Antiliberal Internationalism in the 20th Century

In this project we aim to uncover the longer twentieth-century trajectories and genealogies of antiliberal internationalism: sentiments, outlooks, strategies, and ideologies.

Since the turn of the millennium, all over the globe new forms of international collaboration have surfaced that explicitly position themselves against the liberal international order established after the fall of the Berlin Wall. These and other contemporary examples of antiliberalism across national boundaries are frequently explained as consequences of the recent cultural backlash, tendencies of authoritarianism and the populist zeitgeist against the backdrop of globalising societies. However, in hindsight, antiliberal internationalism is not necessarily a timely or new phenomenon – nor can current manifestations of it be understood or explained detached from historical precursors. In this project we aim to uncover the longer twentieth-century trajectories and genealogies of antiliberal internationalism: sentiments, outlooks, strategies, and ideologies.