Anarchism and Cosmopolitanism

Abstract

In most surveys of anarchism, cosmopolitanism is mentioned in reference as one of its sources in discussions of classical Greek thought, namely the Cynics and the Stoics. Whether or not one can draw such a linkage with the theory and practice of anarchism as an ideology in its various shapes and forms since the nineteenth century may be debatable. Nevertheless the cosmopolitan currents found in the Radical Enlightenment but also in the extra-European thought and practice of the Global South and in liminal encounters between Europe and the colonial Other are important influences for the formation and transmission of anarchism. Furthermore, the engagement with nationalism and patriotism by such anarchists as Rudolf Rocker and Gustav Landauer deal with cosmopolitanism in critical ways. More recently the revival of cosmopolitan thought in critical International Relations and the practices and theorisations of the Global Justice, Occupy and Square movements link the classical anarchist tradition with New and Post Anarchist currents. This chapter will discuss these themes.

Introduction: The Two Faces of Cosmopolitanism

The concept of cosmopolitanism has always been Janus-faced. While the term was coined and brought into use by the Cynics and Stoics, the definition of cosmopolitanism has spanned a wide gamut of meanings and intentions. The better known variety is in fact in direct opposition to the theory and practice of anarchism. The Alexandrine, Roman and British imperial traditions had very little to do with the anarchic cosmopolitanism of Diogenes of Sinope, the wandering, homeless philosopher who ordered Alexander the Great to move as he was blocking his sunlight. Or for that matter with Zeno, the metic (an outcast of Phoenician or Semitic background), whose Republic described a ‘city in the sky’, the cosmopolis, which was a boundary-less city where laws and compulsion had ceased to be.[1] For Augustus or Benjamin Disraeli, the Empire wore the benevolent mask of cosmopolitanism in which a variety of cultures could flourish under the hegemony of imperial law and administration, governed at the metropolitan centre by selfless administrators ruling through a universal morality informed by restrained human passions of Stoical provenance, which had formed their educations and personalities and which thus ensured that local rivalries would be managed sensibly with all the citizens and subjects of the Empire granted justice. In a more flamboyant, indeed crasser manner, the putative American Century after 1945 and the rebooted American ‘hyper-power’ of the 1990s also proclaimed the selfless duties of the world hegemon, the so-called indispensable power, the guardian of human rights and the purveyor of humanitarian interventions in a world where ‘history had ended’ and politics revolved around the technicalities, which liberalism could not settle immediately. Needless to say, as Noam Chomsky of the anarchist tradition has shown, this was bound up with a high quotient of hypocrisy and self-interest.[2]

From the perspective of civil society, cosmopolitanism since 1945 and/or the end of that Cold War (we may be in a new one), has also been associated with, on the one hand, the ideology of the ‘frequent flyer class’ who, lived off and administered the process of capitalist globalisation, and on the other, the alternative globalisers who pursued them in increasingly ritualised confrontations at meetings of the WTO, the World Bank, the G7/8/20 nations or Davos-like gatherings.[3] Indeed it could be argued that the contestation over the meaning of cosmopolitanism has become a central cleavage in the national and international body politic since 1989. This wider cleavage posited the winners against the losers of globalisation, and undermined traditional social democratic parties in the Global North, in which rust belt and anti-immigrant narratives were used to potent effect by national populist parties.[4] Another cleavage occurred in the Global Justice Movement itself over its meaning and the nature of its constituencies and their representatives and leadership. Thus the Global Justice Movement was a rather shaky coalition of activists from the Global North, which spanned anarchists to centrist trade unionists and manifested strengths (Seattle 1999) and tensions (World Social Forums) because of this. On another plane, despite the differences in the role, numbers and representativeness between the fissiparous Northern coalition and the Zapatistas, Latin American social movements, peasant and trade unions of the Indian sub-continent and the radical governments (Venezuela, Bolivia, etc.) in Latin America, from the late 1990s to the early 2000s, real pressure was placed on the WTO, the World Bank and unbridled neo-liberal globalisation.[5]

Since 2007–2008, this cleavage line has shifted, and this shift had been anticipated by the growth of nationalist populism in the Global North’s ‘rust belts’ since the 1990s. Since the financial crisis of 2007–2008 and the dawn of the so-called Age of Austerity, the latent cleavage between the winners and losers of globalisation in the Global North has been revealed. This is a different cleavage than the one manifested between the Global Justice Movement in the North and their on-off trade union allies, but has a similar class valence to it.

Paolo Gerbaudo has described the series of Occupy-like movements and the growth of left and right populism as a struggle between ‘The Mask’ (of small ‘A’ anarchism) and ‘The Flag’ (of local, regional and national patriotisms). National and local patriotism was present in the Arab Spring from the beginning and arguably also present in Occupy Wall Street and elsewhere in the metropolitan centres of the Global North (the upsurge of Catalan nationalism and SYRIZA’s national-popular message, being two other examples). Thus the cleavage between the cosmopolitan ‘Mask’ and the national-popular ‘Flag’ runs right through the Occupy and anti-austerity movements of the past decade. It is but the newest version of a dilemma, which anarchists and the cosmopolitan left has confronted over centuries.[6]

It is usually argued that classical anarchism and its syndicalist cousins were undermined, disoriented and ultimately marginalised due to the dual effects of 1914 (‘The Flag’: national identification, World War (s)), and of 1917, an alternative authoritarian radical ‘Mask’ (the Bolshevik Revolution and the Marxist-Leninist model). In short, national identity and Communist internationalism were the two forces which dissolved the global presence of anarchist and syndicalist forms of cosmopolitanism during the ‘short-twentieth century’ (1914–1991). In the twenty-first century, the dilemmas faced by the cosmopolitan anarchists and syndicalists of the first decades of the twentieth have returned in a new but not unfamiliar guise.[7] Furthermore, as I have suggested, the meaning of these Occupy-style movements and the previous Global Justice Movement posed different profiles depending on the participation of organised trade unionists, the urban poor, people of colour and indebted, largely white, lower and middle-class youngsters, North and South. Thus the themes posed in this chapter transcend the interests of historians and the systems building and classification quests of social scientists and political philosophers. The themes of this chapter go to the heart of our condition in the early twenty-first century.

This chapter uses a methodological cosmopolitanism to trace the complex and indeed tortured relationship of cosmopolitanism and anarchism.[8] In so doing it also casts light on the constant debate about the periodisation of anarchism, since the concept of cosmopolitanism is shared by the ‘pre-anarchist’ libertarian impulse before the ‘ism’ was formulated in the nineteenth century, the phase of classical anarchism (1840s to 1940s), and the new anarchism(s) of the post-1945 epoch. This chapter illuminates the usages of cosmopolitanism in the recent surge of anarchist historiography, as well as anarchist-inspired theoretical work in the disciplines of International Relations (IR), Political Science and the interface of modernism and post-modernism. Finally the politics of space, language and community, an aspect of the scalar dimension, and its impact on notions of national identity and local patriotism, conclude this chapter. Thus I suggest that the encounter of cosmopolitanism with anarchism can cast light upon our present condition and politics, but it can equally serve as a methodological tool for understanding how we got here.

