Diaspora: A Journal of Transnational Studies

Diaspora 3:1 1994 Citizens of Humanity: Internationalism and the Imagined Community of Nations Liisa Malkki University of California, Irvine Without the nation there can be no humanity, even as without organization and division there can be no expeditious and fruitful labour . . . . Nations are the citizens of humanity, as individuals are the citizens of the nation. . . . And as every individual lives a twofold life, inward and ofrelation, so do the nations. Giuseppe Mazzini, 1849 (emphasis added) [N]ation-ness is the most universally legitimate value in the political life ofour time. Benedict Anderson, Imagined Communities 1. Introduction This article is a sketch of ongoing research that takes internationalism1 as its object of anthropological and historical study. Its focus is not on the better-studied movement of socialist or proletarian internationalism,2 but, rather, to use Tom Nairn's words, on internationalism idealized as "the higher harmony of the World Spirit" (430), and as the imagining of a World Community of "nations ." On the basis of both ethnographic and documentary research , the article suggests that internationalism is fruitfully explored as a transnational cultural form for imagining and ordering difference among people, and as a moralizing discursive practice— and that one of the moral underpinnings of dominant discourses of internationalism is the ritualized and institutionalized evocation of a common humanity. What I will explore, then, are the processes and practices that allow the contemporary system of nation-states to be imagined as an international community, a "family of nations." This imagined international community (see Anderson) is not a supranational or cosmopolitan3 world but precisely an international one, a world where globality is understood to be constituted by interrelations among discrete "nations" (see Gupta 67). Rée's use of the term in a recent essay is clarifying: Diaspora 3:1 1994 By internationality I do not mean what is usually meant by internationalism: a willingness to overlook national interest in favour of the welfare ofhumanity as a whole. Internationality is a style of thought and global social organisation that tries to generate a plurality of nations, in order that, for any piece of land, and for any human being, there should be a definite answer to the question "which nation is responsible?" Internationality , you might say, is the tendency for the global imposition of the nation-form. (9-10; emphasis added)4 Thus, the dimension of the international with which I am concerned here is an integral and, indeed, constitutive aspect of the national order of things. Far from being simply a set of secondary interactions among preexisting and self-constituting national entities , the international order itself serves to reproduce, naturalize, legitimate, and even generate "the nation form" all over the world (Balibar, "The Nation-Form" 86ff.). Thus, internationalism as a cultural and political phenomenon is not just a product of market forces and international trade relations that then "add up" to an international system (world systems theory); nor is internationalism explainable simply as a kind of truce in the age-old warring of nation-states, regulating and bringing order to what would otherwise be a Hobbesian anarchy.5 For what such well-worn conceptions miss is precisely what Anderson's enormously influential recent work has made clear: that nationalisms are most usefully explored not as "self-consciously held political ideologies," but as "large cultural systems" (12; emphasis added). In this light, it becomes easier to see that one way of studying the naturalization of nationness is to pursue the international; for underlying all the competing nationalisms of the modern era lies a fundamental vision of global order itself, a vision of the international. Both the national and the international are transnational cultural forms, and both are aspects of an overarching "national order of things" (Malkki, "National Geographic " 37; "Context and Consciousness" 33,55). Gupta's work on the interconnections between nationalisms and the nonaligned movement traces a parallel connection; while he is not directly discussing internationalism, his argument outlines very clearly how the national and the international constitute each other: The nation is continually represented in state institutions such as courts, schools, bureaucracies, and museums, which employ the icons and symbols of the nation. . . . But, very important, the nation is also...