<nettime> The Trials of Cosmopolis

["Kermit Snelson" <ksnelson@subjectivity.com>]

According to Bertrand Russell in "The Impact of Science on Society", science
has made the traditional liberal principle of "unrestricted national
sovereignty" obsolete and "must be abandoned."  In his words, "national
liberty will have to be effectively constrained"; otherwise "the human race
will perish, and will perish as a result of science."  The person who
recently posted this writing to "nettime" cites its date, 1952, as evidence
of astonishing prescience.

However, this thesis was already rather hoary by 1952, and had in fact
become a commonplace among the world's thought leadership since at least a
decade before World War I.  In 1910, for instance, British journalist Norman
Angell published a book entitled "The Great Illusion" that became not only a
best-selling sensation, but also a classic 1937 movie by Jean Renoir.  For
this work, and for books on the same theme dating back to 1903, Angell was
knighted in 1931 and awarded the Nobel Peace Prize in 1933.

Other influential proponents of an international, "anti-military" system of
Atlantic democracies during this period included the great American
historian Henry Adams, the famous British writer H.G. Wells, and the
California merchant and League of Nations pioneer David Lubin.  Wells wrote
in 1928 that such a program "rests upon a disrespect for nationality and
there is no reason why it should tolerate noxious or obstructive governments
because they hold their own in this or that patch of human territory."
Lubin, who in 1905 founded Rome's Institute of World Agriculture that is
today part of the United Nations Food and Agriculture Organization, was even
blunter.  In a remarkable letter dated 20 March 1918 to US Supreme Court
Justice Louis Brandeis, he stated:  "But the nations, in their assumption of
the right of absolute sovereignty rule, are still under the sway of
paganism.  Such an assumption of absolute sovereignty is pagan. ... Our
earnest prayers go up to the Almighty for the success of General Allenby and
of the British and Allied arms in Palestine, and the world over, now
battling, in this great struggle of Democracy against Autocracy for Jehovah,
the Power of Righteousness, against Odin, the power of brute force."

Visions of a supra-national "cosmopolis" (to use USC professor Stephen
Toulmin's term) were not confined to the West during this period.  One of
the most important of these was the Khilafah movement in the 1920s, which
cause was joined by Mohandas Gandhi.  Since the founding of Islam, the
Muslim Ummah (world community) had been headed by a caliph, which
institution had most recently been hosted by the Ottoman Empire.  After that
empire's defeat in the struggle referred to above by Lubin, the caliphate
was abolished in 1924 by Mustafa Kemal (Ataturk), the founder of modern
Turkey.  The Khilafah movement is the struggle to restore that institution.
Still unsuccessful, it continues in various forms to this day.

The intellectual history of the entire 20th century, then, was largely an
anti-liberal one that tried to limit the political role of secular and
scientific values on one hand, and of nation-states on the other, positing
instead the political unification of the world based on a transnational
ethos.  It was also the most barbarous, bloody century in history.  Are
these two facts unrelated?  Is it prudent to assume in good conscience that
the second happened despite, and not because of, the first?  Or does
prudence rather invite us to consider that these noble men who, in the name
of eliminating war, tried to place science and temporal sovereignty under a
global "rule of law," were simply but disastrously wrong?  And as we prepare
for a new world war, shouldn't we, with our greater historical hindsight,
hesitate before adopting for a third time exactly the same beliefs that
prevailed among the "great and the good" just before the first two broke
out?

Kermit Snelson

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