Anarchist Cosmopolitanism and the Origins of Modernity

Peter Kropotkin noted that the road to the modern state was not preordained and should not be equated with a happy march from the darkness to sunlight uplands of modern statist progress.[9] If we look in the Muslim world, for example, an anti-cosmopolitan fundamentalist narrative of the origins of the umma can be counter-posed by the work of the classical thinker Ibn Khaldun, the cosmopolitan cities of al Andalus (Andalusia) under the Cordoba Umayyads or the trade exchanges of the multi-ethic and multi-religious Ottoman, Safavid and Mughal Empires.[10] The endpoint is not the modern state[11]: and if we look at another case, modernity in Europe was promoted by transnational Christian orders, confraternities, guilds and the Republic of Letters.[12] Even the inherent brutality of the instrumental rationality of the Enlightenment, the target of the Frankfurt School, post-modernists and post-colonial thinkers, can be read in a different light through the humanist and open-ended cosmopolitanism of the Radical Enlightenment of democratic rationalism, secularism or atheism associated with Spinozism and other subterranean traditions. Indeed, during the Early Modern Period, Spinoza was named the new Stoic and compared with the antinomian cosmopolitan, Zeno.[13] Even if commercial cosmopolitanism in the eighteenth and early nineteenth century can be allied with the horrors of the international slave trade and settler imperialism in the New World, Africa and Australasia, there is also an alternative reading pointing to pirate confederacies, maroon settlements and radical organisations of artisans and workers, and an alternative, radical reading of Adam Smith, John Locke and David Ricardo from which anarchism and indeed Marxism drew their original impulses.[14] Thus there was a trans-Atlantic counter-blast to slave fortresses and the plantation system in a systematic dispersal of the radical cosmopolitan politics of Mary Wollstonecraft, Tom Paine, William Godwin and Anacharsis Cloots (‘the orator for the human race’), who fought both aristocratic reaction and the restrictive nationalism of the French Jacobinism of Robespierre.[15]

The waves of social radicalism which have flowed around the globe since 1848 (the pre-1914 syndicalist upsurge, the era of council communist and factory militancy and the Bolshevik Revolution (1917–1924), ‘1968’, ‘1989’ (in a different key) and indeed ‘2011–2013’) have been informed by a cosmopolitan sensibility which was allied to a libertarian spirit, direct action and at times conscious anarchism.[16] If we stop here and consider the period of ‘classical anarchism’, where large ‘A’ anarchism was most manifest, the attempt to understand anarchism in the form of national case studies has been superseded by a series of individual and collective enterprises which chart anarchism as a global network in which the first instincts of a cosmopolitan world order and sensibility are foremost in the research agendas of historians and social scientists.[17] The signal event which established anarchism on the political map and became the lodestone of the anti-authoritarian wing of the First International, and assumed pride of place in the calendar of the Left, and especially the anarchist left until 1917, was the Paris Commune of 1871. Recent accounts of the Commune have stressed the role of women and foreigners in Paris: the Commune was an unabashedly cosmopolitan event which renounced the centralised French state and identified itself as part of a broader federated cosmopolitan order where exiles and immigrants in Paris played an oversized role in the proceedings.[18] Davide Turcato and Travis Tomchuk have re-imagined the history of Italian anarchism not as a peninsular-bound affair but a global movement of migrants from the ‘boot’ and its islands.[19] Other studies have traced the movements of Spanish/Argentine anarchists between Spain and Argentina from the 1890s to the 1940s,[20] the interchange of Japanese, Korean and Chinese anarchists across the great cities of East Asia[21] or the various permutations of anarchism and syndicalism between Cuba, Florida, Puerto Rico and the Panama Canal Zone.[22] One of the most recent studies uses the global dimension to understand the history of the Industrial Workers of the World (IWW) during its heyday in the first two decades of the twentieth century and an earlier collective study focussed more broadly on wider globally situated syndicalist movements up to and beyond the 1940s.[23]

Thus the exilic networks, great port cities and the spread of networked movements of anarchists and syndicalists, who operated within a global framework and therefore mimicked, in an antinomian fashion, the flow of capital and attendant imperial networks, have given rise to studies of the ‘anarchist’ Atlantic, Pacific and Mediterranean.[24] Network analysis informed by cosmopolitanism is perhaps at its most intriguing in recent studies which focus on liminal port cities such as New York and its environs,[25] San Francisco,[26] Los Angeles/San Diego/the borderlands,[27] various cities and towns in Peru[28] and Chile,[29] and London,[30] where exiled, home and cosmopolitan networked anarchists and syndicalists lived in close proximity and collaboration. The biographies of José Rizal,[31] Errico Malatesta,[32] Louise Michel[33] and Emma Goldman,[34] to name just four examples, are only understood using this method. The same cosmopolitan sensibility has informed new histories of art in which artistic spaces and art markets are located in the bohemia of this fluid world: the histories of Post-Impressionism, Cubism, Futurism and Dadaism, and for that matter the complicated and at times fraught Orientalist exchanges between radical artists of the Global North and South, can only be understood using local and global network analysis of London’s Fitzrovia, New York’s Greenwich Village or Paris’s Montmartre.[35] A methodological anarchist cosmopolitanism not only undermines state-centric case studies of a movement dedicated to the abolition of states but has deconstructed and de-provincialised the Eurocentrism of a historiography without falling into an essentialising identity politics, in short embracing a methodology advanced by Paul Gilroy whose work on the Black Atlantic has been superseded by what he terms ‘planetary humanism’,[36] a form of post-race thinking and akin to the Latin American theorist Walter Mignolo’s ‘worldly culture’, which seeks to avoid the trap of hegemonic Northern modernism by endorsing the liminality of ‘border thinking’, transcending national borders and Northern historical narratives.[37] Gilroy and Mignolo hail from a Marxist heritage but, their first principles, seem to be closer to Élisée Reclus than Lenin or Mao.[38]

The rise of the modern state system of international ‘anarchy’ has always been accompanied by a shadow system, which appears and then disappears between brief reversals of the established order, identified in waves of anti-state and boundary defying reshufflings and challenges to the powers who rule the Earth. These cycles have not gone unnoticed by the doyen of World Systems theory, Immanuel Wallerstein, who was even invoked by the champion of the last wave (2011–2013), David Graeber.[39] Nor has this ‘secret history’ been ignored by the anarchist-learning novelist Thomas Pynchon whose 2006 novel, Against the Day, is a transnational novel tracing pre-1914 cosmopolitan anarchism (Wobblies, bombers, anarchist communities) immersed in world of plutocratic imperialist geopolitics. Indeed he suggests that this is an alternative take on the lead-up to the First World War in which these cosmopolitan forces are an alternative to geopolitics and nationalism.[40] Meanwhile, the international historian Jeremi Suri, in more sober academic attire, argues that the Great Power détente of the late 1960s and early 1970s arose not only from the nuclear stalemate or the debilitating effects of the Vietnam War but within the background of social radicalism endemic in global civil society (anticipating, I would argue, the cosmopolitan radicalism of the movement of movements of the post-Cold War era), which threatened the stability of élites East and West and threatened to spiral into a series of events which had to be managed from above so as to restore more predictable state-to-state International Relations, in much the same fashion that order was restored by the Great Powers after 1848–1849.[41] This naturally leads us on to the complex and entangled discussions of the world system and world politics and demonstrations of how this ‘anarchist/cosmopolitan turn’ has affected the most interesting debates in International Relations, International Political Theory and Political Economy in the twenty-first century.

