'Global Austria' and the League of Nations: Reframing Empire and Internationalism

Abstract

In 1945, when Karl Polanyi was in London typing up his lecture notes on Nationalism and Internationalism, the Geneva-based League of Nations, perhaps the most extraordinary institution that had yet appeared in human history, was all but dead, without funeral and without fanfare, and a new international organization, and the foundations for the United Nations Organizaton were being laid on the other side of the world. Polanyi had already lived through through the great transformations of twentieth century international politics. His birth in 1886 in Vienna to a Jewish bourgeois family—his father was a railway entrepreneur, whose real name Pollacsek spoke to the diverse Habsburg origins—coincided with the international turn of the 1880s and 1890s. As we will see, in the Austrian empire as well as Europe’s other empires, bourgeois and aristocratic contemporaries were likely to identify with a ‘new internationalism’—the characteristics of which were a faith in international law, arbitration, and governance, as the means of a permanent peace.