Debating Internationalisms: Contexts, Concepts, and Historiography PDF

Introduction Debating Internationalisms Contexts, Concepts and Historiography Antero Holmila and Pasi Ihalainen The experiences of the late 2010s and early 2020s – most recently the over- whelmingly nationalistic responses to the Covid-19 crisis – have made us inc...

Introduction Debating Internationalisms Contexts, Concepts and Historiography Antero Holmila and Pasi Ihalainen The experiences of the late 2010s and early 2020s – most recently the over- whelmingly nationalistic responses to the Covid-19 crisis – have made us increasingly aware of the fact that internationalism and concepts closely related to it, like cosmopolitanism, universalism or Europe, have typically lived under the shadow of nationalism. Yet, while the emergence of modern nation states with their own ‘imagined communities’, pace Anderson, has dominated the historian’s craft since the professionalization of history in the nineteenth century, ideas that transcend the national predate nation states and nationalism. As Charlotta Wolff (Chapter 1) and several other contributors to this volume point out, ideas on borderless and universal communities within Europe emerged before the modern notions of nation state and conceptualizations of such communities as ‘international’. Many of the histories of nationalism, international relations and inter- nationalism have focused on events, leading actors and institutions despite the fact that past discourses and conceptualizations have also shaped those histories. This volume analyses how the semantic cluster surrounding ‘the international’ has emerged, evolved and changed over the course of modern history, including the development of a variety of its counter-concepts. Historical events – the fodder of much international relations scholarship – are important as context for discourses on the international but to unlock their wider meanings and the underlying structures that give them their shape, the keys are concepts as used by past political agents (see also Richter 1987: 259; Koselleck 2006: 11). In this volume, we do not apply today’s analytical concepts, paradigms or schools of thought from international relations research to interpret the past. From our historical, empirical 2 Antero Holmila and Pasi Ihalainen perspective, conceptual history and the focus on language underscore all historical understanding; as Hans-Jürgen Goertz has noted, language dom- inates ‘the process of cognition from beginning to end’ (Goertz 2001: 13). In terms of conceptual history, our aim is to analyse long-term dis- cursive and conceptual constructions of the cosmopolitan, international and European, partly also global and universal, in the course of European history since the eighteenth century. Our subject is the variety of meanings of the words referring to the international and the related contested – highly political – concepts created in a variety of contexts. Concepts, unlike mere words, escape simple definitions as they ‘collect, aggregate, and inte- grate a variety of meanings that often stem from widely differing fields, within widely differing terminologies’ and not only from the contemporary world but also a wide variety of past experiences and meanings (Jordheim and Sandmo 2019: 5, 7). As Marjanen and Ros point out (Chapter 3), our present-day public discourses on the favourable and unfavourable aspects of international activities continue to recycle historical – positively and negatively charged – connotations of the international. Our chapters hence discuss both the historical trajectories of concepts reaching beyond nation states, their use in particular politicized arguments and the resulting man- ifold meanings. While summarizing some related history of international relations and institutions, our analyses are based on prominent texts as well as everyday political debates in which past actors defined a variety of interrelated concepts that reached beyond nation states. As we reconstruct diverse past understandings of political, cultural and economic phenomena that reached beyond nation states, this book is not so much about the history of the agents, institutions or events of international relations, or about theoretical scholarly debates, but about the more every- day discourses on things international in a wide-ranging arena. Instead of trying to simply define what was ‘cosmopolitan’, ‘international’, ‘universal’ or ‘European’ in history, we analyse how past actors – including politicians, editors, public intellectuals and professionals – talked about the interna- tional and related terms. As previous research on international cooperation has rarely focused on language use and has seldom been based on any systematic analysis of a vast corpora of sources, conceptual history cannot necessarily build on earlier studies focusing on international practices and their generalizations on con- ceptualizations and the course of political discourse. Nevertheless, previous research is the point of departure for reconstructing the past contexts in which these concepts were debated. As part of the series European Conceptual History, we focus on ‘the transformation of social and political concepts’ and ‘notable values and  Introduction 3 terminology that have developed throughout European history’, though many of our chapters include elements of the international, universal and global well beyond Europe. In their Conceptual History in the European Space (2017), Willibald Steinmetz, Michael Freeden and Javier Fernández Sebastián emphasize the research attitude of conceptual history: it entails an awareness of the importance of language for what is sayable and doable and an emphasis on past conceptualizations by contemporaries; it does not reconstruct past ‘reality’ based on modern analytical concepts. Concepts constitute ‘focal points of interpretation and understanding’ that demon- strate ‘regularities and difference in human discourse’. They are ‘windows through which we can appreciate how comprehensions of the world are organized and brought to bear on action’ but they are also ‘constraints on the messiness of human thought and enablers of its transformation’. As Reinhart Koselleck has put it, ‘concepts express what a discourse is talking about’, while conceptual history ‘identifies the many layered meanings contained in the actual usages of a concept’. Conceptual history does not necessarily start with words; it can also start with phenomena in search for relevant and corresponding terms (Steinmetz and Freeden 2017: 1–2, 22–23; the Koselleck quote is from Koselleck 1996, 64). This is very much the case with discourses on the international: in many empirical cases words other than internationalism itself have turned out to be the key to these debates. Methodologically Steinmetz and Freeden have seen some common features between conceptual history and Skinnerian history of political thought. There are differences, however: conceptual history is typically not as focused on intentionality and rhetoric as a means of conceptual change as Cambridge-style intellectual history. Nor does conceptual history share the normative features and focus on linguistic structures of critical discourse analysis. In contrast to political philosophy, it is interested in meaning created in particular historical contexts rather than in the truth-value of past arguments (Steinmetz and Freeden 2017: 28–30). While many of the authors in this volume have adopted Skinnerian strategies of contextualiza- tion by focusing on linguistic conventions and considering original autho- rial intentions (Skinner 2002), they do not focus on the political thinking of individuals but rather on the variety of views expressed within com- munities – often political or intellectual elites of each national community to be precise. D ​ ebates on the international can be analysed as nexuses of multi-sited political discourses so that the previous and simultaneous activ- ities of political agents in other historical spaces, national and transnational forums are taken into consideration. Their mobility between these forums, connected physical experiences and (transnational) discursive transfers may also be relevant for understanding any particular speech act concerning the 4 Antero Holmila and Pasi Ihalainen international (Ihalainen and Saarinen 2019). Our focus is on the evolving meanings of concepts in use in political arguments: we integrate methods from discourse studies, corpus linguistics and digital humanities into the study of the history of internationalisms, to extend the repertoire of con- ceptual history beyond the historical semantics of Begriffsgeschichte or the analysis of individual speech acts by canonical thinkers in the history of political thought. The expansion of digitized texts has led to a major turning point in conceptual history in the past few decades. Steinmetz and Freeden have seen digital humanities in conceptual history as a promise rather than a reality, due to difficulties in interpreting semantic data (Steinmetz and Freeden 2017: 32). Thanks to the rapid growth of digitized texts during the late 2010s, we take on this challenge here by tentatively integrating digital history into the study of conceptual history. In preparing this introduction and some of the chapters (Chapters 3, 7, 8, 10 and 14), we have drawn on digitized data to home in on the historical periods that saw major changes in the vocabulary of the international. Case studies that build on contextualizing and critical close reading have thus been chosen in the said chapters based on comput- er-assisted generation of word patterns over time. A relatively new dataset used by many of the authors consist of digitized parliamentary records from a number of European countries. However, we are aware that the historical record largely remains either undigitized or unprepared for computer-based Natural Language Processing, and as a consequence the focus of analysis cannot be determined by computer-assisted research alone. When examining larger textual resources in conceptual history, relative word frequencies are very useful. However, we can by no means gauge the semantic value inherent in words and word patterns based on frequencies alone. We can measure the occurrence of the word Internationalismus at the German Reichstag in the 1930s, for instance, but without textual contexts, we cannot determine what that meant in practice. Nor can innovations in the meaning of concepts simply be measured quantitatively. Single innovative conceptualizations of the international may have been politically, economi- cally or culturally significant, especially if they impacted the course of debate and action, while much of the everyday vocabulary of the international has been merely technical in nature, lacking ideological dimensions, such as talk about international aviation or global standards. One challenge brought about by digitized sources is the need to select representative examples of more general conceptual trends. Highlighting comparable word distribu- tions in larger datasets, word embeddings, for instance, as opposed to mere unigram frequencies, can reveal variety in the language of the international (see Chapter 8).  