The Anarchist Cosmopolitan Turn and World Politics

An anarchist approach to cosmopolitanism can fruitfully be applied to the variety of approaches, which have flourished in political theory, sociology and history since the end of the Cold War. First let us examine the revival of the Kantian project. It would seem that there is little in common between anarchism and the Kantian approach. Of course it is true that Kant did not envisage a world-state or world federation in the manner that Daniele Archibugi has proposed.[42] Indeed, a world-state would have been a failure of cosmopolitanism in the eyes of Immanuel Kant. Other recent attempts try to come closer to Kant’s legacy but also might have some similarities to an anarchist cosmopolitan approach. Thus Mervyn Frost has proposed a framework of ‘two anarchies’ in which sovereign states and a robust global civil society achieve a fruitful equilibrium, since the dictatorship of a state-centric international society (the so-called ‘anarchy’ treasured by the International Relations community) would at least be lessened and anarchists might be appreciative of the space and opportunities granted to non-state pluralism.[43] As Todd May has argued, whereas anarchists would resist world government, they would not disapprove of world governance. Governance can happen from the bottom-up through horizontal networks which take into account the rights and needs of individuals.[44] Jonathan Havercroft and Alex Prichard have recently suggested international anarchy ‘as a self-help system would give way, to a more democratic conceptualisation of an ordered international system that lacks a central orderer’.[45] In a similar manner, using the concept of freedom as non-domination found in republicanism, Cécile Laborde and Miriam Ronzoni argue that globalisation creates new dimensions of unchecked power, which allow states and non-state actors fresh opportunities for domination, and they call for a new balance of powers, from their republican internationalist position, which would result in ‘the mutual non-domination of all polities’.[46] This form of mutual non-domination of all polities, through a reciprocal balance founded on justice, is not far from certain strands of anarchism, albeit the importance of the state in Laborde and Ronzoni’s argument would be an anathema to anarchists themselves. Yet Alex Prichard has shown that, unlike most other nationalist radicals of the nineteenth century, Pierre-Joseph Proudhon endorsed the seemingly status quo concept of the balance of power because its destabilisation through the rise of a united Poland, for example, would lead to world war and yet deeper forms of regressive chauvinistic nationalism and thus undermine the solidarity of the working classes across national borders.[47]

The hidden agendas of mainstream Kantian cosmopolitanism have also been mapped out by anarchist and radical critics. Unorthodox radical Costas Douzinas and anarchist Noam Chomsky both emphasise its state-centric first premises, namely the regimes of human rights laws, refugee rights and courts with global jurisdictions, loaded in the favour of the hegemonic powers.[48] At present, of course, the putative US hegemon is guided by a Trump regime that is suspicious of the enterprise (the fear of ‘globalists’) but for very different reasons than critics on the alternative globalisation Left.[49] Perhaps the Kantian phase is being discarded for earlier polices which found favour in the mid-twentieth century of Fascist and Imperial geopolitics. But here, too, the anarchist or anarchist-influenced analysis was in the forefront.

Two contemporaries who lived in the age of totalitarian regimes, George Orwell and C. Wright Mills, warned precisely of the dangers of domination of the world by friend/enemy super-states. Orwell (a veteran of Barcelona’s May Days in 1937, an anti-Stalinist socialist of anarchist inclination) gives us an imaginative portrayal of a dystopian international society in the year 1984, divided into Eurasia, Eastasia and Oceania, which engage in a series of inconclusive wars to mobilise their populations under similarly structured elites and ideologies.[50] Later Wright Mills, who was attracted to the legacy of the IWW, adapted the concept of bureaucratic collectivism and allied it to the nuclear tensions of the 1950s Cold War.[51] Thus the origins of a possible Third World War, he argued in a passionate pamphlet, could be found in two mirror-image global military industrial complexes who might not keep their wars limited to inconclusive, if bloody pantomimes, as in Orwell’s novel. More recently, and in a similar vein, Rob Walker has warned against super global sovereignty or the possibility of a future consortium of superpowers exercising a type of shared global sovereignty. But more focussed, conscious and consistent usages of the anarchist legacy, in short bringing anarchism into the debate in International Relations about ‘anarchy’, were pioneered by Richard Falk and others, and for the past decade, have been driven forward by Prichard.[52]

One of the aims of Prichard and others is to demystify the totemic usages of ‘anarchy’ in IR, which recently Havercroft and Prichard have compared to the ‘common sense’ first premises of the dominant political economy of neo-liberalism. ‘Anarchy’ between states, the mainstream argument maintains, is inescapable: states exist in a lawless domain of egoism and self-interest and ‘progress was defined by how far we move from it in philosophical-historical time’.[53] Such a world view found in political economy, economics or IR denies the existence of self-organising systems of social life which rely on principles of reciprocity and mutual aid.[54] It therefore comes as no surprise that one of the few earlier efforts to break out of IR parochialism was launched by a joint project of Robert Keohane and Elinor Ostrom, the latter an interesting scholar who bridged the worlds of voluntary cooperation and the commons with the so-called laws of the free marketplace.[55] In fact IR’s usage of the term ‘Hobbesian International Anarchy’ may be a distortion of what Hobbes meant and an incorrect juxtaposition of Hobbes’s description of the behaviour of individuals in certain circumstances, to how a state will or should behave on the global plane. In this manner the first assumptions of IR, the prevalence of ‘anarchy’ in the global arena, can be challenged by using methodological anarchism and more directly the ideology known as anarchism.[56] Prichard has pointed to David Held’s work on cosmopolitan world politics and compares this project to a Proudhonian approach, since both opt for multi-level and federal solutions.[57]

It is certainly the case that a ‘methodological anarchism’ has brought fresh insight into the debates over the nature of the international system under both the Westphalian and post-Westphalian orders and indeed posits a good deal of scepticism about the neat schematic quality of both or indeed the very existence of the Westphalian system in the first place.[58] The debate which raged (particularly in the 1990s and 2000s) over the extent to which globalisation and mainstream cosmopolitan politics were forms of neo-medievalism are viewed in a fresh light by invoking an anarchist stance.[59] Even regional integration, especially European integration, has connections to the Proudhonian legacy. An intellectual history of the European project, especially the centrality of functionalism, would be remiss to forget that Harold Laski and David Mitrany both read Proudhon carefully.[60] But equally Falk and Prichard have pointed out the similarities between the civil society forms of cosmopolitanism and the Proudhonian legacy, the type endorsed by the critical supporters on the Left in the beleaguered European Union, in the shared attributes of cooperation, non-violence, community, small-scale organisation and local solutions.[61] I will now turn to the similarities and differences between anarchist cosmopolitanism and post-modern thought.

Post-Modernism, Post-Anarchism, Libertarian Socialism and Cosmopolitanism

Post-modernist cosmopolitanism in the later works of Jacques Derrida is very close to the anarchist tradition, especially his concept of the New International in which the uniqueness of the individual is placed in dynamic tension with the need for global collective action.[62] Thus Derridean-type projects of ‘cities of refuge’ for global migrants in their libertarian and statist-political incarnations, and more directly the practice of the No-Borders campaigners, who are small ‘A’ anarchists,[63] bring to mind and expand in a unprecedented manner earlier attempts in the immediate post-1945 era by anarchists and pacifists to refuse to recognise national borders, by employing passive resistance at national frontiers and in refusing to use passports when travelling.[64] Recently, activists and thinkers have taken Hannah Arendt’s slogan of the ‘right to have rights’ out of its republican context and applied it to the No-Borders movement, something it should be added, Arendt would have opposed.[65] John Lechte and Saul Newman have sought to counterpose Arendt’s plea with Giorgio Agamben’s meditations on the ‘bare life’ of the stateless refugee, asking whether the crisis in the state-based systems which administer forced migration, can only be repaired if we think beyond an international society of states and a domestic society of citizens, and another separate group of disempowered human beings.[66] On a practical level, a former high-flying British diplomat, Carne Ross, has initiated an NGO of former diplomats who work for a grassroots diplomacy of global civil society.[67] There have also been attempts to meld the two camps (Arendtian Libertarian Republicanism with the new cosmopolitanism) in the work of Bonnie Honig,[68] who would like to promote a form of agonistic cosmopolitics and Andrew Dobson’s rather similar notion of ‘thick cosmopolitanism’,[69] both of which endorse world-building projects but not to the extent that they undermine locally controlled institutions, even the democratic state: one might say a diluted version of Proudhonian federalism.

