Socialism's Borders: Global Labor Networks, the Second International, and the Birth of the Socialist Nation-State, 1880-1919

Abstract

This dissertation argues for the importance of the global intellectual exchanges facilitated by the Second International in the development of a socialist concept of the nation-state that would form the basis for socialist and social democratic governments of the twentieth century. Prior to the period described, the dissertation argues, mainstream Marxism had no unified idea of the nation-state as a useful category for socialist organizing. Drawing on archives and periodicals from member organizations of the Second International writing in English, German, Polish, French, Dutch, Italian, and Spanish, as well as the organization’s own archives and the writings and correspondence of individual socialists involved in the Second International, it argues that the socialist conception of the boundaries and responsibilities of national governments to the ‘workers of the world,’ and vice-versa, emerged from debates over specific political and economic challenges faced by working-class and socialist parties at the turn of the twentieth century. Specifically, the dissertation focuses on five issues cross five different chapters: democratic citizenship, territory and national autonomy, migration and border enforcement, national self-determination, and militarism. Each of these debates is shown to have contributed to the development of the ‘national idea’ in mainstream Second International socialism and consequently to have shaped the socialist states of the twentieth century that emerged from the Second International’s network, including Poland, Italy, Austria, France, Germany, Finland, Australia, Great Britain, and the Netherlands.