Introduction 5 Previous Conceptual Histories of Internationalism Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe, the magnum opus of German Begriffsgeschichte, contained a chapter on ‘International, Internationale, Internationalismus’ (volume 3, 1982) without discussing cosmopolitanism or universalism more extensively as we do in our volume (e.g. Chapters 1, 2 and 9). According to Peter Friedemann and Lucian Hölscher (1982: 367–69, 397), the founding of The First International by socialists in 1864 marked the beginning of the history of internationalism as a key concept in German political debate. The attribute ‘international’ had appeared in late eighteenth-century British and French debates on the law of nations, introduced by Jeremy Bentham in 1789 (discussed in Chapters 1, 2 and 3), but in the course of the late nine- teenth century ‘international’ became increasingly used as a synonym for the slightly more pejorative ‘cosmopolitan’, reflecting the increasing inter- national interaction of the time. In our volume, we analyse the French and British debates (Chapter 2) and explore the nineteenth-century conceptual expansion based on big data (Chapter 3) as well as in the theoretical debates of socialism (Chapter 4). For Friedemann and Hölscher, the ideological content of ‘internationalism’ still implied associations with expectations of a socialist world revolution in the interwar era (also Chapter 6) and, after the Second World War, socialist unity under Russian/Soviet dominance within the Eastern bloc. In the Western world, the pejorative connotations of inter- nationalism decreased during the Cold War, even though the concept was rarely used to describe international cooperation, which reflects awareness of the continuous existence of ideological, political and cultural borders between and within the blocs (see Chapter 10). Our findings suggest that after the Second World War – especially from the 1960s to the 1980s – inter- nationalism as a concept was highly adaptable and polyvocal. In other words, it rendered more prestige to both ideas and events across a wide spectrum of action. Though not a representative of conceptual history, Akira Iriye’s work on Cultural Internationalism and World Order (1997) constitutes an important starting point for analyses of the spirit of internationalism that began to emerge in the interwar period. Iriye has called this cultural international- ism, emphasizing the role of cooperation between intellectuals and artists in search of international peace and pointing at projects such as student exchange and the creation of an international language, Esperanto. ‘[T]he [analytical] term internationalism is used to refer to an idea, a movement, or an institution that seeks to reformulate the nature of relations among nations through cross-national cooperation and interchange’ (Iriye 1997: 3). Following the same theme, Iriye devoted his Global Community: The Role of 6 Antero Holmila and Pasi Ihalainen International Organizations in the Making of the Contemporary World (2002) to charting out how twentieth-century internationalism evolved through the wide range of emerging international organizations. As he wrote, internationalism was a mindset, a ‘global consciousness … the idea that nations and peoples should cooperate instead of preoccupying themselves with their respective national interests’ (Iriye 2002: 9–10). Our case studies show that despite the birth of new international institutions, especially the League of Nations and the United Nations (and their web of agencies and non-governmental organizations that worked in close association with the international system), the nation state remained the key unit through which internationalism was facilitated. Thus we add a fresh dimension to the current scholarly view that the international and national work in tandem as an interconnected phenomenon (e.g. Sluga 2013; Sluga and Clavin 2017; Holmila and Ihalainen 2018). As Cornelia Navari commented in her Internationalism and the State in the Twentieth Century (2000), inter- nationalism was not only a matter of ideology, but also chosen as policy. Particularly useful is her observation that ‘the processes which produced internationalism were informed by conceptual categories as well as by material “facts”’ (Navari 2000: 3). What these conceptual categories were remained largely unexplored. Martin H. Geyer and Johannes Paulmann’s The Mechanics of Internationalism: Culture, Society, and Politics from the 1840s to the First World War (2001) also represents the renewed scholarly interest in interna- tionalism at the turn of the millennium. Their work focused on the struc- tures and practices of internationalism between the 1840s and the First World War. Their general argument illustrates approaches to the history of internationalism around 2000: There are good reasons for using the term ‘internationalism’ as a meaningful concept for analysing developments in nineteenth- and twentieth-century international relations. It is a historical term used by those advocating new international structures and organizations, economists no less than socialists, reformers as well as those rejecting the phenomenon for nationalistic reasons. (Geyer and Paulmann 2001: 3) While recognizing the importance of the concept as such, Geyer and Paulmann focused less explicitly on concepts and language than on insti- tutions and their transnational links. They covered matters such as stand- ardization, passports, and governmental and monarchical internationalism, touching on themes that are discussed in this volume: the world economy (Chapter 7), socialist (Chapter 4) and feminist internationalism (Chapter  Introduction 7 5), and the rise of internationalism in sport (Chapter 9). While Geyer and Paulmann explored the nineteenth century, we also look at the preceding revolutionary period and at twentieth-century developments in discourses when the first wave of international organizations culminated with the founding of the League of Nations. In the 2010s, volumes on internationalism rarely had an explicit focus on conceptual history. Internationalism Reconfigured: Transnational Ideas and Movements Between the World Wars (2011), edited by Daniel Laqua, focuses on Europe and North America in the 1920s, addressing transnational pro- jects connected to the League of Nations. The authors study the diversity of international thought and action beyond diplomacy, in cases combining the activities of individuals, groups and associations with intergovernmental and non-state institutions. They explore networks and transmission processes, arguing that internationalism was dependent on transnational structures and movements. While the authors were interested in national associations involved in international cooperation, ‘international’ organizations of the League and non-state actors, the conceptual history of ‘transnational’ and ‘internationalism’ by Patricia Clavin remains rather brief and emphasizes practices, not discourses or concepts. This leaves space for histories that show how the function of language through concepts and discourses are essential in prefiguring practices. David Armitage’s Foundations of Modern International Thought (2013) takes a classical intellectual history approach to how leading European polit- ical thinkers broadened their perspectives beyond nation states between the early seventeenth and mid-nineteenth centuries – ending with visions of a world of competing sovereign states. Armitage has used Google Ngrams to visualize the relative frequencies of ‘global’, ‘international’ and ‘transna- tional’ in twentieth-century English-language literature and in long-term and multiple processes of globalization and deglobalization. His discussion of how modern conceptions of international law were formed approaches conceptual history (Armitage 2013: 38, 41, 43, 45). While Armitage points at changing ways of international thinking in the British parliament, digi- tization has enabled us to explore those changes empirically and bring up aspects of debate that reach well beyond international law (Chapters 2, 6, 8 and 10). This leads us to ask to what extent we should include concepts of the world and the global in our explorations of discourses of the interna- tional. While it is not in primary focus, several of our chapters touch on the concept of the world and discuss related concepts. Recently, Hagen Schulz-Forberg combined transnational and entangled history and con- ceptual history in his Global Conceptual History of Asia, 1860–1940 (2014). 8 Antero Holmila and Pasi Ihalainen Schulz-Forberg challenges methodological nationalism, emphasizing the role of historical agents in conceptual entanglements as well as the inclu- sion of ‘anti-Western’ perspectives. His work is a healthy reminder of the risks of Eurocentrism in conceptual history: while writing within the series European Conceptual History, we need to recognize its problems and relate European conceptualizations to developments beyond Europe (see Chapter 1 on cosmopolitanism as anti-colonialism; Chapter 2 on universality and colonialism; Chapter 4 on socialist colonial politics; Chapter 6 on the importation of the controversial Leninist and Wilsonian understandings of internationalism to Europe and the world after the First World War; Chapter 9 on the rise of ‘global’ as an alternative to ‘international’ within the Olympic movement; Chapter 12 on discourses in the global South; and Chapter 13 on climate change as a global challenge). We need to ask to what extent European debates on the international have turned truly global or remained focused on relations between nation states in Europe, recycling Eurocentric views of the ‘world’. At the same time, internationalist visions have been presented by numerous non-Europeans, as demonstrated by Glenda Sluga in her Afterword. As for the concepts of the world and globalization as ‘a historical process and movement that consists of everything and everyone’ (Jordheim and Sandmo 2019: 2), Helge Jordheim and Erling Sandmo are comprehensive in their Conceptualizing the World: An Exploration across Disciplines (2019). Jordheim and Sandmo point at how language has been globalized with the rise of a number of compound words. ‘The world’ and ‘global’ have been used to refer to an infinite number of phenomena and have become tempo- ralized to forward-looking concepts of movement and communication. A major problem related to the rise of ‘globalization’ and its idea of the world becoming one is that this disregards the sense of the world as a limited space, masking the risks of the process leading to a global catastrophe (Jordheim and Sandmo 2019: 2, 14–15; approached in Chapter 13). Jordheim and Sandmo focus on interaction ‘between nations’ or ‘beyond nations’ touching on the paradox of a limited globe. We consider the concepts of the world and the global whenever they have been entangled with debates on internation- alism, which occurred especially in relation to the world economy as argued by Schulz-Forberg (Chapter 7), the Olympic movement (Holmila, Chapter 9), the student movement (Saksholm, Chapter 12) and environmental dis- courses (Kaarkoski, Chapter 13). The work that is closest to our goal thus far is Glenda Sluga’s Internationalism in the Age of Nationalism (2013). Sluga’s book provides a general history of international ideas, associations and institutions and includes aspects of the history of the concept. Sluga explores key moments  Introduction 9 of internationalism that are highly relevant for us here, including the turn of the twentieth century, the end of the two world wars, the global seventies and what she calls the ‘postinternational’ 1990s. She highlights intersections of the social, political and intellectual in the history of internationalism, exploring ‘imagined’ and ‘invented’ internationalism, emphasizing entanglements with the history of nationalism and consid- ering the interrelationship between talk on and practices of internation- alism. Her comment that ‘internationalism has long been regarded as a story of ideologues and radicals’ (Sluga 2013: 2) is particularly notewor- thy here. The chapters in this volume build on this internationalist