Other cosmopolitanism projects on the post-modern or post-workerist Left are harder to assimilate into the anarchist tradition. In series of widely read works, Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri[70] sought to posit Empire against the Multitude, but it is unclear if this is merely a recycling of Marx’s take on the rise of global capitalism harnessed to the search for a new agent, ‘the Multitude’, once the traditional proletariat had failed its ‘historic’ task.[71] It is hard to understand if Leninism has been squeezed out of their scenarios or merely re-enters in new garb.[72] Indeed there are many Marxists who would argue that they have forgotten that the workshop of the world has merely moved from Manchester to the east coast of Leninist-Capitalist China. Recently, the unorthodox Marxist geographer David Harvey has suggested the recovery of capitalism after the crisis of 2007–2008 was a joint project of Chinese Keynesian demand management resulting in the building of myriad airports and high-speed trains in China and unsustainable levels of debt, and the near zero interest rate/quantitative easing regimes of Western financialised zombie capitalism.[73]

But it is Saul Newman’s elaboration of the neologism, ‘post-anarchism’, which has most consistently drawn the connections between classical anarchism and post-modern thought and related arguments found in the fields of cosmopolitan and globalisation studies.[74] Here is not the occasion to engage in a long discussion of his ideas, which in any case can be found elsewhere in this volume. Newman argues that post-anarchism is a post-modernist take on classical anarchism purged of its scientistic and positivist encrustations through a course of post-modernist medicine. He also argues that whereas much of what he takes to be the classical anarchist canon needs this remedy, Max Stirner and to a degree Mikhail Bakunin, anticipated the key concepts of Foucault, Deleuze and others. For Newman, the Zapatistas, the Global Justice Movement and the movements of the square and Occupy, the sans-papiers and the previously mentioned cities and camps of refuge are practical manifestations of post-anarchist cosmopolitanism. Furthermore, Newman also has deployed the term anarchy against its purveyors of realism in International Relations studies to defend his post-foundationalist, post-anarchism in a curious operation in which he employs Carl Schmitt, the purveyor of Nazi geopolitics, as a foil to expose the hypocrisies of the current global order.[75] For Newman, post-foundationalism undermines the hegemonic certainties, indeed platitudes, found in IR.

Cosmopolitanism, Anarchism, Ethnicity and Patriotism

The cosmopolitanism of the anarchist movement during the heyday of ‘classical anarchism’ was not unproblematic. In the studies cited above, the melding of various exilic, economic, intellectual and artistic networks was unstable and boundaries between networks were not absent. Language groups or groups of kindred languages therefore offered threats and opportunities for political practice. Studies which investigate the spread of anarchism and syndicalism in Latin America and the Caribbean stress that Spanish was the lingua franca, and if we look more closely at the spread of anarchism in Brazil or Argentina, we will find a language kinship between Spanish, Portuguese and Italian. It may be true that the IWW spread its methods and creeds via a group of nomadic and cosmopolitan worker migrants and particularly maritime workers, but within these episodes, we witness a series of stories that align with language groups: thus the spread of syndicalist ideas in the British Isles (including Ireland), the USA, Canada, South Africa and Australasia was facilitated by an ‘antinomian Anglosphere’. The previously cited study by Turcato or other studies of the Italian anarchist movement as a global movement, with interchanges with others, still can only be understood to a large extent as global movement living through the Italian language.[76] Indeed it was merely another example of how the concept of ‘Italy’ as a unified unit of understanding, and Italian as a received language of exchange, erased previous local dialects, or some would argue, the separate Romance languages of the migrants and their parents.[77]

Thus language communities aligned to ethnicities or shared cultures forced the issue of boundaries back into the anarchist and cosmopolitan networked world. One of the most telling case studies is the Yiddish-speaking communities of Jewish anarchists and syndicalists who thrived in the ‘Yiddishland’ of East-Central Europe and the Czarist Empire, as well as in the cosmopolitan world cities of London, Paris, New York and Buenos Aires.[78] This does not lack a certain pathos, given the fact that the Jews became the targeted ‘enemies of the people’, the ‘rootless cosmopolitans’ of the Nazi and late Stalinist regimes. The question of whether the Jews were a people, ethnicity or a religion was inherently interesting in an era of nation-state formation, but once we place this question in the context of other language-family based anarchist networks, a number of cross-cutting connections and problems can be detected. In terms of the history of cosmopolitanism, the Jewish anarchist communities are in some respects unique, and rather similar to other case studies; a fully functional and dynamic community of Jewish anarchists was tied to a specific form of Yiddish radicalism, which died when the Yiddish language was no longer spoken.[79] It should also be recalled that during the heyday of this movement in New York, London or Paris, young anarchist militants cut their teeth first in the language community’s institutions. Famously, Emma Goldman and Alexander Berkman, before they mastered English, were politicised in the Yiddish- and also German-speaking anarchist milieu but only later in life assimilated into English-speaking movements in the USA. Indeed in their case, when they were forced to live exilic lives in Russia, France, the UK and Canada, they felt bereft of the customs and cadences of the USA.[80] Even if some of the newspapers of the Yiddish anarchist movement in New York and elsewhere had long-term afterlives, the movement was undermined by the assimilation of later generations of host-language speaking children who moved away from identifiable Jewish ghettoes in London or New York to the suburbs. Communism, Zionism (Modern Hebrew) and even a return to Orthodoxy undercut these previously dynamic movements.[81] So how do we assess the linkage between language, nation and state for these anarchist cosmopolitan movements? Those associated with the Yiddish and Jewish anarchists in the early twentieth century addressed this issue in interesting and multifarious ways.

Gustav Landauer was a German Jew, very much assimilated into German culture but with a sensitive ear to Yiddishland and Jewish Orthodoxy. He defined himself as South German, German, Jew and indefinable ‘I’. In many respects, just as Newman claimed that Stirner anticipated post-modern thought, so too did Landauer. Thus Landauer combined strands of Stirner and Nietzsche and formulated his thoughts with a shockingly modern tone. Like Foucault, he sought to fight his ‘inner statist’ and like the French theorist, he too argued that the real source of power is micro-power. He advocated an anarchist politics based on the spirituality of the community which was decidedly different from Foucault and the other master thinkers of post-modernism. If ‘the state’ resided in our inner selves, this illusion which enslaved us had to be contested so that the foundations of a liberated community could be forged; nevertheless, the ‘folk’ was not a mythical illusion; the folk brought hope and life. But Landauer read Herder in a very different manner than many Germans; his concept of the Volk was not related to racial hierarchies. So Landauer sought a synthesis in which the uniqueness of each culture was preserved but the final goal, a libertarian cosmopolitan politics, would flourish because it would not be built on artificial and arid foundations.[82] Although he embraced a form of spiritual Zionism which included the new community which would be a source of inspiration for the kibbutz,[83] his Zionism did not involve the actual settlement of Palestine. For Landauer the Jewish people were the least attracted to the idea of the state and therefore they could construct these communities outside of its structure, even outside a Jewish state located in a given physical location.[84] So in many regards, Landauer foreshadows a form of libertarian cosmopolitanism which does not completely dismiss the arguments of present-day communitarians such as David Miller[85] and has affinities with those advocates of new forms of regionalism which are neither subordinated to a powerful centralised state nor force various cultures to lose their distinctiveness in overarching larger structures. One can therefore point to the similarities in the arguments of those who advocate a Europe of regions (which of course is also Proudhonian)[86] or the communal experiment in Northern Syria, in Rojava, where some Kurdish nationalists have sought to create in multi-communal confederal polity, in part inspired by the Libertarian Municipalism of Murray Bookchin.[87]

