Charting the Road to Davos: The Rise and Fall of Internationalism

Governing the World: The History of an Idea
by Mark Mazower
Penguin, 2012, 416 pp.

“La tot’ homoze in familje konunigare so debá,” sang Ludwig Zamenhof in 1877, in celebration of his nineteenth birthday. The language of the song, Esperanto, was of his own invention, but the sentiment was not: All mankind must unite in one family. Within fifty years, that same idea could have found expression in any number of international languages—from Solresol, in which every phoneme is sung, to Volapük, an improbably popular, vaguely Germanic tongue that attracted tens of thousands of speakers before collapsing under the weight of its own unwieldy grammar. For the slightly less ambitious, there was the spelling reform movement, which attempted to turn English into a sort of universal language by dramatically simplifying its orthography. It was under the influence of spelling reform that Melville Dewey, author of the Dewey decimal system, changed his name to Melvil Dui and that Theodore Roosevelt ordered all government publications to be issued only in the simplified spelling. In what must be counted as a regrettable loss for posterity, Dui changed his name back to its original spelling, and Congress quickly reversed (or, as Roosevelt would have had it, reverst) the president’s order.

Setbacks aside, proponents believed that such linguistic innovations would eventually bind the world together, as H. G. Wells put it, in “a common resonance of thought.” That didn’t turn out to be the most accurate of Wells’s predictions, which included suburbanization, aerial warfare, and the atom bomb. But it captured a deeply felt desire in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. As Mark Mazower shows in Governing the World: The History of an Idea, a startling number of thinkers and activists in those centuries either expected or fervently hoped that international affairs would be, if not placed under the supervision of a world government, as Wells desired, then at least transformed according to universal principles, laws, and reason. The nineteenth and twentieth centuries, in other words, were the age of internationalism.

The word international was coined surprisingly late, in 1780, by the utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham. Nations, of course, had long been locked into rivalries marked by the pulsing alternation of warfare and negotiated peace. But before the nineteenth century few thought that those nations could make up an international society that might be governed. War and peace were the affairs of princes and their representatives, held in check only by the alliances that each was able to summon against the others. The first hint of something different came after Napoleon’s revolutionary army cut a gash through Europe. In response, the conservative monarchs formed the Concert of Europe, a grand counterrevolutionary system f...