The Wilsonian Challenge to International Law

2011 ◽  
Vol 13 (1) ◽  
pp. 179-208 ◽  
Author(s):  
Leonard Smith
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
International Law ◽  
New World ◽  
World Order ◽  
Great War ◽  
New World Order ◽  
Woodrow Wilson ◽  
Secretary Of State ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
The Great War

AbstractAfter the Great War, Woodrow Wilson challenged the foundations of international law based on fully sovereign states. “Wilsonianism” as elaborated in the Fourteen Points, and in other speeches, rested on a logic that made a universalized liberal individual the locus of sovereignty in the new world order. The truly radical implications of Wilsonianism had no sterner critic than Robert Lansing, Wilson's secretary of state and one of the founders of the American Journal of International Law. Lansing held tenaciously to a positivist paradigm of international law as it had evolved by the early twentieth century. This article reconsiders the conflict between Wilson and Lansing not so much as a duel between individuals as a duel between conflicting conceptions of sovereignty and the purpose of international law in the new world order.

The Sovereign Logic of Jack London’s Sea Stories

2017 ◽  
Author(s):  
Hank Scotch
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
New World ◽  
World Order ◽  
The Self ◽  
New World Order ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Spatial Differences ◽  
The Difference

Jack London’s maritime writing often interrogates the difference between the savage space of the “outside” sea and the relative domesticity of land’s civilized interior, as well as the ways in which this spatial distinction supports the sovereignty of space, society, and the self. But instead of maintaining these spatial differences, London’s work is all about exposing their increasing indistinction in the early twentieth century and the effects such a spatial destabilization had on sovereignty itself. This interrogation of the new world order and its effects on previous forms of sovereignty, the chapter argues, is what makes London’s contribution to American maritime writing (especially The Sea-Wolf and The Cruise of the Snark) so important. London’s sea stories not only acknowledge the world’s new “nomos” but the effects this order has on political and personal forms of autonomy and coherence.

‘Enough of the Great Napoleons!’ Raja Mahendra Pratap's Pan-Asian projects (1929–1939)

2012 ◽  
Vol 46 (2) ◽  
pp. 403-423 ◽  
Author(s):  
CAROLIEN STOLTE
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Strategic Alliances ◽  
New World ◽  
World Order ◽  
Political Order ◽  
The Political ◽  
World Federation ◽  
New World Order ◽  
Political Activities ◽  
The Relationship

AbstractThis paper traces a set of interlinked Asianist networks through the activities of Mahendra Pratap, an Indian revolutionary exile who spent the majority of his life at various key anti-imperialist sites in Asia. Pratap envisioned a unified Asia free from colonial powers, but should be regarded as an anti-imperialist first and a nationalist second—he was convinced that India's independence would materialize naturally as a by-product of a federated Asia. Through forging strategic alliances in places as diverse as Moscow, Kabul, and Tokyo, he sought to achieve his goal of a united ‘Pan-Asia’. In his view, Pan-Asia would be the first step towards a world federation, in which all the continents would become provinces in a new world order. His thought was an intricate patchwork of internationalist ideas circulating in the opening decades of the twentieth century, and his travels and political activities are viewed in this context. Pratap's exploration of the relationship between the local, the regional, and the global, from an Asian perspective, was one of many ways in which Asian elites and non-elites challenged the legitimacy of the political order in the interwar years.

Wives, Wages, and Regulating Breadwinners

2020 ◽  
pp. 71-95
Author(s):  
Nimisha Barton
Keyword(s):  
Twentieth Century ◽  
Middle Class ◽  
Working Class ◽  
Social Life ◽  
Great War ◽  
Marital Discord ◽  
Early Twentieth Century ◽  
Male Breadwinner ◽  
The Great War ◽  
Foreign Wives

This chapter cites Yolanda Foldes's 1937 novel about a Hungarian family in interwar Paris, in which the character Klari Barabas stumbles into the middle of a lovers' quarrel involving Greek Christos and his French wife. It analyses the misfortunes of fictional Christos and his French wife, which suggest men's work, missing wages, and marital discord that were intertwined in the mixed and immigrant working-class households sprouting up throughout France after the Great War. It also discusses the twin middle-class ideals of the male breadwinner and the femme au foyer that governed early twentieth century economic and social life. The chapter recounts how marriage became the most reliable legal means of securing access to a male breadwinner and his wages by the early twentieth century, especially in the event of the union's demise. It talks about alimentary pensions that were paid regularly by estranged husbands and were enforced by officials at the behest of French and foreign wives themselves.

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