Another thinker and activist who was a contemporary of Landauer and addressed similar issues was Rudolf Rocker. Rocker was a German gentile who became the charismatic leader of the thriving community of London’s East End Jewish anarchists before 1914. In many respects Rocker’s position was akin to the Austro-Marxists who also grappled with the issue of nation-state-class in the multi-ethnic and confessional Austro-Hungarian Empire.[88] Unlike Landauer, Rocker was a child of the Enlightenment; he had little time for Stirner and was a firm rationalist. Unlike Landauer who was attracted to the völkisch Herder, Rocker’s was attracted to the rationalist cosmopolitan, Wilhelm von Humboldt, an enthusiasm shared by Noam Chomsky,[89] albeit Rocker also insisted that Herder was no romantic or as restrictive as his German nationalist followers allowed, because languages defied national borders and relied on global borrowings to grow and prosper. Indeed one could say that the positions of Landauer and Rocker on the national question echo to a certain extent recent divisions in nationalist studies between primordialists (Landauer) and modernists (Rocker).[90] Anticipating the position of the scholar of nationalism, John Breuilly, the nation, according to Rocker, was a product of the state and elite power plays.[91] The foundational community for Rocker was the folk group (perhaps what we would term the ethnie). Folk groups were melded together through the coercion and inventive imagery of power seekers. The problem was that power and the state destroyed or distorted the libertarian potential of culture. But these folk groups, unlike Landauer’s take, did not share some ineffable Geist, they were not primordial facts, but living and evolving bundles of common cultural traits shared individually and separately from the group itself. The individual was not bound to a group but could draw from his/her birth group at will. Rocker may have helped himself by following the path of Benedict Anderson,[92] who appreciated the interplay of language, print culture and shared experience, but this was not fleshed out to a sufficient degree in his major work on the subject, Nationalism and Culture,[93] first published in 1937 during Rocker’s long American exile and at the very moment Yiddish culture was being eradicated through the genocidal polices of the Nazis and less deadly but hostile policies of Stalinist control in the USSR.

One way to bridge the language gap between ethnicities, nations and even neighbouring communities of exiled anarchists speaking a different home language was through Esperanto or other artificial languages invented to overcome linguistic barriers. For rationalists, followers of a certain form of Enlightenment cosmopolitanism, Esperanto, along with the Modern School of the anarchist rationalist educationalist, Francisco Ferrer, would foreshadow the future cosmopolitan anarchist commonwealth and these aspirations were shared partially by other well-meaning republicans, anti-clericals and radical liberals who embraced many of the same first premises and principles of this libertarian culture.[94] It was therefore fitting that the inventor of Esperanto hailed from the multi-cultural and polyglot Bialystok in the heart of Yiddishland.[95] But the anarchists were not unequivocal supporters of this new language, as some of the anarchists were disturbed by forms of anti-clericalism and radical republicanism which placed them too closely to the radical bourgeoisie, because after all, these erstwhile allies were in the capitalist camp and on occasion faced them across the picket line.[96]

However there were other differences between the anarchists, which hark back to the divisions between ‘primordialists’ such as Landauer and the ‘modernists’ such as Rocker. Landauer was harshly critical of Esperanto, indeed in an article published in 1907, he enjoined his readers: ‘Do Not Learn Esperanto!’[97] For Landauer, Esperanto lacked a passionate attachment to real life. Rocker’s position was more nuanced. On the one hand, Rocker was no essentialist, which one could argue Landauer was, and did not feel that his adopted Yiddish Jewish community was bound together by inherent racial attributes or state-based official scripts. This community was malleable and changed across time and space; indeed he, a gentile, born a German Catholic, had wholeheartedly embraced it and helped shape its cultural life (one biographer even describes him as ‘the Anarchist Rabbi’).[98] In his future cosmopolitan world federation based on ‘voluntary socialism’, each individual would have the right to pursue and practise his or her own culture and thus a folk culture was built from the free association of sovereign individuals who chose which culture they wished to embrace, in much the same way Rocker had done in his own life. So Rocker sought to meld the rationalism of the Enlightenment with elements of Landauer’s essentialist message since Rocker still recognised that definable group cultures existed and should exist in the anarchist future.[99]

Landauer’s harsh injunctions are in fact much closer to Antonio Gramsci’s. In earlier work I sought to demonstrate that Gramsci as pre-Leninist council communist in Turin worked with anarchists and syndicalists and constructed a form of libertarian Marxist socialism, which however was based on premises which were inherently hostile to much of the discourse and methods of ‘classical anarchism’.[100] Being a trained philologist and dual speaker of Sardinian and standard Italian, Gramsci was very sensitive to the connections of language to culture, identity and power. Indeed, his arguments about socialism and communism can only be grasped if one understands that his metaphors, analogies and reasoning about politics are substantially drawn from this professional training and personal obsession with philology.[101] It is striking that at different times and without mutual acknowledgement, Gramsci and Landauer both criticised the chief Italian anarchist advocate of Esperanto, Luigi Molinari.[102] For the young Gramsci and the ‘Prison Notebooks Gramsci’, Molinari’s quest for Esperanto and the more general attachment of pre-Fascist socialists and anarchists to this world of ‘Free Thought’, anti-clericalism and most particularly Esperanto, was a form of artificial cosmopolitanism, which was why pre-1917 Italian socialism could never be truly popular, because it was not rooted in the essence of Italian popular culture. Like the Roman Catholic hegemony rooted in the city of Rome and the Vatican, Italian national-popular culture was undermined by a pernicious form of cosmopolitanism which ironically the enemies of the Church had recreated through international manifestations such as Esperanto and crude forms of anti-clericalism. Thus Gramsci argued for Communist internationalism rooted in an Italian national-popular culture and he sought to translate the practices of Leninism into Italian but ultimately this Italian Leninism still had to be guided by the selfless and clear-eyed Comintern. Furthermore, he also felt that anarchist forms of education, particularly naïve Free Thought, with Esperanto a rather silly and pernicious flowering therein, undermined the ability of the subaltern and working classes’ ability to master the codes of the humanist elite (who promoted in fact their own specious form of bourgeois cosmopolitanism) and therefore prevented the powerless from achieving hegemony in Italy.

Landauer and Rocker shared Gramsci’s attraction to the heritage of European culture and spent a good deal of their lives promoting both classical humanism but also the emerging canon of modernism. Perhaps all three were still too Eurocentric and at times even Orientalist; nevertheless, Landauer’s and Rocker’s form of anarchist commonwealth shared little with the rigid Communist internationalism of Gramsci, who fell prey to his own form of doctrinaire and scientistic ideology. Gramsci argued that historicist Marxism was more libertarian than the anarchists’ anarchism because it was more realistic and therefore could achieve results in the real world. But it can also be argued that Gramsci embraced Leninism and the unquestioned lead of the Comintern not because it aligned with his pre-Leninist ideas but because Lenin and the Bolsheviks had been successful and he and his Italian comrades were dismally unsuccessful. The roughest form of pragmatism motivated Gramsci, not internationalism: nothing succeeds like success.[103] Rocker wrote Nationalism and Culture just as Gramsci was penning his prison notes, which ruminated over the rise of fascism and perhaps secretly the rise too of Stalinism. Gramsci retained his visceral hatred of all forms of cosmopolitanism associated with the pre-1914 anarchist/libertarian subculture and saw the national-popular as a remedy for the demagogic national populism of Fascism and the biological populism of the Nazis. Rocker sought to meld together the lessons of the ‘primordialists’ and the ‘modernists’ in a new synthesis in face of the same horrors.

