Abstract

This project elaborates the history of a political idea, the nation, through the work of some of the most influential thinkers of the international labor movement between the mid-nineteenth and the mid-twentieth centuries. It argues against both those who maintain that the radical tradition has ignored and underestimated nationalism and those who accuse it of economic reductionism. What previous approaches to this topic miss is first that these thinkers aimed to organize workers in terms of shared class interests and in direct opposition to those who would promote particularist political and cultural goals. Second, that they were very much aware of the attractiveness of nationalist claims and sought both to understand and to counter them. And, finally, that it was only through the analysis of social structures that they could arrive at understandings of the nation which permitted the formulation of a vision capable of contesting capitalist expansion from the standpoint of universal freedom rather than nationalist revindication. In fact, it was precisely in those instances where the movement turned to the construction of national identities and cultures, by linking socialism to nation-building, that it went wrong. ;This study is organized around a selection of thinkers from each of the three Internationals. It seeks to reconstruct themes and to point out the historical and theoretical limitations of each problematique and each thinker. The latter include Bakunin, Marx, and Engels in relation to the First International's concern with class solidarity across political borders; Lenin, Luxemburg, and Bauer in relation to the Second International's concern with socialism in ethnically plural societies; Stalin and Gramsci in relation to the Third International's substitution of nation-building and national liberation for the old class project. ;"With a Cosmopolitan Intent" concludes with an examination of the relationship between ethnic and civic nationality, national self-determination, republican institutions, and the process of globalization, from the perspective of the post-Soviet era and in the light of social theory and Kant's ideas about cosmopolitan right