The Department of International History is delighted to welcome Professor Michael Goebel who joined the Graduate Institute in September 2018 as the Pierre du Bois Chair Europe and the World, which is generously supported by the Pierre du Bois Foundation. In his book, Anti-Imperial Metropolis: Interwar Paris and the Seeds of Third World Nationalism, Professor Goebel explores the era of global anti-imperialism and the local social contexts from which it emerged.
What is the main argument of the book?
Empirically the book deals with the social history of non-European migration to interwar Paris, but it asks a question that really has more to do with the post-WWII global political history of decolonisation and the Third World idea: What are we to make of the fact that so many later Third World leaders were politically socialized in imperial centres such as Paris? My argument, especially for French colonial subjects, is that colonial-metropolitan migration rendered rights differentials particularly palpable. It thus fuelled the search for a new world order, which eventually narrowed down on demands for structurally equivalent nation-states. Also, newborn anticolonial activists in interwar Paris found themselves in an exceptionally cosmopolitan environment, in which they constantly compared their own situation to that of their neighbours and peers, including people from other colonies. Thus, Ho Chi Minh liaised with Chinese communists in Paris, Senegalese activists cooperated with Antilleans and Algerians, and so forth. Comparison and exchange sparked learning curves and promoted a certain standardisation of political claims, which communist orchestration further helped push towards a one-size-fits-all format according to which every nation should have its state. Put simply but broadly: I argue that a microscopic socio-legal history of migration can help us better understand the globalisation of the nation-state model of political organisation in the twentieth century.
Had that history been examined previously and, if so, what did you seek to add or examine further and with what results?
Yes, of course there were piles of books before I came along, both about the specific topic of colonial migration to interwar France and the broader issue of the spread of nationalism—which I felt was the more important question to engage with. As far as the global and/or international history of nationalism in Africa and Asia was concerned, in my view it mostly fell into the camps of political and/or intellectual history. Of course, there were many good social histories of how, say, dockworkers or postal clerks responded to anticolonial mobilisation in this place or the other, but for the most part these were local studies. Wherever the larger edifice was concerned historians seemed interested in the movement of ideas, or at best the emergence of an international system. A classic of this genre was Elie Kedourie’s book about nationalism in Africa and Asia, which essentially enquired about what the leaders of future independence movements made of European romantic nationalist texts. Likewise, Benedict Anderson devoted much attention to the socio-economic conditions for the emergence of nationalism in Europe, but reverted into a pedestrian history-of-ideas mode when he came to explaining nationalism in Africa and Asia.
I didn’t find these accounts wrong, but I found them anaemic. Ho Chi Minh did not come to champion a Vietnamese nation-state simply because reading Herder or Lenin, or both, had persuaded him. Rather, for him and his peers in interwar Paris the nation-state model promised to enshrine and administer a host of civic rights that imperial states either outright withheld or layered into a highly unjust web of legal pluralism—the arbitrariness of which, again, was spotlighted by migration and the possibility of global comparison. While my book can be read as a contribution to intellectual history, too, I wanted to make sure that I don’t miss the socio-legal history of concrete predicaments that made the nation-state model so attractive for so many people.
What larger insights can we draw from this investigation about this part of the world and at that particular moment, notably as regards subsequent global dynamics?
Though perhaps a little too general and therefore also banal, the larger message in my view is that nationalism is not merely a philosophical problem that increased global exchange will render redundant. Since civic and ethnic notions of nationhood are so often conflated and almost inextricable in practice, I don’t think nationalism and nation-states are likely to disappear anytime soon. They are so sticky because they promise answers, even if illusory, to concrete problems.
Speaking more as a student of global history, I think there has been over the last decades too much of a tendency to celebrate transnational exchange, fluidity and networks. I don’t mean this as a political criticism. Temperamentally, I share the cosmopolitan sympathies of most of my colleagues. But I fear these sympathies have too often misled us into underestimating the potency and persistence of nationalism in our reading and writing of history.