Conclusion: The Future of Cosmopolitanism and Rooted Cosmopolitanism

If we turn full circle, return to our initial arguments in this chapter concerning the role of cosmopolitanism and globalisation in the twenty-first century, disputes over the role of global English, the Latin of today’s Empire, have interesting parallels with the half-forgotten disputes over the utility and political effects of Esperanto. Daniele Archibugi the present-day supporter of world federation suggests a need for an Esperanto-like solution to the language of business in a projected world parliament.[104] Peter Ives, a keen student of Gramsci’s philological studies,[105] has addressed Archibugi in light of Gramsci’s intellectual biography. In a curious way, this is a re-run of Gramsci’s encounter with the Italian anarchist, Molinari. How can a new cosmopolitics in Archibugi’s parliament or for that matter in today’s global civil society be expressed in a new Esperanto of Global English (or possibly in the future in Global Mandarin, Hindi, Arabic or Spanish), when the language will largely not be intimate to the speaker?[106] Or as Hannah Arendt responded to Karl Jasper’s enthusiasm for cosmopolitan world government in a language which is dated and offensive, ‘A world citizen, living under the tyranny of world Empire, and speaking a kind of Esperanto, would no less be a monster than a hermaphrodite’.[107]

One way out of this impasse is to embrace the concept of the ‘rooted cosmopolitan’, a term which has inspired my quest in charting the global life in exile of the Italian anarchist, Errico Malatesta, and a term which I noticed has been embraced separately by several writers in different contexts outside the field of anarchist studies.[108] David Turcato notes in reference to Malatesta, love of birthplace, a preference for ones’ own language is beneficial for the fostering of solidarity in human groups so long as it does not breed exclusivity and sense of superiority.[109] And Malatesta also argued that even if we are cosmopolitans (Malatesta was in fact a member of a club called the ‘Cosmopolitans’,[110] where radical exiles and locals met in a room in a pub in Covent Garden during the 1890s, whose landlord was no other that the denizen of the ‘antinomian Anglosphere’, Tom Mann), one is forced to submit to the political regime where one lives, one’s solidarity with the distant worker is a duty but solidarity within one’s own culture is more keenly felt. In the cosmopolitan city, this meant solidarity with fellow workers whose origins were distant in, for example, Malatesta’s organising of solidarity amongst the Italian tailors of the London’s West End during a massive strike of the East End’s Jewish anarchist-led unions.[111] While some French anarchists, perhaps still influenced by the exceptionalism associated with the French Revolution and indeed a prevailing anti-Semitic cadence, refused the badge of cosmopolitanism because it was considered antipatriotic and embraced the term internationalist even though logically the unit of analysis would be a world of states, Malatesta, drawing from the cosmopolitanism of the Risorgimento and his own life story choose another path.[112] In both multi-national and multi-national settings in exile and in the sharp regional particularisms of the new and artificial nation-state called Italy, an overriding sense of patriotism, love of a locality and not a state or dominant ethnic group, generated Malatesta’s reasoned position. This approach is also prevalent in the adaption of Bookchin’s communal federalism in Northern Syria’s Rojava in contradistinction to the sectarianism elsewhere in that region or in the so-called ‘identitarian’ populism which threatens globally to bring back the worst horrors of the twentieth century. In his heart Rocker was a rationalist cosmopolitan, who bowed reluctantly to the need to accommodate cultural differences but longed for a world of global citizens. Using Bookchin’s concept of Libertarian Municipalism, Sean Wilson has suggested that a theory of libertarian cosmopolitan democracy (which goes beyond Held or Archibugi) can be supplemented by a cosmopolitan conception of citizenship.[113] Though not fully anarchist, this construct based on majority rule, grassroots participation and multi-level governance is a far more inspiring aspiration than others proposed in our dangerous and dismal present.

[1] R. Fine and R. Cohen, ‘Four cosmopolitan moments’, in S. Vertovec and R. Cohen (Eds), Conceiving Cosmopolitanism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002), 138–139; D. Inglis and R. Robertson, ‘Beyond the gates of the polis: Reconfiguring sociology’s ancient inheritance’, Journal of Classical Sociology, 4:2 (2004), 165–189; D. Inglis and R. Robertson, ‘The ecumenical analytic: “globalization”, reflexivity and the revolution in Greek historiography’, European Journal of Social Theory, 8:2 (2005), 99–122; C. Douzinas, Human Rights and Empire: The Political Philosophy of Cosmopolitanism (London: Routledge, 2007), 248, 298; G. Leung, ‘Towards a radical cosmopolitanism’, in M. Stone, I. rua Wall, and C. Douzinas (Eds), New Critical Thinking. Law and the Political (London: Routledge, 2014), 229–240.

[2] N. Chomsky, The New Military Humanism: Lessons from Kosovo (London: Pluto, 1999) and N. Chomsky, Who Rules the World? (London: Penguin, 2017). Mark Mazower examines the pre-1945 imperialist origins of the post-1945 post-colonial human rights regime. See M. Mazower, ‘The strange triumph of human rights, 1933–1945’, Historical Journal, 47:2 (2004), 377–393 and M. Mazower, Governing the World; The History of an Idea (London: Penguin, 2013).

[3] C. Calhoun, ‘The class consciousness of the frequent travellers: Towards a critique of actually existing cosmopolitanism’, in Vertovec and Cohen, Conceiving Cosmopolitanism, 86–109; D. Graeber, Direct Action: An Ethnography (Edinburgh: AK Press, 2009); M. Maeckelbergh, The Will of the Many. How the Alterglobalisation Movement is Changing the Face of Democracy (London: Pluto, 2009).

[4] H. Kitschelt, E. Grande, R. Lachat, M. Dolezal, S. Bornschier, and T. Frey, ‘Globalization and the transformation of national political space: Six European countries compared’, European Journal of Political Research, 45:6 (2006), 921–956.

[5] R. J. F. Day, Gramsci is Dead. Anarchist Currents in the Newest Social Movements (Pluto: London, 2005); U. Gordon, Anarchy Alive! (London: Pluto, 2008); R. Krøvel, Anarchism, the Zapatistas and the global solidarity movement’, Global Discourse, 1:2 (2010), available at http://global-discourse.com/contents; D. Murray, ‘Democratic insurrection: Constructing the common in global resistance’, Millennium, 39:2 (2010), 461–482; G. Pleyers, Alter-Globalization. Becoming Actors in the Global Age (Cambridge: Polity, 2010); E. Lagalisse, ‘“Good Politics”. Property, Intersectionality, and the Making of the Anarchist Self’. PhD, McGill University, 2016.

[6] P. Gerbaudo, The Mask and the Flag: Populism, Citizenism and Global Protest (London: C. Hurst, 2017).

[7] C. Levy, ‘Anarchism and Leninist Communism: 1917 and all that’, Socialist History, 52 (2017), 85–94.

[8] U. Beck, ‘The cosmopolitan perspective: Sociology in the second age of modernity’, in Vertovec and Cohen, 61–85; U. Beck, Cosmopolitan Vision (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2004).

[9] R. Kinna, ‘Kropotkin’s theory of the state: A transnational approach’, in C. Bantman and B. Altena (Eds), Reassessing the Transnational Turn. Scales of Analysis in Anarchist and Syndicalist Studies (London: Routledge, 2015), 43–61.

