Few political notions are at once so normative and so equivocal as internationalism. Today, the official discourse of the West resounds with appeals to a term that was long a trademark of the Left. Whatever sense is given it, the meaning of internationalism logically depends on some prior conception of nationalism, since it only has currency as a back-construction referring to its opposite. Yet while nationalism is of all modern political phenomena the most value-contested—judgements of its record standardly varying across a 180-degree span, from admiration to anathema—no such schizophrenia of connotation affects internationalism: its implication is virtually always positive.footnote¹ But the price of approval is indeterminacy. If no-one doubts the fact of nationalism, but few agree as to its worth, at the entry to the millennium the status of internationalism would appear to be more or less the reverse. It is claimed on all sides as a value, but who can identify it without challenge as a force?

Behind this paradox lies an unexamined history. It was Masaryk, a great national leader, who once suggested the clearest and simplest definition of nationalism. It signified, he thought (dissociating himself from it), any outlook that treats the nation as the highest political value.footnote² This need not mean that its adherents will in all circumstances, or every context, think only or above all of the nation, to the exclusion of other attachments or identities—in any given situation, the extent of its bearing is always variable. So understood, the formula gives us a counterpart definition of internationalism sufficiently minimal and neutral to allow for what has been most lacking: some empirical reconstruction of its record. Historically, the term may be applied to any outlook, or practice, that tends to transcend the nation towards a wider community, of which nations continue to form the principal units.

The advantage of a pragmatic definition of this kind is to dispense with a number of conventional preconceptions about nationalism and internationalism, and to suggest more systematic ways of inter-relating the two. Since their first emergence in modern form, some two hundred and fifty years ago, each has undergone a series of metamorphoses. How are these transformations best conceived? Below I suggest a periodization. The pitfalls of any totalizing division of historical time into a categorical sequence are obvious enough. In one way or another, periodization always involves arbitrary simplifications, to a point where not a few of our finest historians would wish to reject it as a procedure altogether. That, however, is easier said than done. In a forthcoming work, Fredric Jameson has remarked with reason that, as narrative beings, we have little choice: ‘we cannot not periodize’.footnote³

The schema set out here is confined to a few telegraphic notations. Its object is to lay out the inter-relations between nationalism and internationalism as a succession of intelligible phases, each defined by a pair of dominants. The term signifies its own limits: what is ‘dominant’ will never be exhaustive of the phase in question, but will represent rather the most novel and salient forms of any period, which will always contain a series of counter-currents and sub-tones that can be set aside only provisionally, for the sake of simplification. The procedure adopted will be to match the changing historical versions of internationalism against the successive ideal-types of nationalism to which they could be said historically to correspond, as tracked by five coordinates: 1) the type of capital cœval with, or active in, each successive variant of nationalism; 2) the principal geographical zone of the nationalism in question; 3) its prevalent philosophical idiom; 4) the operative definition of the nation; 5) the relation of the particular nationalism to the dominated classes. The premise of the scheme is that the history of internationalism is best mapped against these coordinates of nationalism. In every period, there has been more than one variety of nationalism and internationalism; and significant conflicts have always existed among, as well as between them. But in this tangled skein, a line of dominants seems nonetheless discernible.

The origins of modern national sentiment as a secular force go back to the eighteenth century. It was then that there erupted the two great revolutions that gave birth to the first ideological conception of the nation, as we understand the term today—the rebellion of the North American colonies against Britain, and the overthrow of absolutism in France. The American and French Revolutions, which effectively invented our idea of the nation as a popular collectivity, were products of societies that were among the most advanced of the time: their ideologies marked a dramatic rupture with the visions of the world that had inspired earlier European revolutions, in the Low Countries in the 16th century and in England in the 17th century, both of them deeply religious uprisings, made in the name of God as much or more than that of the people. The American and French Revolutions occurred, nevertheless, in a world still anterior to the Industrial Revolution; one in which capital continued to be basically commercial or agrarian. Just for that reason, the elites of each were typically capable of mobilizing direct producers in town and country—that is to say, popular masses composed mainly of artisans or cultivators—behind them. There was not yet, as a general social fact, that social chasm between manufacturers and workers which industrial factories would later open up. A single category could notionally embrace all, ascendant and subordinate classes—patriotism. Militants in the struggles of the future United States and in France called themselves ‘patriots’, a term inspired by images and legends of the republics of classical antiquity: Athens, Sparta, Rome.

What was the philosophical idiom of this new patriotism? Famously, it was the characteristic rationalism of the Enlightenment, whose most eloquent spokesmen—Rousseau, Condorcet, Paine, Jefferson—pitted common reason against tradition, a conscious collective will against the inert weight of customs. Hence the ruling definition of the nation in this period was essentially political—that is to say, it was an ideal of the future, not a legacy of the past. The nation was something that free citizens were going to create: it did not pre-exist their intervention as a perennial fact but would emerge as a new kind of community, based on ‘natural’ rights rather than ‘artificial’ privileges or restrictions, in which liberty was to be understood as civic participation in public life in the full sense of the term.

In retrospect, one of the most striking features of this Enlightenment patriotism was its universalism. Typically, it assumed a basic harmony between the interests of civilized nations (uncivilized peoples were another matter), all potentially united in a common struggle against tyranny and superstition. Emblematic of this optimistic rationalism was the argument of Kant’s essay, For a Perpetual Peace: that rivalry between princes was the only important cause of wars—and that once royal ambitions were a thing of the past, as republican constitutions spread, the peoples of Europe would have no further cause to fight one another. In this era, then, the ideals of patriotism and cosmopolitanism marched together; on the plane of values, there was no contradiction between them. Not only, indeed, on the plane of values but also, in good measure, in lives and actions. It is enough to think of the roles played by Lafayette in both the North American War of Independence and the French Revolution itself; or Paine in Philadelphia and Paris, as pamphleteer for the Thirteen Colonies and deputy for the Gironde in the Convention.footnote⁴ Further south, in the zone most affected by the North American and French upheavals, the Liberators of the Wars of Independence in Spanish America—Bolívar, Sucre, San Martín—fought not only for their own native provinces but across a continent, to emancipate distant or neighbouring lands, in a spirit of regional fraternity.