QS: What distinguishes globalism from internationalism for me is the assumption from international law that sovereignty can be partially ceded through treaty to some kind of a supranational body that sits above and beyond the reach of the nation. In this style of internationalism, or we could say intergovernmentalism, nations remain at some level in the driver's seat. To me, globalism makes a stronger claim, seeking a framework that cannot be switched off by decisions of nation states. Realistically, that's a hard thing to achieve because international law relies on the consent of participating nations. Indeed, it is this dream of permanence in globalism that makes it both utopian and prone to both dissent and defection from participant states.
JM: Interestingly, I find that both those opposed to globalism, as you describe it, and those historically opposed to internationalism mobilized in ways that, for the historian, produce different “key moments” and alternate “periodizations” than traditional historiography focused on anti-communism and the Cold War. In my study of those opposed to internationalism in the United States, for example, the timeline is longer. World War I and the League of Nations debate is a key departure point, but even with the defeat of the treaty in the United States, internationalism only seems to grow for them as a menace in the 1920s and 1930s. Opposition to internationalism informs resistance to entrance into World War II on the side of the Allies. It animates one of the major groups that gets involved in the America First Committee, whose discourse will circulate through the sovereignty movement for decades. In subsequent years, this movement mobilizes around the United Nations, of course, seeking to restrict its power. It also rallies against UN actions. These include sanctions on the Ian Smith regime in white Rhodesia, and later in South Africa. They oppose the Immigration Act of 1965. They resist the ceding of the Panama Canal, a demand they understood as part of the UN plot of decolonization led by a dominant “Afro-Asian bloc.” These moments also reveal how additional issues beyond anti-communism really animated people’s investments in the politics of foreign policy. For me, the world wars and decolonization emerge as more important factors.
Studying anti-internationalism from the bottom up also sheds light on how the politics of “globalism,” seemingly distant from individuals’ everyday lives, in fact were perceived to have manifested in very local, intimate ways. In looking at bottom-up sources, I see how what, on the surface, may seem like paranoid conspiracy theories are actually generated by people in what they perceive to be real experiences at the local level. For example, in Jamestown, Virginia, in the late 1950s, officials decide they're going to fly the UN flag at the historic site. This is understood by local anti-internationalists as capitulation to the human rights covenant of the UN, pushed by the “Afro-Asian bloc,” and as an internationalist intervention to support desegregation of public schools and public places in Virginia. Reading the letters anti-UN activists write about this revealed to me how “internationalism” is understood to creep down to the personal, community level. Defending their sovereignty – their local and personal governance and jurisdiction and their nation’s – from these threats becomes more acute for them in contexts like these.