Joseph Grim Feinberg: Borderlands Internationalism

Borderlands Internationalism: Rethinking the Universal with a Look to East-Central European Socialist History

The origins and problems of nationalism have been well researched. Much less research has explored potential alternatives. I look at a set of alternatives that emerged from the socialist movements of the multiethnic regions of Central and Eastern Europe in the decades before the First World War, in the broad region I call the “borderlands” where the region’s empires were struggling to control diverse populations. Those populations sometimes responded with nationalism, but sometimes with calls for a new world order where all peoples could live together. I look specifically at Polish-speaking, Yiddish-speaking, and Czech-speaking socialist movements, asking how they reinterpreted socialist theory to account for their own perceived peripheral positions. I suggest that the “borderlands” perspective on internationalism, developed away from imperial centers like Vienna, Berlin, and St. Petersburg, understood universalism not as something to be achieved immediately, through the use of reason or the application of ready-made ideals, but as something that would emerge from a process of recognizing forms of particularity that had been previously suppressed or overlooked.

Image: Joseph Grim Feinberg

RSVP Agnes Bendik at YmVuZGlrYWcgfCBjZXUgISBlZHU=

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• Next Wednesday, 21st May, 12:30 pm, Haggag Ali: Dignity or Dignities? Egyptian Visions of Decolonization in Budapest
• Next Thursday, 22nd May, 05:00 pm, Benjamin Nathans: To the Success of Our Hopeless Cause in Budapest