turn, combining discourses and material circumstances to demonstrate that the discourses created by ‘ideologues and radicals’ have indeed framed the tone of speaking and writing about internationalism, but the story itself goes beyond their platitudes. In our opinion, Sluga is hence the best reviewer of our findings in the Afterword of this volume. In their edited volume ​Internationalisms: A Twentieth Century History (2017) Glenda Sluga and Patricia Clavin took the study of the multiple man- ifestations of internationalism further – reflected in the title’s plural. With their fellow authors they explored a political idea that has been central for ‘war and peace, imperialism and nationalism, states and state-building’. In their view, internationalism has provided an alternative to understandings of subjectivity, identity and sovereignty that centre on the nation state, but nationalism, imperialism and internationalisms have strong ideological and intellectual connections. They welcome constructivist approaches and studies of the language of internationalism, though these perspectives are more visible in their introduction than in the actual case studies. Sluga and Clavin recognize the contextual specificity of internationalisms and refer to interaction between events and ideas, ‘thought and practice’, ‘the entangled histories of international thinking’ and ‘conflicting and contested narratives’ (Sluga and Clavin 2017: 5–6, 8, 12). Our volume is a response to Sluga and Clavin’s call for the systematic study of the ‘language’ of internationalism and includes perspectives they have not covered. A vast body of other specialist literature on internationalism is burgeon- ing and cannot be reviewed here in detail. Suffice it to say that the topics range from Talbot Imlay’s The Practice of Socialist Internationalism (2017), to the fast-growing area of internationalism as seen through race and gender perspectives. One of these is Keisha N. Blain’s and Tiffany M. Gill’s edited volume To Turn the Whole World Over: Black Women and Internationalism (2019). The editors explain that this volume is less about charting concepts and more of ‘an attempt to expand the contours of black internationalism theoretically, spatially and temporally’ (2). 10 Antero Holmila and Pasi Ihalainen The Structure of this Book in Relation to the Conceptual History of Internationalisms While the European international system has evolved at least since the Treaty of Westphalia (1648), building on the principle of sovereign nation states and international law (Armitage 2013), we explore transformations in conceptualizations of the international since the eighteenth century, when the dynamic of the debate started to increase and related vocabularies to widen. Cosmopolitan Enlightenment thought (Charlotta Wolff in Chapter 1), together with traditions of French universalism, constituted the back- ground for the radical rethinking of international relations by the French revolutionaries, which inspired reinterpretations of the implications of the law of nations in Britain (Friedemann Pestel and Pasi Ihalainen in Chapter 2). Intensified international interaction and cooperation supported consider- able diversification of the language of the international in the late nineteenth century, which can be seen in the emergence of the first wave of using the term ‘international’ and then ‘internationalism’ (Jani Marjanen and Ruben Ros in Chapter 3). The nineteenth century witnessed the rise of at least three different strands of understanding the international. Firstly, the British Empire and the rising United States constituted contexts for the growth of what has often been generalized as ‘liberal’ internationalism, building on the idea of the Empire as a model for global order and conceptions of national excep- tionalism. Secondly, much of continental Europe carried on the traditions of diplomacy between sovereign nation states derived from Westphalia, the Congress of Vienna and the Holy Alliance. Both of these conceptions of the international contributed to the emergence of a variety of international conferences and organizations towards the end of the nineteenth century. Pressure groups emanating from the growing civil society challenged these developments, demanding the right to participate in politics both nationally and internationally, in the labour and women’s rights movements. Socialist internationalism was the first to include the very word in its constructions of identity, to question the established international order based on capitalism, class societies and nation states (Pauli Kettunen in Chapter 4). It also partly inspired the first wave of feminism, while some other women’s rights move- ments tried to change the gender order within the liberal and conservative traditions (Tiina Kinnunen in Chapter 5). While the late nineteenth century witnessed the flowering of myriad spe- cialized international organizations that reinforced the role of nation states, the twentieth century was an age of both internationalism and national- ism, total wars and genocide. In the wake of the First World War and the  Introduction 11 dissolution of empires, nations came together in an entirely new forum, the League of Nations, and new nations entered the international stage. A certain international optimism among revisionist socialists and some non-socialist politicians in the 1920s faded with experiences of the rise of nationalism in the 1930s (Pasi Ihalainen and Jörn Leonhard in Chapter 6). Expectations of an emerging world economy that would ensure peace evap- orated with the economic crash in 1929 and the global depression that fol- lowed (Hagen Schulz-Forberg in Chapter 7). The decades after the Second World War were marked by a new type of superpower rivalry, decolonial- ization and the further wave of new nations appearing in the international scene. Throughout these transformations, nationalism and internationalism interacted, but internationalism was typically subordinated to the interests of nation states. The analysis of language, both on the macro-level of serial textual data (‘distant reading’) and on the micro-level (‘close reading’), suggests that the developments between the two world wars stimulated a further wave of internationalism. This second wave was, however, considerably delayed by the rise of National Socialist Germany and the Second World War. What we call the second wave is visible in parliamentary debates from the 1920s onwards. Figures 0.2 to 0.4 show that the term ‘international’ was used increasingly frequently in the British, Dutch and Swedish parliaments until the 1980s, with a steep rise since the 1960s as what can be called the third wave. Google Books Ngram Viewer on ‘international*’ in English, French and German similarly corroborate with an increase around 1920, a decline in the 1930s and during the Second World War, and a rapid increase during the 1960s, peaking around 1990 (see Figure 0.1). Figure 0.1 Juxtaposition of Google Ngrams for the word ‘international’ in English, German and French corpus between 1800 and 2019 (https://books.google.com/ ngrams). 12 Antero Holmila and Pasi Ihalainen Figures 0.3 and 0.4, Table 0.1 and Google Ngrams in Figure 0.1 all indicate that the ‘postinternational’ turn, mentioned by Sluga, began towards the end of the twentieth century, when the stem ‘internation*’ entered into a relative decline in English, French and German literature. This seems to suggest the emergence of a ‘post-internationalist age’ which was less concerned with the relations between nations than with the world as a coherent whole. The word ‘international’ was not replaced with ‘global’ as expected, but there are indications in Ngram Viewer that the use of both words declined. These developments gave rise to alternative terminologies used to conceptualize the world ‘beyond’ the nation state as a fluid continuum rather than a con- stellation of nations. Of these, the scholarly terms ‘cosmopolitanism’ and ‘transnational’ rapidly gained popularity in social scientific and humanities research respectively in the first decade of the twenty-first century but have hardly found their way to public discourse. In political theory, cosmopolitanism remains a modern normative concept which has little to do with the conceptual history of cosmopolitanism, as demonstrated by this volume (Chapters 1, 2 and 9). For us, transnational is a modern analytical concept, used (in Chapters 2, 3, 5, 6, 7, 12 and 14) when the focus is on cross-border networks functioning independently of nation states and potentially on European or global, as opposed to particular Figure 0.2 The absolute frequency of ‘international’ in the British parliament (1800–2005). © Joris van Eijnatten.  Introduction 13 national, challenges. As Tiina Kinnunen (Chapter 5) points out, in the beginning of the twentieth century ‘transnational’ cross-border interaction was still covered with the term international. The attribute transnational was used in public discourse before scholars began to use it in the last two decades. In historical research, the transnational perspective typically focuses on phenomena that transcend the nation state; explores processes, networks, discourses, interconnections and institutions that have had impact beyond nation states; and examines different types of cross-national transfers related to knowledge, people, currencies, information and more (Beckert 2006; Ahonen 2014; Patel 2015). Both macro- and micro-level analyses of debates on the international suggest that this re-evaluation of internationalism began in the 1960s. For example, nation states whose official identities were constructed on member- ship in an established church were replaced first by more generally adopted ecumenical ways of thinking and then by purely secular ways of concep- tualizing international questions (Joris van Eijnatten and Pasi Ihalainen in Chapter 8). The 1960s was also the era of decolonization and increasing cross-border mobility, both of which influenced changing values in Europe. The Red Cross, for instance, struggled to negotiate between its emphasis on Figure 0.3 The absolute frequency of internationa(a)l(e) in the Dutch parliament (1814–2018), with a clearly visible post-internationalist turn since around 1990. © Joris van Eijnatten. 