[10] R. J. Holton, Cosmopolitanisms: New Thinking and New Directions (Basingstoke: Palgrave, 2009), 67–68; S. Zubaida, ‘Middle Eastern experiences of cosmopolitanism’, in Vertovec and Cohen, 32–41.

[11] H. Spruyt, The Sovereign State and its Competitors: An Analysis of Systems Change (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996).

[12] M. C. Jacobs, Strangers Nowhere in the World: The Rise of Cosmopolitanism in Early Modern Europe (Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 2006); J. I. Israel, Radical Enlightenment: Philosophy and the Making of Modernity 1650–1750 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001); J. I. Israel, Enlightenment Contested: Philosophy, Modernity, and the Emancipation of Man 1670–1752 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2006); J. I. Israel, A Revolution of the Mind. Radical Enlightenment and the Intellectual Origins of Modern Democracy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2010).

[13] Israel, Enlightenment Contested, 456–470.

[14] G. Claeys, ‘Reciprocal dependence, virtue and progress: Some sources of early socialist cosmopolitanism and internationalism in Britain, 1750–1850’, in F. van Holthoon and M. van der Linden (Eds), Internationalism and the Labour Movement, 1830–1940, Vol. 1 (Leiden: Brill, 1988); M. R. Garcia, ‘Early views on internationalism: Marxist socialists vs. liberals’, Revue Belge de Philologie et D’Histoire, 84:4 (2006), 1049–1073.

[15] P. Linebaugh and M. Rediker, The Many-Headed Hydra: The Hidden History of the Revolutionary Atlantic, Rev. ed. (London: Verso Books, 2012); A. Policante, The Pirate Myth: Genealogies of an Imperial Concept (Law and the Postcolonial) (London: Routledge, 2015); J. Israel, Revolutionary Ideas. An Intellectual History of the French Revolution from The Rights of Man to Robespierre (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2014), 292–293, 316–320, 500–502.

[16] A. Körner (Ed), 1848: A European Revolution? International Ideas and National Memories of 1848 (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2000); L. van der Walt and M. Schmidt, Black Flame: The Revolutionary Class Politics of Anarchism and Syndicalism, Vol. 1 (Edinburgh: AK Press, 2009); S. J. Hirsch and L. van der Walt (Eds), Anarchism and Syndicalism in the Colonial and Postcolonial World, 1880–1940 (Leiden: Brill, 2011); R. Darlington, Syndicalism and the Transition to Communism: An International Comparative Analysis (Farnham: Ashgate, 2008); Levy, ‘Anarchism and Leninist Communism’; G.-R. Horn, The Spirit of ’68: Rebellion in Western Europe and North America, 1956–1976 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007); K. Kumar, 1989: Revolutionary Ideas and Ideals (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota, 2001); P. Kenney, A Carnival of Revolution: Central Europe 1989 (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, New Ed, 2003); G. Lawson, C. Armbruster, and M. Cox (Eds), The Global 1989: Continuity and Change in World Politics (Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2010); M. Sitrin and D. Azzellini, The Can’t Represent US!: Reinventing Democracy from Greece to Occupy (London: Verso Books, 2014); D. Graeber, The Democracy Project: A History, a Crisis, a Movement (London: Penguin, 2014); Gerbaudo, Mask and the Flag.

[17] D. Berry and C. Bantman (Eds), New Perspectives on Anarchism, Labour and Syndicalism Labour and Syndicalism. The Individual, the National and the Transnational (Newcastle upon Tyne: Cambridge Scholars Press, 2010); Bantman and Altena, Reassessing the Transnational Turn; B. Maxwell and R. B. Craib (Eds), No Gods No Masters No Peripheries. Global Anarchisms (Oakland, CA: PM, 2015).

[18] J. Merriman, Massacre: The Life and Death of the Paris Commune (New York: Basic Books, 2014); K. Ross, Communal Luxury. The Political Imaginary of the Paris Commune (London: Verso Books, 2015).

[19] D. Turcato, ‘Italian anarchism as a transnational movement, 1885–1915’, International Review of Social History, 52:3 (2007), 407–444; T. Tomchuk, Transnational Radicals. Italian Anarchists in Canada and the U.S. 1915–1940 (Winnipeg, MB: University of Manitoba Press, 2015).

[20] J. A. Baer, Anarchist Immigrants in Spain and Argentina (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2015).

[21] D. Hwang, ‘Korean Anarchism before 1945: A regional and transnational approach’, in Steven Hirsch and Lucien van der Walt (Eds), Anarchism and Syndicalism in the Colonial and Postcolonial World, 1870–1940 (Leiden: Brill, 2010), 95–130; A. Dirlik, ‘Anarchism and the question of place: Thoughts from the Chinese experience’, in Hirsch and van der Walt, Anarchism and Syndicalism, 131–146.

[22] K. Shaffer, ‘Havana hub: Cuban anarchism, radical media and the trans-Caribbean anarchist network, 1902–1915’, Caribbean Studies, 37:2 (2009), 45–81; K. Shaffer, ‘Tropical Libertarians: Anarchist movements and networks in the Caribbean, Southern United States, and Mexico, 1890s–1920s’, in Hirsch and van der Walt, Anarchism and Syndicalism, 273–320; E. M. Daniel, ‘Cuban cigar makers in Havana, Key West, and Ybor City, 1850s–1990s: A single universe?’, in G. de Laforcade and K. Shaffer (Eds), In Defiance of Boundaries: Anarchism in Latin American History (Gainesville: University of Florida Press, 2015), 25–97; K. Shaffer, ‘Panama red: Anarchist politics and transnational networks in the Panama Canal Zone, 1904–1913’, in ibid., 48–71.

[23] P. Cole, D. Struthers, and K. Zimmer (Eds), Wobblies of the World. A Global History of the IWW (London: Pluto Press, 2017); Hirsch and van der Walt, Anarchism and Syndicalism.

[24] B. Anderson, Under Three Flags. Anarchism and the Anti-Colonial Imagination (London: Verso, 2005); J. C. Moya, ‘Modernization, modernity and the trans/formation of the Atlantic World in the nineteenth century’, in J. Cañizares-Esquerra and E. Seeman (Eds), The Atlantic in Global History: 1500–2000 (New York: Prentice-Hall), 179–198; I. Khuri-Makdisi, The Eastern Mediterranean and the Making of Global Radicalism, 1860–1914 (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2010).

[25] M. Bencivenni, Italian Immigrant Radical Culture. The Idealism of the Sovversivi in the United States, 1890–1940 (New York: New York University Press, 2011); J. Guglielmo, Living the Revolution: Italian Women’s Resistance and Radicalism in New York City, 1880–1945 (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina Press, 2012); T. Goyens (Ed), Radical Gotham. Anarchism in New York City from Schwab’s Saloon to Occupy Wall Street (Urban: University of Illinois Press, 2017).

[26] K. Zimmer, ‘A Golden Gate of anarchy: Local and transnational dimensions of anarchism in San Francisco, 1880s–1930s, in Altena and Bantman, Reassessing, 100–117.

[27] D. Struthers, ‘“The boss had no color line.” Race, solidarity and the culture of affinity in Los Angeles and the borderlands, 1907–1915’, Journal for the Study of Radicalism, 7:2 (2013), 61–92.

