An international civilization? Empire, internationalism and the crisis of the mid-twentieth century

This article explores the notion of an international civilization in nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century thinking on international relations and the state system. This idea was fundamental to Victorian thinking about relations between Europe and the rest of the world, and was particularly important in reconciling the universal claims of liberal thought with the spread of European imperial control in Africa and Asia. Between the First and Second World Wars, however, the collapse of liberalism and the rise of ideological conflict within Europe led to the gradual retreat from eurocentric claims to civilizational predominance. The emergence of a genuinely global international order after 1945 through the United Nations occurred simultaneously with the collapse of the idea of an international civilization.