14 Antero Holmila and Pasi Ihalainen humanitarian universality and the realities (and particularities) of humani- tarian aid in conflicts related to decolonialization (Norbert Götz and Irène Herrmann in Chapter 11). Similarly, the Olympic movement began to view internationalism in sport as a universal human right rather than a reflection of an activity centred on the nation state (Antero Holmila in Chapter 9). Within Western European student movements, internationalism was already a premise for all activities and, as transnational ways of thinking gained ground, national phenomena and events were interpreted as part of worldwide developments (Juho Saksholm in Chapter 12). The international environmental movement was also taking new forms and affecting the ways in which politicians saw global climate challenges, though these were not that much discussed in the language of internationalism but often with an emphasis on national interests (Miina Kaarkoski in Chapter 13). Finally, the effects of European integration, first via common markets, but increasingly also in other areas, were felt in the domestic and foreign policy debates of EU member states. European unity continued to be frequently debated in relation to nationhood, however (Mats Andrén and Joris van Eijnatten in Chapter 10 and Viktória Ferenc, Petteri Laihonen and Taina Saarinen in Chapter 14). Figure 0.4 The absolute frequency of internationell* in the Swedish parliament (1867–2017). © Joris van Eijnatten. Table 0.1 The absolute frequencies or unigram counts of ‘internationali[s/z]e’, ‘internationali[s/z]ing’ and ‘internationali[s/z]ation’ and related terms, with their Dutch and Swedish equivalents, as used in the British, Dutch and Swedish parliaments. © Joris van Eijnatten. Britain 1861–1880 1881–1900 1901–1920 1921–1940 1941–1960 1961–1980 1981–2000 2001–2005 total globali[s/z]ation 0 0 0 0 0 3 730 1,113 1,846 globali[s/z]e 0 0 0 0 0 0 4 5 9 globali[s/z]ing 0 0 0 0 0 0 21 23 44 internationali[s/z]e 1 9 27 27 78 38 22 204 0 internationali[s/z]ing 1 1 28 19 52 13 14 132 0 internationali[sz]ation 11 12 126 221 113 94 31 621 0 Netherlands 1861–1880 1881–1900 1901–1920 1921–1940 1941–1960 1961–1980 1981–2000 2001–2018 total globaliseren 0 0 0 0 0 4 26 4 34 globaliserend[e] 0 0 0 0 0 9 40 122 171 globalisering* 0 0 0 0 1 12 576 1,096 1,685 internationaliseren 0 0 0 0 9 25 35 53 122 internationaliserend(e) 0 0 0 0 0 1 11 9 21 Introduction internationalisering* 0 0 0 1 22 122 866 777 1,788 mondialiseren 0 0 0 0 0 5 7 2 14 mondialiserend[e] 0 0 0 0 0 0 3 9 12 0 0 0 0 0 25 97 95 217 mondialisering* Sweden 1867–1880 1881–1900 1901–1920 1921–1940 1941–1960 1961–1980 1981–2000 2001–2017 total internationalisera 8 0 0 2 0 11 11 4 36 internationaliserande 0 0 0 0 0 0 2 0 2 internationalisering* 73 0 1 28 7 186 1,170 425 1,890 globalisera 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 2 2 globaliserande 0 0 0 0 0 0 0 1 1 globalisering* 0 0 0 0 0 0 537 1,305 1,842 15 16 Antero Holmila and Pasi Ihalainen The Mission of European Conceptual History of Internationalisms We explore conceptualizations of the international as fluctuating, con- textual and contingent political, cultural and economic discourses, often, but not always, related to interests of nation states and their nationalisms. Cosmopolitan ways of thinking and transnational networks have provided alternatives to ways of thinking purely centred on the nation state, but their role in mainstream discourse has remained limited. We emphasize the dis- cursive and contested aspects of related debates and arguments, opening up a long-term and systematic vista, from eighteenth-century cosmopolitanism to our days of transnational interaction. Translations from several languages to English are our own if not otherwise stated. Internationalism customarily refers to cooperation between states. Within the tradition known as liberal internationalism, patriotism and nationalism have been seen not only as antonyms of internationalism but as its prereq- uisites and hence reconcilable. A deeper understanding of the dynamics between nationalisms and internationalisms is hence one of our goals; this helps us to comprehend challenges in international cooperation of which contemporaries were often very conscious. In the confines of one volume it is not possible to cover everything that goes beyond nations states. In line with the series European Conceptual History, we focus on European political cultures in a comparative and transnational perspective. Northwest European political cultures are the primary focus of contrib- utors: we analyse British, Dutch, Finnish, French, German, Hungarian, Swedish and Swiss debates. We consider this a legitimate choice for one substantial and three practical reasons. Firstly, many of the concepts of international cooperation first evolved in Northwest European countries and were gradually extended to cover Southern and Eastern Europe and beyond the bounds of the continent. The consideration of more peripheral countries in Northwest Europe balances conventional great-power-centred narratives. Secondly, the digitization of documents on long-term political discourse has proceeded furthest in many Northwest European countries; this makes a digital history contribution to conceptual history practical and potentially innovative methodologically. Thirdly, conceptual history – also in its comparative and transnational forms – has established itself in these countries, making it somewhat easier to recruit authors ready to contribute with diachronic analyses that proceed beyond the boundaries of their ‘own’ nation states. Fourthly, the group of conceptual historians we have been able to assemble mostly read Northwest European languages, which enables comparative research between countries in this cultural area.  Introduction 17 We have done our best to break out of the nation state-centred paradigms of academic research, asking every author to justify their choice of national cases in the light of European conceptual history. Conceptualizations and discourses that extend beyond Europe – such as those of the universal and global – are considered through their relations and implications for concepts of internationalism in Europe. While empire and imperialism are not in focus here, we are aware that for centuries, Europeans have attempted to dominate global debates on international cooperation – as on almost any field of human activity. We hope that our volume contributes to the critical examination of such tendencies. We fully recognize that not all voices can be heard through the extant sources, whether digital or analogical. The concepts whose history we analyse are abstract and not necessarily used in everyday discourses beyond political and cultural elites, even if the scope of debates was broad at times by the early and particularly the late twentieth century. We contribute to the inclusion of gender and class perspectives on the conceptual history of international cooperation. International politics has long remained a white, male and elite sphere of activity, and other perspectives are not explicitly present in many of the sources we use. Yet, the contributors have been asked to reflect on their potential significance and to include instances originating from everyday politicized debates in the media if not on the micro-level of individual citizens. Gender and class are the focus of two chapters, one on the internationalism of the first wave of feminism (Chapter 5), and the other on trade union and labour internationalism (Chapter 4). In the beginning of the twenty-first century the future of political, eco- nomic, environmental or multilateral internationalism has been challenged by populistic, neonationalist and protectionist trends. The interconnected world manifested in the political, social, cultural and economic order of the twen- tieth century was depicted as being in a crisis in an age of Brexit, Trumpist policies, European populism and a number of other anti-establishment, anti-internationalist and anti-EU trends that dominated the debates of the late 2010s. The inability of international organizations to tackle effectively the climate or Covid-19 crises further calls their legitimacy into question. Is such questioning of the international exceptional or just another phase in a centuries-old negotiation between the interests of nation states and attempts to transcend or proceed beyond them? Internationalism could be seen as a phenomenon comparable to democracy and parliamentarism (Ihalainen, Ilie and Palonen 2016; Kurunmäki, Nevers and Te Velde 2018), that is, to ideals that have never been achieved in some particular phase of history but which continue to provide major goals in ongoing political debates. To understand the role of the international in the political, social, economic, cultural and 18 Antero Holmila and Pasi Ihalainen ecological debates of today we need to grasp its multi-layered history as a con- tested concept. It may be that, like concepts of the world, our current concept of the international needs to move ‘toward a broader, more comprehensive, and more complex reality’ (Jordheim and Sandmo 2019: 17). Antero Holmila is Associate Professor of Modern History at the Department of History and Ethnology, University of Jyväskylä, Finland. He has published widely on the histories of the era following the Second World War, including the transition from war to peace, the emergence of the Holocaust in British and Nordic collective memories, the birth of the United Nations, geopolitical thinking and the International Olympic Committee during the Cold War era. ORCID 0000-0003-2456-7223. Pasi Ihalainen is Academy of Finland Professor at the Department of History and Ethnology, University of Jyväskylä, and has previously worked as a visiting professor at the universities of Freiburg, Gothenburg, Leiden and Uppsala. He has published widely on the history of political discourse and the conceptual history of nationalism, democracy and parliamentarism since the eighteenth century, applying comparative and transnational per- spectives. ORCID 0000-0002-5468-4829. References Ahonen, P. 2014. ‘On Forced Migrations: Trans-National Realities and National Narratives in Post-1945 (West) Germany’, German History 32(4): 599–614. Armitage, D. 2013. Foundations of Modern International Thought. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Beckert, S. 2006. ‘AHR Conversation: On Transnational History’, American Historical Review 111(5): 1441–64. Blain, K.N. and T.M. Gill (eds). 2019. To Turn the Whole World Over: Black Women and Internationalism. Urbana: University of Illinois Press. Friedemann, P. and L. Hölscher. 1982. ‘Internationale, International, Internationalismus’, in O. Brunner, W. Conze and R. Koselleck (eds), Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe: Historisches Lexicon zur politisch-sozialen Sprache in Deutschland, vol. 3. Stuttgart: Klett-Cota, pp. 367–97. Geyer. M.H. and J. Paulmann (eds). 2001. The Mechanics of Internationalism: Culture, Society, and Politics from the 1840s to the First World War. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Goertz, H.R. 2001. Unsichere Geschichte: Zur Theorie historischer Referentialität. Stuttgart: Reclam.  Introduction 19 Holmila, A. and P. Ihalainen. 2018. ‘Nationalism and Internationalism Reconciled: British Concepts for a New World Order during and after World Wars’, Contributions to the History of Concepts 13(2): 25–53. Ihalainen, P., C. Ilie and K. Palonen (eds). 2016. Parliament and Parliamentarism: A Comparative History of a European Concept. New York: Berghahn. Ihalainen, P. and T. Saarinen. 2019. ‘Integrating a Nexus: The History of Political Discourse and Language Policy Research’, Rethinking History 23(4): 500–19. Imlay, T.C. 2017. The Practice of Socialist Internationalism: European Socialists and International Politics, 1914–1960. Oxford. Oxford University Press. Iriye, A. 1997. Cultural Internationalism and World Order. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press.. 2002. Global Community: The Role of International Organizations in the Making of the Contemporary World. Berkeley: University of California Press. Jordheim, H. and E. Sandmo (eds). 2019. Conceptualizing the World: An Exploration across Disciplines. New York: Berghahn. Koselleck, R. 1996. ‘A Response to Comments on the Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe’, in H. Lehmann and M. Richter (eds), The Meaning of Historical Terms and Concepts. Washington DC: German Historical Institute. Koselleck, R. 2006. ‘Crisis’, Journal of the History of Ideas 67(2): 357–400. Kurunmäki, J., J. Nevers and H. Te Velde (eds). 2018. Democracy in Europe: A Conceptual History. New York: Berghahn. Laqua, D. (ed.). 2011. Internationalism Reconfigured: Transnational Ideas and Movements Between the World Wars. New York: I. B. Tauris. Navari, C. 2000. Internationalism and the State in the Twentieth Century. London: Routledge. Patel, K.K. 2015. ‘An Emperor Without Clothes? The Debate about Transnational History Twenty-five Years On’, Histoire@Politique 26. https://doi.org/10.3917/ hp.026.0191. Richter, M. 1987. ‘Begriffsgeschichte and the History of Ideas’, Journal of the History of Ideas 48(2): 247–63. Schulz-Forberg, H. (ed). 