Sanford S. Elberg Lecture in International Studies: Institute of International Studies, UC Berkeley

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My topic tonight is the changing meanings of internationalism, but I will be less directly concerned with the semantics of the term, than with the history of its forms. It is clear, of course, that whatever we understand by internationalism will depend on some prior idea of nationalism, since the term only came into existence and acquired currency as a back-construction referring to its opposite. As general -- deliberately minimal -- definitions, I will take as a form of nationalism any political outlook that accords an especially high value to the nation, and as a form of internationalism any outlook capable of transcending this towards other nations. With that in mind, what I am going to propose is the outline of an analytic framework whose intention -- at any rate --is to inter-relate the two. The way I will go about this is to suggest a pragmatic periodization of the metamorphoses of internationalism, and its antonym, nationalism, over the course of the last two hundred and fifty years. Of course, only a few simplified and selective strands of such a long time-span could, in the best of cases, be picked out here. It is also true that as a procedure periodization is to some extent always arbitrary, to a point where not a few of the finest historians today, at any rate in principle, reject it altogether. But in a recent phrase of Fredric Jameson's, there is a sense in which, as narrative beings, 'we cannot not periodize'.

With that adage in mind, I will sketch what I take to be successive phases and meanings of internationalism in its relationship with nationalism, from about 1750 to the present -- each phase defined by a set of dominant features. When I describe these as dominants, the term implies that the features in question are never exhaustive of the phases in question, but represent rather the most novel and prominent characteristics of any period, which will always contain significant counter-currents and sub-tones that I will have to set aside provisionally for the purposes of my exposition. Let me, then, list succinctly the analytic coordinates I will employ to distinguish each phase of internationalism. The best way to grasp its changing historical forms, I believe, is to match them against the successive phases of nationalism to which they could be said historically to correspond. Here at least five coordinates are pertinent.

1. the type of capital coeval with, or active in, each successive variant of nationalism;
2. the principal geographical zone of the nationalism in question;
3. the prevalent philosophical idiom;
4. the operative definition of the nation;
5. the relation of the nationalism in question to the dominated classes.

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