Internationalism and Globalism in Mid-twentieth Century Political Thought

The concept of space is central to thinking about the international as a sphere of political interactions between and across a wide variety of political units, such as states, empires, federations, and unions. The chapter explores the concrete notions of space and their imagined representations in mid-twentieth-century international thought, focusing especially on US and British public intellectuals who, in the context of growing attention to the world’s technological interconnectedness and under the threat of atomic war, promulgated globalism and the globe as counter-concepts to the international. The globalism articulated by these public intellectuals was predicated on both descriptive and normative dimensions of space that were intended to address the problem of war.