2014. Global Conceptual History of Asia, 1860–1940. Abingdon and New York: Routledge. Skinner, Q. 2002. Visions of Politics: Volume I: Regarding Method. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Sluga, G. 2013. Internationalism in the Age of Nationalism. Pennsylvania Studies in Human Rights. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press. Sluga, G. and P. Clavin (eds). 2017. Internationalisms: A Twentieth-Century History. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. Steinmetz, W. and M. Freeden. 2017. ‘Introduction Conceptual History Challenges, Conundrums, Complexities’, in W. Steinmetz, M. Freeden and Javier Fernández Sebastián (eds), Conceptual History in the European Space. New York: Berghahn, pp. 1–46. Steinmetz, W., M. Freeden and Javier Fernández Sebastián (eds). 2017. Conceptual History in the European Space. New York: Berghahn.  Chapter 1 Conceptions of Cosmopolitanism in the Intellectual Culture of the Enlightenment Charlotta Wolff The notion of a borderless community, although not conceptualized as ‘international’ before the nineteenth century, is obviously much older than the nation state as a concept. In medieval Europe, the self-assigned univer- salistic mission of Christianity had fed the idea of a cultural community, but the animosities and rivalries between European sovereigns, as well as between their developing states and the papacy, constituted a challenge to the old conception of the unity of Latin Christianity. The ideal of a universal cultural community nevertheless remained strong in medieval and early modern political theory, where it was conceptualized in terms of, on the one hand, the res publica Christiana, and, on the other, a universal monarchy or Christian empire, reflective of the heavenly order, which could be achieved under the rule of one sovereign (Hölzing 2011: 70–88). The ideals of universal monarchy and Christian empire were central for legitimizing the policies of Catholic rulers such as Holy Roman Emperor Charles V. The Eurocentric ideal of a universal res publica Christiana as a moral superstructure lasted well into the seventeenth and eighteenth centu- ries and was occasionally discussed even in early nineteenth-century prop- aganda (see Chapter 2). As Christianity itself was split by religious dissent, the Reformations, and the long wars of the seventeenth century, universal- istic ideals were articulated as necessary for the achievement of peace and stability. With the peace processes of Westphalia, diplomacy was formalized 22 Charlotta Wolff and theorized for a new mission: to maintain a balance of power essential to geopolitical stability in Europe. In this context, natural law, and the law of nations (ius gentium) that subsequently developed, became central for the conceptualization of relations between states. While seventeenth-century treatises on the law of nations were in Latin and therefore presented natural continuities with how a res publica Christiana was conceptualized, the phil- osophical literature of the eighteenth century and the ‘Enlightenment’ was increasingly in the vernacular but still recycled the classical concepts. Early eighteenth-century essays on ‘international’ organization and peace thus still reflected the ideals of balance and universal monarchy. In this respect, the novelties of the eighteenth century and the Age of Enlightenment were, on the one hand, the bold proposals for perpetual peace drawn up by philosophers and thinkers such as Saint-Pierre, Rousseau, Bentham or Kant, and, on the other, the conceptualization and personal experience of a strong spirit of cosmopolitanism amidst the literary elite, known as the Republic of Letters (république des lettres, res publica litter- aria). This development went hand in hand with the increasingly optimistic belief in progress and humanity fed by periods of relative peace in Western Europe between 1713 and 1740 and again between 1748 and 1756. After the death of Louis XIV of France in 1715, Europe in effect seemed to enter an era of cosmopolitanism, epitomized in the epistolary practices of the literary elite, with its networks of correspondence and friendship extending over the continent and the Atlantic Ocean. In terms of ideals present in dramatic literature, poetry and art, however, the second half of the century was characterized by a patriotic discourse with increasingly democratic and republican undertones. In this context, how did the intellectual elites, who described themselves in terms of a res publica litteraria by analogy with the res publica Christiana, define ‘cosmopolitanism’ as an ideal and as a practice? Cosmopolitan Visions for a Post-absolutist Europe What we could call cosmopolitan cultural practices were commonplace in the république des lettres of the eighteenth century. Intellectuals, diplomats, ama- teurs and other educated persons of standing communicated across borders through correspondence, travelled to meet in the cosmopolitan salons of Paris, contributed to scholarly debates by publishing their writings abroad in the proceedings of the rapidly developing scientific academies or were introduced in foreign high society by common acquaintances and personal recommendations. This natural intercourse of individuals gave birth to a conscience of the existence of a community across borders, to ‘cosmopolitan’ as a self-description and to cosmopoli(ti)sme as a creed. This manifested in  Conceptions of Cosmopolitanism 23 ambitious visions for peaceful cooperation, not only between intellectuals but also between nations and in everyday practices that impacted on lan- guage and vocabulary (Masseau 1994; Coulmas 1990). In French, which in the late seventeenth century became the lingua franca of the Republic of Letters, cosmopolite (cosmopolitan), in the sense of a person travelling extensively without settling in a specific place, had been in use at least since the sixteenth century, when Guillaume Postel used the term instead of indicating his place of birth (Postel 1560; TLFi). The notion of a person of no fixed abode was present also in seventeenth-century usages of the word, as research in the database Electronic Enlightenment shows (cosmopolite: Daniel Coxe to Robert Boyle 1666, EE; Georges Pierre Des Clozets to Robert Boyle 1678, EE). In the sense of a ‘citizen of the world’, operating beyond particular states and for whom the concept of nationality is irrelevant, cosmopolite was increasingly used in the eighteenth century. That is also when the derived concept of cosmopoli(ti)sme (alternatively cosmopolitanisme) appeared, the marquis d’Argenson being one of the first to use it in the late 1730s to designate cosmopolitanism as an attitude and abstract ideal (TLFi). René-Louis de Voyer de Paulmy, marquis d’Argenson (1694–1757) belonged to an important family of lawyers, ambassadors and ministers who served the central administration of the Bourbons from Louis XIII to Louis XV. Like his friend Voltaire, he had been educated in a Jesuit college, and like many other representatives of the French judiciary elite, he strongly opposed royal absolutism. With Montesquieu and président Hénault, he joined the Club de l’Entresol, a philosophical circle founded by the abbé Alary and the abbé de Saint-Pierre in 1724. The club gathered the aristo- cratic opposition – magistrates of the parlements – as well as diplomats and other intellectuals from Paris and abroad, united by French court culture and language. In this milieu, which largely corresponded to the ‘first generation’ of the French Enlightenment, cosmopolitanism as a practice and an ideal was strongly linked to the rejection of absolutism and the damages inflicted on society by the bellicose expansion of France under Louis XIV. D’Argenson was slightly sceptical about human capacity for cosmopol- itanism. In a letter to Voltaire from 7 July 1739, d’Argenson stated that ‘Our virtue is not advanced enough … for this perfect cosmopolitanism that would seek equally the happiness of all humankind’ (7 July 1739, EE). Around the same time, in the late 1730s, in another of his writings, d’Ar- genson wrote that he would prefer to concentrate his love on his fatherland and be indifferent to the other inhabitants of the world: ‘May a greater man embrace love for the entire globe, I admit I do not feel great enough for that’ (quoted by Rathery 1859, xxxiii). Still, he was tempted by cosmopolitanism 24 Charlotta Wolff and claimed to be working on a treatise on ‘to what extent cosmopolitanism can be accepted in a good citizen’ (ibid.). In other words, d’Argenson gave patriotism his preference, not only because this was less demanding, but mostly because love for humankind as a whole seemed to require almost superhuman virtue. D’Argenson’s ideal was a European republic, but while his own views remained at a general and practical level, his friend Saint-Pierre drew up more ambitious plans. A Jesuit who had participated in the peace negoti- ations at Utrecht, Saint-Pierre was representative of the post-Westphalian culture of diplomacy, where international conflicts were to be resolved by civilian negotiators rather than through military action (Bély 1990: 743–51). Published in Utrecht from 1713 onwards, his Projet pour rendre la paix per- pétuelle en Europe was symptomatic of a certain war-weariness. To prevent conflicts in the future, it proposed forms of international organization of a kind so radical that it took 250 years before they could be concretized even partly. Saint-Pierre’s Projet, in two volumes, breaks with tradition by reject- ing the ideals of universal monarchy (Saint-Pierre 1713: II, 49, 71, 113) and balance of powers (équilibre des puissances, Saint-Pierre 1713: I, vi), which he sees as leading to both an unending competition for domination and wars. Instead, he proposes a treaty of union between sovereign states, what he calls the ‘European Union’ (Union Européenne, Saint-Pierre 1713: passim), with a common deliberative assembly (la diète générale) invested with arbitrating powers, de facto a permanent peace congress reflective of the diplomatic experiences of the time, and a permanent council for running the affairs of the union (Saint-Pierre 1713: I, 335). In English and French, the terminology of cosmopolitanism was scarcely used before the last third of the eighteenth century. Contrary to d’Argen- son, Saint-Pierre did not use the words cosmopolite, cosmopolitisme or even (inter-)national, which was used in French only from the beginning of the nineteenth century. Nation is used as a synonym for the country (including its inhabitants) ruled by a sovereign. The most interesting concepts are the ones Saint-Pierre formulates for his specific purpose, the most central being the Union Européenne, a concept modelled on his perception of an existing Union Germanique (the Holy Roman Empire, Saint-Pierre 1713: I, vii, 63, passim). His ‘European Union’ comprises eighteen sovereign states: France, Spain, Britain, the Dutch Republic, Portugal, the Helvetic Confederation, Florence, Genoa, the Papal states, Venice, Savoy, Lorraine, Denmark, Courland and Danzig, the Holy Roman Empire, Poland, Sweden and Russia (Saint-Pierre 1713: I, vii). The cosmopolitan community of European states is thus limited to Christian nations, but its mechanisms would be extensible to a hypothetical and pagan Union Asiatique (Saint-Pierre 1713: II, 204). As  Conceptions of Cosmopolitanism 25 a weaker synonym, Saint-Pierre also uses the expressions société européenne and corps européen (Saint-Pierre 1713: I, ix, xi, passim). Interestingly, while he does not refer to cosmopolitanism as such, he not only conceptualizes