Conclusion

This book’s journey through the history of a broad range of political, leisure, educational, and medical institutions in the Alps shows that emotions constituted an essential ingredient in the development of internationalist ideas and practices in the interwar period. After the First World War—a traumatic event that contemporaries blamed on mismanaged passions—internationalists constructed the Alps—a recent battleground and the markers of national borders—as ideal sites for instilling amicable feelings among nations. The staging of large-scale international events such as the 1924 Winter Olympics strengthened the image of mountains as a natural backdrop for peaceful encounters. The commercialization of “typical” convivial products such as cheese fondue and the “cup of friendship” further reinforced this association. At the same time, in an age of increasing industrialization, the Alps attracted both public and private entities interested in large infrastructure projects (including roads, electrical plants, railway lines, and tunnels like the one celebrated in ...

International Mountaineering while Talking about Emotions

By looking at the Union Internationale des Associations d’Alpinisme (UIAA, or International Mountaineering and Climbing Federation), an international organization created in 1932 “to promote mountaineering and climbing worldwide,” this chapter explores the “moral economy” of internationalism, or the dynamics through which internationalist groups used feelings to attribute moral values to specific beliefs and behaviors. It demonstrates that the UIAA used emotions to promote both its image and its mission. It presented alpinism as a means to engender “friendship” among nations, mimicking the League of Nations’ rhetoric and activities in this period. It also employed emotions as a tool to manage its relationships and as an essential ingredient to stage its events (e.g. international congresses and exhibitions). As such, it inaugurated a set of ideas and practices which would become normative in the subsequent decades.

Managing Emotions at the League of Nations

Emotions constituted a fundamental part of the work of the League of Nations throughout the time of its existence. The League employed emotional rhetoric and images, often embodied and symbolized by the Alps, in order to legitimize itself and its policies. It used feelings to brand itself as capable and noble, to draw associations with positive values such as resilience, purity, and honesty, and to argue for its own feasibility in the post-1919 world. It also took emotions into account while staging international encounters, devoting much energy and resources trying to shape what people felt during the meetings and long-term stays in the Alps organized in this period. The League’s carefully-managed emotional style—which was deliberately based on “nobility,” “dignity,” and “friendship” rather than “force” and “pride”—frustrated many of its supporters while fueling its opponents’ argument that it was inherently weak; at the same time, it led to a set of ideas and practices (e.g. school exchanges to foster “mutual understanding”) that—for better or for worse—still influence many forms of international cooperation to this day.

A University for Feeling the Emotions of Internationalism

Chapter 5 examines the case of the University Sanatorium of Leysin as a means to explore how internationalists constructed and used spaces to elicit and manage people’s emotions. It devotes particular attention to efforts at creating atmospheres conducive to international cooperation, emphasizing how administrators, doctors, patients, and visitors all contributed to shaping the notion that these could be effective. As demonstrated by the case of a proposed new International University Sanatorium, the ideas and the practices it inaugurated continue to influence a broad range of state and non-state actors in the subsequent decades, and still affect international education to this day.

Seeing Emotions while Healing the Body and the World as a Whole

By analyzing the case of Dr. Auguste Rollier’s sanatoria for the treatment of tuberculosis in the Swiss village of Leysin, this chapter demonstrates the centrality of images in interwar internationalist practices. Following the blueprint set out by the League of Nations in this period, internationalists advocated for a holistic approach to healing: they linked physical cures with social, and political health; and they associated their attainment with specific visible emotional expressions. Most notably, internationalists created educational and work establishments with the explicit goal of instilling feelings such as “joy,” and they produced, reproduced, and distributed photographs to serve as evidence of their success. The aesthetics and assumptions they inaugurated proved long-lasting and influence international environments to this day.

Associating Emotions and Internationalism with the Alps

Chapter 2 provides an overview of the forces that led to both the internationalization and the sentimentalization of the Alps in the interwar period. It argues that changes in demography, the appropriation of the mountains on the part of political movements across the political spectrum, the tension between modernity and anti-modernity and also between nationalism and internationalism all played an important role in this context. Moreover, a vast array of cultural productions—ranging from film, to novels (e.g. Heidi), to “typical” alpine products (e.g. fondue), to the news coverage of major events such as the Winter Olympics—contributed to the construction of the Alps as a quintessential site for international cooperation.

Introduction

I saw the monument erected in Turin in honor of the portentous Cenisio tunnel and I imagined this choreographic composition Luigi Manzotti* * The epigraph is drawn from Luigi Manzotti, Excelsior: azione coreografica, storica, allegorica, fantastica in 6 parti e 11 quadri, musica di Romualdo Marenco (Milan: Regio Stabilimento Ricordi, 1881), 1...