earth. The English installed in a corner of Africa the phone, the car, and polo. Western ideas and emotions moved along with the machines and goods. It appears strange and unexpected to have the history and thought of various peoples so connected.
All these phenomena are absolutely and unmistakably new. They belong exclusively to our civilization that, from this point of view, does not appear like any earlier civilization. And these events are coordinated with others. European states have recently seen and recognized at a conference in London the inability to restore their economy and their respective productive capabilities without a mutual assistance pact. Because of their economic interdependence, people cannot, as before, start and stop with impunity. Not by sentimentality, but by the demands of their own interests, the victors have to renounce the pleasure of sacrificing the defeated.
Internationalism is not a brand-new current. For roughly a century in European civilization one notes the tendency to develop an international organization of humanity. Nor is internationalism necessarily a revolutionary current. There is a socialist internationalism and a bourgeois internationalism, which is not absurd or contradictory. When it finds its historical origin, internationalism is a result of emanation, a consequence of liberal ideas. The first major incubator of international organisms was the Manchester school. The liberal state emancipated industry and trade from feudal and absolutist barriers. Capitalist interests developed independently from the growth of the nation. The nation, finally, could no longer contain them within its borders. Capital is denationalized; industry began to conquer foreign markets; goods do not know boundaries and strive to move freely across all countries. The bourgeoisie becomes in favor of free trade. Free trade as an idea and as practice was a step toward internationalism in which the proletariat will recognize one of its desired ends, one of its ideals. Economic borders are weakened. This event strengthened the hope of a day to come when political borders no longer exist.
England, the only country where the liberal democratic idea has been fully realized, understood and classified as a bourgeois idea, has achieved free trade. Production, because of its lawlessness, suffered a severe crisis, which triggered a backlash against free trade measures. States once again began to close their doors to foreign production to defend their own production. This launched a protectionist period during which production was reorganized on a new footing. The dispute of markets and raw materials acquired a bitter nationalistic characteristic. But the international role of the new economy returned to find its expression. It developed new forms of capital on a huge level, of financial capital, international finance. Its banks and consortiums merged savings in various countries to be invested internationally. The world war partially tore at the fabric of economic interests. Afterward, the postwar crisis showed the economic solidarity of the countries, the moral a nd organizational unity of civilization.
The liberal bourgeoisie, today as yesterday, works to adapt its policies to the new forms of human reality. The League of Nations is an effort, certainly futile, to resolve the contradiction between the international economy and the nationalist politics of bourgeois society. Civilization is not resigned to die in this crash, this contradiction. It creates, therefore, every day, communication agencies and international coordination. In addition to the two worker internationals, there are various other types of internationals. Switzerland is hosting the ―core" of more than eighty international associations. Not so long ago, Paris was the headquarters of an international congress of dance teachers. The dancers discussed their problems at length, in multiple languages. They were united, across borders, by the internationalism of the foxtrot and tango.