the idea of a European community in terms of a political and strategic alliance, but also in terms of a common fatherland, la commune patrie, and a republic of peace, république de paix, the ‘republic’ here referring to the community (Saint-Pierre 1713: I, 362, 376, 378). While he rejects the idea of a universal European monarchy (monarchie universelle, monarchie de l’Europe) for being impractical, weak, arbitrary and subject to many inconveniencies for the rulers (Saint-Pierre 1713: II, 71), as Montesquieu did after him, Saint- Pierre’s Projet is permeated by a universalist but Eurocentric ideal, associ- ated with peace and with free and unhindered trade (commerce). This limited universalism not only reflects the liberal aristocracy’s aversion towards absolutism, but also the same kind of exclusive cosmopolitanism that in practice restricted the Republic of Letters, not to speak of the cosmopolitan beau monde, to educated Europeans of a certain social standing. It is also a clear manifestation of an idea of a European community of interests, which had the potential to become a political superstructure. This bold vision for peace and cooperation in a European republic was a rare but significant measure of how far the Republic of Letters could project its sense of community and of a common culture of cosmopolitan- ism. However, in the first third of the century, this cosmopolitanism was not yet generally conceptualized as an ideal. By contrast, cosmopolitan practices and attitudes were widely embraced by the European diplomatic and literary elites of the Age of Enlightenment, whose networks of sociability and cor- respondence presented a clear continuity with the Club de l’Entresol on a personal level, long after it had been dissolved by the French authorities in 1733. In the decades that followed, as we shall see, these elites would infuse the term ‘cosmopolitanism’ with political meaning. Descriptions of Cosmopolitan Practices and Attitudes The self-celebrated practices of the Republic of Letters have been much described in previous research (Masseau 1994; Félicité 2015; Rjéoutski 2015; Wolff 2005, 2015). Interestingly, although this ‘republic’ de facto lived out a cosmopolitan ideal, compared to ‘progress’, ‘Enlightenment’ or ‘humankind’ (humanité), ‘cosmopolitan(ism)’ was rather sparsely used before the last third of the century. When the concepts were used, however, in the 1740s and 1750s, it was generally in a positive sense reflective of the spirit of the philosophes, who appropriated them to declare themselves cosmopolitans. Voltaire used the term cosmopolite in his correspondence 26 Charlotta Wolff in a pleasant and complimentary way. When writing to Frederick II on the subject of universal peace, he stated ‘I am such a good cosmopolitan that I will be delighted about anything’, and when addressing his friends La Condamine and Gauffrecourt, it was in the terms of ‘my [very] dear cosmopolitan’ (29 April 1752 and 25 January 1756, EE). A work often mentioned as an example of a positive conception of cos- mopolitanism representative of eighteenth-century intellectual culture is Fougeret de Montbron’s Le Cosmopolite, ou le citoyen du monde, published in 1750 and translated into German in 1758. Despite the definite articles in the title, this is not a normative treatise but a description of the author’s exten- sive travels. In other words, being a ‘cosmopolitan’ is as much a practice as a philosophical attitude. When he began his travels, the author says he ‘hated his fatherland’, but having grown accustomed to the ‘impertinence’ of so many foreigners, he has over time been reconciled with his native country. In other words, the text appears as a short lesson on the universality of human vices and virtues, regardless of place and origin (Montbron 1750: 3). A contemporary positive and tolerant approach to cosmopolitan practices also appears in Diderot’s and d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie, a work that the editors themselves defined in the preface to the third volume as ‘cosmo- politan’ in the sense of tolerant and impartial: ‘this dictionary is a sort of cosmopolitan work, which would do itself wrong by any marked pref- erence or predilection’ (Diderot and d’Alembert 1753: vi). In the entry ‘Cosmopolitain, ou cosmopolite’, the cosmopolitan is defined as ‘a man who is a stranger nowhere’. The definition is illustrated by the following anecdote: ‘When an ancient philosopher was asked where he came from, he answered: “I am a Cosmopolitan, which means citizen of the world. I prefer, said another one, my family to myself, my fatherland to my family, and humankind to my fatherland”’. Cosmopolitanism is thus understood as an enlarged identity that eventually embraces humankind. Significantly, the entry ends with a cross-reference to another entry, ‘Philosophe’ (Diderot and d’Alembert 1754: 297). The author of the entry ‘Cosmopolitain, ou cosmopolite’ is unknown. However, one contributor to the Encyclopédie and representative of the philosophes who frequently used the concept was the abbé André Morellet (1727–1819). Morellet used the expression ‘je suis cosmopolite’ several times (five occurrences in his letters in the EE between 1765 and 1806). He also included his friends in this creed. He thus wrote (in French) to William Petty, First Marquess of Lansdowne (a.k.a. Lord Shelburne), ‘I think you have become a little cosmopolitan by the interest you take in the happiness of all nations’ (4 September 1775, EE); ‘like me you are a cosmopolitan and a patriot at the same time’ (7 May 1787, EE).  Conceptions of Cosmopolitanism 27 Morellet, like Raynal and many other French intellectuals associated with the Encyclopédie, was a strong supporter of American independence. Shelburne, too, as an Irish-born member of the British opposition, had demonstrated a conciliatory attitude towards the emancipation of the Thirteen Colonies, and in Morellet’s letters to him, ‘cosmopolitanism’ was used in the context of progressive anti-colonialism. In another letter to Shelburne, Morellet wrote that ‘it is precisely because of a lack of this cosmo- politanism that your government behaves in such an absurd and unjust way towards the Americans’ (12 April 1776, EE). After the British forces led by John Burgoyne had been defeated by the Americans at the battle of Saratoga, Morellet wrote: ‘As a cosmopolitan I like the good of humanity better than that of the English nation, and as a just person I cannot be unhappy to see the triumph of a cause I believe to be that of justice’ (30 December 1777, EE). Morellet explained his enlightened vision of cosmopolitanism in a letter to Benjamin Franklin almost ten years later: We have been told that you were very well received, and that you got all the hurrahs of the people. Those are very good and very convenient dispositions; but for the good of your country, they need to be durable, they need to expand, and all enlightened and virtuous citizens need to uphold them, so that your sage counsels and your grand visions for the happiness and liberty of America will influence the measures that are still to be taken, and will con- solidate the edifice for which you have laid the foundations with some other good patriots. This is the wish I make from the bottom of my heart, not as your friend and for your glory, but as a cosmopolitan, and hoping there might be, on the face of the Earth, a country where the government might be truly busy with the happiness of humankind; where property, liberty, security, [and] tolerance could be, so to say, natural goods like the ones given by the soil and the climate; where the European governments, when they will come back from their mistakes, could go to look for models. The Greek colonies had to reignite their sacred fire in the prytaneion of their metropolis. It will [now] be the opposite, and the metropolises of Europe will go to America to look for the one that will rekindle all the principles of national happiness, which they have let die out amongst themselves. Above all, may the most complete and most illimited liberty of commerce be established amongst you: I consider it as important to the happiness of humankind gathered in society as political freedom. The latter concerns people only seldom and through a small number of things; but the liberty to cultivate, to manufacture, to sell; to buy, to eat, to drink, to dress as one likes, is a liberty of every day, of every moment; and I will never regard as free a nation that will be enslaved in all the pleasures of life, since after all it is for these same pleasures that people have come together in society. (30 October 1785, EE, original in French) 28 Charlotta Wolff In the French intellectual debate, the concept of ‘cosmopolitanism’ – and to a slightly lesser degree ‘cosmopolitan’ – was thus strongly associated with the universal Enlightenment ideals of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness put forward in the American Declaration of Independence. In a German context, in its turn, a search on Deutsches Textarchiv indi- cates that the concept Weltbürger – world citizen – appears rather early in print. For a long time, it remained more common than Kosmopolit (Jordheim 2018: 304). Among the first to use it in the 1740s were Barthold Heinrich Brockes in Irdisches Vergnügen in Gott from 1740 (redlicher Weltbürger, Brockes 1740: s.p., DTA) and Johann Jacob Bodmer in Sammlung Chritischer, Poetischer, und anderen geistvollen Schriften in 1743 (‘He led neither an urban nor a rural life, and was in this respect truly a cosmopolitan [Weltbürger]’, Bodmer 1743: 22, DTA). The concept then reappears in the 1760s, and its use increases considerably in the 1770s, when Cosmopolit/Kosmopolit appears as its synonym. Throughout the century, in this sample of texts, Weltbürger as well as Kosmopolit kept a mostly positive connotation often associated with humanity, philanthropy, virtue and liberty, like in Schiller’s Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen (‘as a human and a cosmopolitan’, ‘as a liberal cosmopolitan’, Schiller 1795: 11–12, DTA). Johan Henrich Jung- Stillung, in Versuch einer Grundlehre sämmtlicher Kameralwissenschaften, described the Kosmopolit as ‘the defender of the good of humankind’ (Jung- Stillung 1779: 180, DTA). These cosmopolitan ideals of human fraternity and universal philan- thropy were consistent with the Enlightenment philosophy of the first half of the century as well as with masonic ideals that permeated European intellectual culture to a significant but not overwhelming degree. However, from the Seven Years’ War onwards, an increasingly patriotic discourse threatened this ideal. The Patriotic Challenge With the rise of patriotism and democratic ideals, what role remained for cosmopolitanism as a practice and an ideal, and how did the concepts used to articulate cosmopolitanism change? Throughout the eighteenth century, ‘cosmopolitanism’ and ‘patriotism’ were used as pairs finely balancing each other. For instance, the marquis de Mirabeau, trying to understand the cause of Rousseau’s unhappiness, wrote: ‘it is not your quality of a cosmopolitan, since you have extended your fatherland to the whole of Europe’ (3 February 1768). After the Seven Years’ War, however, the term ‘cosmopolitan’ was gradually depreciated. In a well-known article of the Handbuch politisch-sozialer Grundbegriffe in Frankreich, Gerd van den  Conceptions of Cosmopolitanism 29 Heuvel described how this shift took place in the French context from the early 1760s. He associated this shift with the influence of Rousseau (van den Heuvel 1986). However, the rhetoric of war and the general shift to patriotic, neo-Roman discourse were probably even more important