Gender Studies, and co-convene the Political Thought and Intellectual History Seminar. She holds a PhD in Politics and International Relations from the University of Cambridge, M.St in Imperial History from the University of Oxford, UK, and BA (summa cum laude) in Modern History from the University of Bologna, Italy.Rosenboim applied the “Page 99 Test” to her new book, The Emergence of Globalism: Visions of World Order in Britain and the United States, 1939-1950, and reported the following:
From page 99:Visit Or Rosenboim's website.The idea of the ‘global’ emerged in a dialogue with specific geopolitical sites like the frontier which informed normative assumptions about power relations in the world.Page 99 reflects on the geopolitical visions of two American thinkers, Owen Lattimore and Nicholas Spykman, who constructed a global order based on regional blocks. In the book, I discuss the emergence of the idea of ‘globalism’ in the 1940s through a series of transnational conversations between public intellectuals and political commentators in the United States and Britain. One of these conversations revolved around the theme of geopolitics, showing how for the geopoliticians Lattimore and Spykman globalism did not mean universalism, but an interconnected system based on large regional blocks. Their global visions were grounded in concrete geopolitical conditions, such as frontiers, sea power and territorial control. Their tripolar systems, led by the United States, Russia and Britain or China, were intended to offer a stable yet pluralist structure to the post-war world. On page 99, I assess the reasons for the relative decline of their visions in the post-war years, despite their prominence during the war.
Yet page 99 also highlights an important theme of the book: the plurality of political spaces included in the discourse of globalism, and the complex relations between these spaces. For mid-century thinkers, ‘globalism’ did not necessarily entail universality and unity. Rather, the globalist debate that mid-century public intellectuals embarked on sought to balance the tensions between a growing recognition of pluralism on the one hand and an appreciation of the unity of humankind on the other.
The book explores the intellectual history of global thought during and after the Second World War, when public intellectuals grappled with concerns about the future of democracy, the prospects of liberty, and the decline of the imperial system. Without using the term "globalization," they identified a shift toward technological, economic, cultural, and political interconnectedness and developed a ‘globalist’ ideology to reflect this new post-war reality. The world’s globality led mid-century thinkers to challenge conventional political categories, and the ‘global’ became the new yardstick to measure political order in the state, the region, the federation and the whole world. Although the discussion of the marginalisation of the geopolitical visions of tripolar regional blocks in page 99 may seem specific at first glance, it does represent central aspects of the wider debate on the desirable and possible shape of the new ‘global’ order of the post-war era.
--Marshal Zeringue
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