explanations. ‘Cosmopolitan’ had some negative potential even before, and the depre- ciation of the concept during the last third of the century is a matter of proportion. A research on cosmopolit* in the Eighteenth-Century Collections Online (ECCO) gives four results. In these examples, cosmopolite and cosmo- politanism are associated with indifference, as in an undated and unsigned letter in French presumably from Edward Gibbon, retrieved in the database: ‘No, my dear friend, I do not want to be a cosmopolitan. Far from me [is] this sumptuous title under which our philosophers conceal an equal indifference for all humankind’. Here, cosmopolitanism appears negatively, as non-affection and non-attachment. In other words, ‘cosmopolitan(ism)’ could be conceptualized as a non-identity, a non-community, a rejection, indifference and negation, which might explain why it was rarely used to describe the border-crossing practices of the Republic of Letters, in an era that increasingly valued (universal) patriotism (see Chapter 2). For compar- ison, a search in ECCO on patriot* gives over 750 results. Some visions of cosmopolitanism were openly negative. In a letter to Voltaire, Catherine II’s favourite, General Ivan Ivanovich Shuvalov wrote that while the philosopher’s lights would serve Shuvalov’s fatherland, about which he declared to be ‘fanatical’, he was unable to become a cosmopolitan (‘je ne peux me faire cosmopolite’, 29 October 1762, EE). Similarly, in Adolph von Knigge’s Über den Umgang mit Menschen from 1788, the spirit of cosmopolitanism – Weltbürgergeist – is something despicable, con- trarily to patriotism: Love of fatherland is indeed a more composite feeling, but still more profound, warmer than the spirit of cosmopolitanism, for a person who is not expelled early from civil society, wandering from country to country as an adventurer, has neither property nor a sense of civil duties. (Knigge 1788: I, 132, DTA) Weltbürgergeist is here associated with rootlessness and recklessness. Knigge also describes Weltbürgergeist as one of the ‘big expressions’ – happiness of the world, liberty, equality, human rights, culture, general Enlightenment, education, spirit of cosmopolitanism (Glück der Welt, Freyheit, Gleichheit, Rechte der Menschheit, Cultur, allgemeine Aufklärung, Bildung, Weltbürgergeist) – that were only bait (Lockspeisen) or well-intended empty words used by intellectuals for rhetorical games (ibid.: 284, DTA). It 30 Charlotta Wolff is remarkable that this clear rejection of the vocabulary of the Enlightenment occurs before the French Revolution and the negative reactions against it. On the whole, the French revolutionary approach to cosmopolitanism was linked to patriotism as a universal value, and cosmopolitanism as a value was mobilized to promote patriotic, in other words revolutionary and repub- lican, virtues, also outside France (Belissa 1998; Chapter 2). Coupled with the polarization of political concepts, this eventually gave ‘cosmopolitanism’ an ideological potential, although this rarely appears in the big data source databases. With the Revolutionary Wars, the meanings of both ‘cosmopolitanism’ and ‘patriotism’ were put to the test. The positive cosmopolitanism of the mid-century had been expressed in terms of a ‘universal philanthropy’ or love of humankind, as a parallel to the love of fatherland, family and self (amour-propre). With the coalition wars, against a country with an outspo- ken universal-patriotic and republican mission of conquest, this essentially moral cosmopolitanism became insufficient; ‘cosmopolitanism’ became increasingly expressed in patriotic terms and vice versa. In 1795, German writer Jean Paul (Richter) stated in his Hesperus, oder 45 Hundsposttage that ‘patriotism’ was only a narrow form of cosmopolitanism, while philanthropy was patriotism embracing the entire world (Jean Paul 1795: 96–97). Also in 1795, Immanuel Kant published his Zum ewigen Frieden. Since Saint-Pierre’s Projet, both Rousseau and Bentham had drawn up visions for universal peace (Spector 2008; Frey 2012). Rousseau used terms such as République européenne and République chrétienne, but in his discussions of Saint-Pierre’s initiatives, he expressed himself in terms of cosmopoli- tanism no more than Saint-Pierre himself. As demonstrated by Pestel and Ihalainen in Chapter 2, cosmopolitanism was only becoming politicized during the last decade of the century (see also Coulmas 1990: 390–97; Jordheim 2018: 311; Belissa 1998). The same absence of our key concepts is observable in Jeremy Bentham’s A Plan for an Universal and Perpetual Peace (1786–1789) published as the fourth part of The Principles of International Law (1833). He uses ‘nation’ over a hundred times but in a traditional early modern sense as a synonym for ‘country’ or ‘people’; his use of ‘interna- tional’ (which appears only in the title and in the first part) refers to the interaction between such nations, its counterpart being ‘internal’. As a comparison, ‘peace’ appears only eleven times and ‘universal’ twice in the text (Bentham 1833). The idea(l)s of peace and international organization presented by Saint- Pierre, Rousseau and Bentham enabled a clear notion of cosmopolitanism, but only Kant, writing when the concepts of ‘cosmopolitan’, ‘nation’ or ‘fatherland’ were becoming ideologically polarized, gave cosmopolitanism a  Conceptions of Cosmopolitanism 31 formal role in his proposal. Kant uses both German (Weltbürger) and Latin terms (cosmopoliticus). Partly inspired by Saint-Pierre, Kant’s proposal is the most utopian of the eighteenth-century peace projects, as he argues that wars could be ended if all standing armies were abolished, all countries became republics and a federation of free states was instituted to regulate the relations between them. At a legal level, Kant develops the concept of cosmopolitan law or ius cosmopoliticum (Weltbürgerrecht) as the third after ius civitatis (Staatsrecht), and ius gentium (Völkerrecht). By Weltbürgerrecht Kant understood the right of each peaceful individual, regardless of his or her origin, to be shown hospitality in foreign countries even after conflicts. Kant pointed out that this was not a matter of philanthropy but a lawful right (Recht), which is why his proposal goes further than the previous ones. Kant uses the term Weltbürgerliche Verfassung, a ‘cosmopolitan constitu- tion’, to describe the moral and political state that results from this peaceful coexistence where ius cosmopoliticum is practised (Kant 1795). In this sense, Kant theorized ideas that had existed in the rich and various political and philosophical discourse of the revolutionary era without having been sys- temized (Hölzing 2011: 173–88; Beck 2006: 45–46). Conclusion The social practices and networks of the Republic of Letters naturally affected both the self-descriptions of the multilingual elites and more theo- retical reflections on cosmopolitanism and universal patriotism, such as the works by Saint-Pierre or Kant referred to above. By describing themselves in terms of a republic or as cosmopolitans, intellectuals expressed a sense of community, belonging and shared culture. The European republic (of letters) was thus, in practice, an ‘imagined community’ (Anderson 1983) characterized by the constant transgression of geographic, linguistic, reli- gious and to some extent even social boundaries. Still, the social practices of the intellectual community had important exclusive mechanisms as well as inclusive ones (Lilti 2005; Edelstein 2010); eighteenth- and nineteenth-cen- tury cosmopolitanism always contained a certain amount of elitism and a nuance of carelessly ‘being above’ the contingencies of ordinary life. In this context, it was only natural that ‘cosmopolitanism’, for long, was not an ideological concept but a practical one. Attempts to imagine what we today would call transnational communities and organizations, long before the appearance of the ‘international’, did not even mobilize the concept of ‘cosmopolitanism’. These writers used ‘cosmopolitan’ much more fre- quently when referring to an attitude, mundane or philanthropic. The projects for peace and international organization drawn up by Saint-Pierre, 32 Charlotta Wolff Bentham or Kant, however, were manifestations of the same enlightened creed that made European intellectuals like Morellet celebrate the spirit of cosmopolitanism as a parallel to liberty, humanity and virtue. The French Revolution, with the appearance and more frequent use of terms such as ‘national’ and eventually ‘international’, complicated the meanings of ‘cosmopolitan’ and ‘cosmopolitanism’ and their use to describe an identity or a community. A broader study of the concept in the revolu- tionary era would need to take into account its relations not only to univer- sal patriotism, but also to more exclusive concepts such as ‘national interest’ or ‘international’. A step in that direction will be taken in the next chapter. Charlotta Wolff is a professor of Finnish history at the University of Turku, Finland. Her research has focused on European culture in eighteenth-century Scandinavia, the history of elites and bourgeois experiences of modernity in nineteenth-century Finland. She currently directs two projects on intellectual culture in the Age of Enlightenment. ORCID: 0000-0001-7989-8308. References Primary Sources Databases DTA: Deutsches Textarchiv, available at http://www.deutschestextarchiv.de/. ECCO: Eighteenth-Century Collections Online, available at https://www.gale.com/ intl/primary-sources/eighteenth-century-collections-online/. EE: Electronic Enlightenment, available at https://www.e-enlightenment.com/. TLFi: Trésor de la Langue Française informatisé, available at the website of the Centre National des Ressources Textuelles et Lexicales, https://www.cnrtl.fr/portail/. Printed Sources Bentham, J. 1833. ‘A Plan for an Universal and Perpetual Peace’, in The Principles of International Law, vol. IV. Available at https://www.laits.utexas.edu/poltheory/ bentham/pil/pil.e04.html. Bodmer, J.J. 1743. Sammlung Chritischer, Poetischer, und anderen geistvollen Schriften. Bd 7. Zürich. Brockes, B.H. 1740. Irdisches Vergnügen in Gott. Bd 6. Hamburg. Diderot, D. and J. d’Alembert. 1753. Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers. T. III. Paris. Diderot, D. and J. d’Alembert. 1754. Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers. T. IV. Paris. Jean Paul. 1795. Hesperus, oder 45 Hundsposttage. 3rd booklet. Berlin. Jung-Stillung, J.H. 1779. Versuch einer Grundlehre sämmtlicher Kameralwissentschaften. Lauten.  Conceptions of Cosmopolitanism 33 Kant, I. 1795. Zum ewigen Frieden: Ein philosophischer Entwurf. Königsberg. Available at https://korpora.zim.uni-duisburg-essen.de/Kant/aa08/341.html. Knigge, A. von. 1788. Über den Umgang mit Menschen. Bd 1. Hannover. Montbron, J.-L.F. de. 1750. Le Cosmopolite ou le citoïen du monde, s.l. Postel, G. 1560. De la République des Turcs. Rathery, E.J.B. 1859. Introduction aux Journal et Mémoires du Marquis d’Argenson. Paris: Renouard. Saint-Pierre. 1713. Projet pour rendre la paix perpétuelle en Europe. T. II. Utrecht. Schiller, F. 1795. ‘Über die ästhetische Erziehung des Menschen in einer Reyhe von Briefen’, in Die Horen. Bd 1. Tübingen. Secondary Sources Anderson, B. 1983. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. London and New York: Verso. Beck, U. 2006. The Cosmopolitan Vision. Cambridge: Polity. Belissa, M. 1998. Fraternité universelle et intérêt national (1713–1795): Les cosmopoli- tiques du droit des gens. Paris: Kimé. Bély, L. 1990. Espions et ambassadeurs au temps de Louis XIV. Paris: Fayard. Coulmas, P. 1990. Weltbürger: Geschichte einer Menschheitssehnsucht. Reinbek bei Hamburg: Rowohlt Verlag. Edelstein, D. 2010. The Enlightenment: A Genealogy. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Félicité, I. 2015. ‘Relations internationales et cosmopolitisme à l’époque de Louis XIV: L’émergence d’une culture diplomatique ?’, in M.-L. Pelus-Kaplan et al. (eds), Être Citoyen du monde. Actes du Séminaire doctoral du laboratoire ICT – EA 337. Entre destruction et reconstruction du monde: Les enfants de Babel XIVe–XXIe siècles. Vol. 2. Paris: Université Paris Diderot – Paris 7, pp. 71–81. Frey, D. 2012. ‘La guerre et la paix perpétuelle de l’abbé de Saint-Pierre à Rousseau’, Revue des Sciences Religieuses 86(4): 455–73. Hölzing, P. 2011. Republikanismus und Kosmopolitismus: Eine ideengeschichtliche Studie. Frankfurt: Campus Verlag. Jordheim, H. 2018. ‘Keeping the “Ism” in “Cosmopolitanism” – Wieland and the Origins of Cosmopolitan Discourse’, Journal of Political Ideologies 23(3): 299–319. Lilti, A. 2005. Le monde des salons: Sociabilité et mondanité à Paris au XVIIIe siècle. Paris: Fayard. Masseau, D. 1994. L’invention de l’intellectuel dans l’Europe du XVIIIe siècle. Paris: Presses Universitaires de France. Rjéoutski, V. 2015. ‘La francophonie et le cosmopolitisme: Le cas de la noblesse russe (deuxième moitié du XVIIIe – début du XIXe siècle)’, in M.-L. Pelus-Kaplan et al. (eds), Être Citoyen du monde. Actes du Séminaire doctoral du laboratoire ICT – EA 337. Entre destruction et reconstruction du monde: Les enfants de Babel XIVe–XXIe siècles. Vol. 2. Paris: Université Paris Diderot – Paris 7, pp. 93–107. 34 Charlotta Wolff Spector, C. 2008. ‘Le Projet de paix perpétuelle: De Saint-Pierre à Rousseau’, in B. Bernardi and G. Silvestrini (eds), Rousseau, Principes du droit de la guerre: Écrits sur la Paix Perpétuelle. Paris: Vrin. Van den Heuvel, G. 1986. ‘Cosmopolite, Cosmopoli(ti)sme’, in R. Reichardt and E. Schmitt (eds), Handbuch politisch-sozialer Grundbegriffe in Frankreich 1680–1820. Vol. 6. Munich: Oldenburg, pp. 41–55. Wolff, C. 2005. Vänskap och makt: Den svenska politiska eliten och upplysningstidens Frankrike. Helsinki: Svenska Litteratursällskapet i Finland.. 2015. ‘Le cosmopolitisme aristocratique des élites d’Europe du Nord au XVIIIe siècle: Pratiques et débats culturels’, in M.-L. Pelus-Kaplan et al. (eds), Être Citoyen du monde. Actes du Séminaire doctoral du laboratoire ICT – EA 337. Entre destruction et reconstruction du monde: Les enfants de Babel XIVe–XXIe siècles. Vol. 2. Paris: Université Paris Diderot – Paris 7, pp. 83–92.  Chapter 2 Revolution beyond Borders Conceptualizing the Universal and Cosmopolitan in the French Revolution, 1789–1815 Friedemann Pestel and Pasi Ihalainen At first sight, the extension of the French Revolution beyond France’s borders seems to be a classic topic. Factualist accounts on revolutionary ‘cosmopolitanism’, ‘universalism’ or ‘fraternity’ are prominent both in his- torical and political theory research. The phenomena have recently gained further attention due to the transnational and global turns in post-bicente- nary scholarship as well as normative uses of ‘cosmopolitanism’. However, except for van den Heuvel’s article on cosmopolite and cosmopoli(ti)sme in Handbuch politisch-sozialer Grundbegriffe in Frankreich (van den Heuvel 1986) and Helge Jordheim’s work on the late eighteenth-century ‘ismati- zation’ of cosmopolitan thinking in German (Jordheim 2018: 311), there are hardly any systematic semantic analyses of these or related concepts. Many phenomenological or typological approaches to cosmopolitanism or universalism tend to carry normative implications about revolution as a transnational experience. In this chapter, we analyse the political experiences and dynamics of the revolutionary debates of the 1790s and their aftermath in the 1800s, focus- ing on the relationships between nations and on cross-national contacts and transfers. Our interest lies in changing conceptualizations of what is in present-day research called the ‘transnational’ which the French Revolution together with the revolutionary and Napoleonic Wars gave rise to in French, British, German and Dutch political discourses. We are thereby complicating a seemingly straightforward narrative of revolutionary liber- ation and emancipation by looking at the ambivalences and contestations of French world discourse and by tracing subsequent discourse cycles in 36 Friedemann Pestel and Pasi Ihalainen neighbouring countries as they responded to experiences of Revolution and increasingly uninhibited warfare. Our approach takes its inspiration from David Armitage’s and Sanjay Subramanyam’s call to write ‘transitive’ histories, i.e. histories with defined transnational objects (Armitage and Subramanyam 2010: xiv). In our case, rather than simply speaking of ‘revolutionary cosmopolitanism’ or ‘uni- versalism’, we intend to make clear how these concepts were used: which actors (sympathizers, foreigners, military, etc.) or institutions (such as the law) they referred to, in which way and with which limits. Aware that ‘transnational’ is a modern analytical category for a historical phenomenon expressed in very different terms in the Age of Revolutions, we argue that the revolutionary experiences and discourses presented a large spectrum of competing, mirroring or overlapping imaginations beyond the nation. These opened up universalist visions of an exported revolution but, at the same time, reinforced ways of thinking which were supportive of national- ism and imperialism. French revolutionaries and British parliamentarians, for instance, understood the law of nations and its implications for inter- national relations in competing ways. When transnational interaction and exchange of ideas, goods, etc. between individuals and networks crossing borders mobilized ideas of fraternity and cosmopolitanism, the conse- quences were evaluated very differently in mainstream French and British political discourse. For conceptual historians, a frequent empathic understanding of revo- lution linked to concepts like cosmopolitanism, universalism or humanity poses three challenges. First, while they are often positively connoted in scholarship, the risk is that these concepts reify the revolutionaries’ Francocentric or expansionist imaginaries and established sympathetic readings of the Revolution, in particular with regard to hegemonic stances in revolutionary discourse on progress, emancipation or liberation. Second, in the late eighteenth century, the French term cosmopolite carried not only positive, but also pejorative connotations (see Chapter 1). The 1762 edition of the Dictionnaire de l’Académie française defined the term as ‘one who does not adopt a fatherland’ (Albrecht 2005: 35). On the eve of the Revolution, cosmopolite had established itself as the negative, or at least suspicious, ‘other’ to the positive ‘we’ category of patriote, the model of the new citizen, and to the idea of an upcoming regeneration of the French nation. This negative semantic pattern collides with historiographical accounts that distinguish between an early ‘cosmopolitan’ phase of the Revolution until 1792 and a subsequent turn towards radicalization and nationalism. Third, the growing literature on ‘transnational’ or ‘global’ aspects of the French Revolution critically assessing the French republican model and  Revolution beyond Borders 37 diffusionist interpretations of the Revolution places a strong emphasis on warfare, emigration and upheaval in French colonies (Armitage and Subramanyam 2010; Desan 2011; Bell 2015; Forrest and Middell 2016). Integrating these perspectives allows us to shed new light on the exclusion and violence within the Revolution that were associated with categories like ‘universalism’ or ‘humanity’. For these reasons, a look at France alone cannot be sufficient. We have therefore included the British debate on the ‘universal’, the ‘law of nations’ and the ‘cosmopolitan’ moulded by the experiences of wars against revolu- tionary and Napoleonic France. This panorama is complemented by trans- national entanglements of revolutionary vocabularies which reflect other experiences of revolution, war and mobilization, including the Batavian Republic which emerged as a Sister Republic of France. We review uses of this political vocabulary in Franco–German relations after 1800 to high- light the impact of warfare, occupation and reform on the emergence of national consciousness. Our analysis is based on four large source corpora. For France we relied on the debates of the revolutionary assemblies that have been edited as Archives parlementaires and digitized for the period between 1789 and January 1794 (both the printed and digital editions are still ongoing). Through our coverage of this short period in the French deliberations, we identified major conceptualizations of ‘cosmopolitan’, ‘universal’, ‘humanity’, ‘fra- ternity’, or the ‘globe’ (primarily designating a space beyond France) and related terms for the Constituent (1789–1791) and Legislative Assemblies (1791/92) as well as for the National Convention (1792–1795). For British and Dutch discourse, we explored the digitized records of the respective representative bodies in the Eighteenth Century Collections Online, the House of Commons Parliamentary Papers and Delpher, as well as the col- location tool of Hansard Corpus. The search terms included (selectively) the world, earth, globe, mankind/humanity, Europe/European, universal, cosmopolitan, fraternity and international, connected with the Revolution and France. As no equivalent to these legislative bodies existed for the German states, we relied on the collection of digitized newspapers and journals provided by the Bavarian State Library. Relating the Revolution to the World: French Debates on the Universal Nature of Revolutionary Principles, 1789–1794 French discourses on universalism derived from France’s self-perceived special position within Catholic Christendom and a historical tradition that saw France as an heir to the Roman Empire. Enlightenment thinking 38 Friedemann Pestel and Pasi Ihalainen and the Revolution’s promise to ‘recover’ rights for all humanity fuelled ideas of placing the French nation at the centre of the universe with a par- ticular mission. The originally religious mission was secularized by the radicalizing Revolution and targeted the European monarchies. France was to be the model for ‘humanity’: French revolutionaries exported the universal values of their republic in the name of humanity and by force of arms, if necessary. This exportation of Revolution was potentially unlimited, reaching from neighbouring provinces to ‘Europe’, the ‘world’ or even the ‘universe’. Ambivalences of Cosmopolitanism When French revolutionaries debated the relation between France and the outside, the figure of cosmopolite was significant. For the beginning of the Revolution until the fall of the monarchy and the radicalization of revolu- tionary warfare, van den Heuvel observes two usage patterns of cosmopolite – a more neutral one related to foreign trade and a more radical variant of culte cosmopolite, aiming at republican universalism (van den Heuvel 1986: 47–50). This universalism quickly took on more ambivalent meanings against the backdrop of war and terror; it began to imply exclusion as well as liberation (Desan 2013: 87). From 1793 on, cosmopolite became more and more assimilated into the category of ‘foreigner’ and thereby associated with conspiracy against and subversion of the French Republic. In the early debates of the revolutionary assemblies, across the political spectrum, cosmopolites designated those uprooted individuals who had no stable links to family, society, country or region (Jean Joseph Mounier, 4 September 1789: 556; Claude Ambroise Régnier, 2