[28] S. J. Hirsch, ‘Peruvian anarcho-syndicalism, adapting to transnational influences and forcing counterhegemonic practices, 1905–1939’, in Hirsch and van der Walt, Anarchism and Syndicalism, 227–272; D. J. Hirsch, ‘Anarchism, the subaltern, and repertoires of resistance in Northern Peru, 1898–1922’, in Maxwell and Craib, No Gods No Masters, 215–232; S. J. Hirsch. ‘Anarchist visions of race and space in Northern Peru’, in de Laforcade and Shaffer, Defiance of Boundaries, 261–280.

[29] R. B. Craib, The Cry of the Renegade. Politics and Poetry in Interwar Chile (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016).

[30] C. Bantman, The French Anarchists in London, 1880–1914. Exile and transnationalism in the first globalisation (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2013); P. Di Paola, The Knights Errant of Anarchy. Landon and the Italian Anarchist Diaspora (1880–1917) (Liverpool: Liverpool University Press, 2013).

[31] Anderson, Under Three Flags.

[32] C. Levy, ‘The rooted cosmopolitan: Errico Malatesta, syndicalism, transnationalism and the international labour movement’, in Berry and Bantman, Reassessing, 61–79.

[33] C. Bantman, ‘Louise Michel’s London years: A political reassessment (1890–1905)’, Women’s History Review, 26:6 (2017), 994–1012.

[34] K. Ferguson, Emma Goldman: Political Thinking in the Streets (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2011); V. Gornick, Emma Goldman: Revolution as a Way of Life (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2011).

[35] C. Levy, ‘Anarchists and the city. Governance, revolution and imagination’, in F. Federico Ferretti, G. Barrera de la Torre, A. Ince and F. Toro (Eds), Historical Geographies of Anarchism. Early Critical Geographers and Present-Day Scientific Challenges (London: Routledge, 2017), 16–19; J. Gifford, Personal Modernisms. Anarchists Networks and the Later Avant-Gardes (Edmonton: University of Alberta Press, 2014).

[36] P. Gilroy, Between Camps (London: Allen Lane, 2000).

[37] W. Mignolo, Local Histories/Global Designs: Coloniality, Subaltern Knowledges, and Border Thinking (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2000), 39–40.

[38] F. Ferretti, Élisée Reclus. Pour un géographie nouvelle (Paris: Éditions du CTS, 2014).

[39] D. Graeber, Possibilities. Essays on Hierarchy, Rebellion and Desire (Edinburgh: AK Press, 2007), 88–91.

[40] T. Pynchon, Against the Day (London: Jonathan Cape, 2006).

[41] J. Suri, Power and Protest: Global Revolution and the Rise of Détente (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2003).

[42] D. Archibugi, The Global Commonwealth of Citizens. Towards Cosmopolitan Democracy (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2008).

[43] M. Frost, Global Ethics: Anarchy, Freedom and International Relations (London: Routledge, 2009).

[44] T. May, ‘From world government to world governance: An anarchist perspective’, International Journal of Applied Philosophy, 27:2 (2013), 277–286.

[45] A. Prichard and J. Havercroft, ‘Anarchy and international relations theory: A reconsideration’, Journal of International Political Theory, 13:3 (2017), 262.

[46] C. Laborde and M. Ronzoni, ‘What is a free state? Republican internationalism and globalisation’, Political Studies, 64:2 (2015), 289.

[47] A. Prichard, Justice, Order and Anarchy. The International Political Theory of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (London: Routledge, 2013), 42–66.

[48] Douzinas, Human Rights and Empire; Chomsky, Military Humanism and Chomsky, Who Rules.

[49] D. Smith, ‘The fall of Steve Bannon is a win for the globalists. But will it last?’, The Guardian, 18 August 2017.

[50] G. Orwell, Nineteen Eighty-Four (London: Secker & Warburg, 1949).

[51] C. Wright Mills, The Causes of World War III (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1958). On C. Wright Mills’ anarchist connections see, C. Levy, ‘“I am a Goddamn anarchist: C. Wright Mills, the anarchists and participatory democracy’, forthcoming.

[52] T. G. Weiss, ‘The tradition of philosophical anarchism and the future directions in world policy’, Journal of Peace Research, 12:1 (1975), 1–17; R. Falk, ‘Anarchism and world order’, J. R. Pennock and J. W. Chapman (Eds), Anarchism (New York: New York University Press, 1978), 63–87.

[53] Havercroft and Prichard, op. cit., Ref. 44, 255.

[54] E. Cudworth and S. Hobsden, ‘Anarchy and anarchism: Towards a theory of complex international systems’, Millennium, 39:2 (2010), 399–416; A. Goodwin, ‘Evolution and anarchism in international relations: The challenge of Kropotkin’s biological ontology’, Millennium, 39:20 (2010), 417–437.

[55] R. O. Keohane and E. Ostrom (Eds), Local Commons and Global Interdependence (Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage, 1994).

[56] T. Christov, ‘The Invention of Hobbesian anarchy’, Journal of International Political Theory, 13:3 (2017), 296–310.

[57] A. Prichard, ‘David Held is an anarchist. Discuss’, Millennium, 39:2 (2010), 439–459.

[58] B. Tesche, The Myth of 1648: Class, Geopolitics, and the Making of Modern International Relations (London: Verso, 2003).

[59] For the general debate, see, S, Sassen, Territory Authority Rights. From Medieval to Global Assemblages (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2006).

[60] L. M. Ashworth, ‘David Mitrany on the international anarchy. A lost work of classical realism’, Journal of International Political Theory, 13:3 (2017), 311–324.

[61] R. Falk, ‘Anarchism without “anarchism”: Searching for progressive politics in the early 21st century’, Millennium, 39:3 (2010), 381–398; A. Prichard, ‘Justice, order and anarchy: The international political theory of Pierre-Joseph Proudhon (1809–1865)’, Millennium, 35:3 (2007), 623–645; A. Prichard, ‘Deepening anarchism: International relations and the anarchist ideal’, Anarchist Studies, 18:2 (2010), 29–57.

[62] J. Derrida, Spectres de Marx (Paris: Éditions Galilee, 1993); J. Derrida, Cosmopolites de tous les pays, encore un effort (Paris: Éditions Galilee, 1997); J. Derrida, L'hospitalité (Paris: Calmann-Lévy, 1997).

[63] T. May, ‘Equality among the refugees: A Rancièrean view of Montréal’s san-status Algerians’, Anarchist Studies, 16:2 (2008), 121–134; S. Mezzadra and B. Nielsen, Border as Method, or, the Multiplication of Labor (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2013; M. Tazzioli, Spaces of Governmentality: Autonomous Migration and the Arab Uprising (New Politics of Autonomy) (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2014); N. De Genova (Ed), The Borders of “Europe”: Autonomy of Migration. Tactics of Bordering (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2017).

[64] A. Carter, The Political Theory of Global Citizenship (London: Routledge, 2001), 181.

[65] A. Herzog, ‘Political itineraries and anarchic cosmopolitanism and the thought of Hannah Arendt’, Inquiry, 47:1 (2004), 20–41; P. Owens, Between War and Politics: International Relations and the Thought of Hannah Arendt (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007), 16; P. Hayden, Political Evil in a Global Age: Hannah Arendt and International Theory (London: Routledge, 2009), 91; D. Baum, S. Bygrave, and S. Morton (Eds), ‘Hannah Arendt: After Modernity’, New Formations: A Journal of Culture/Theory/Politics, 71 (2011), 5–124.

[66] John Lechte and Saul Newman, Agamben and the Politics of Human Rights. Statelessness, Images, Violence (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2013).

[67] C. Ross, Independent Diplomat: Dispatches From An Unaccountable Elite (London: C. Hurst & Co., 2017).

[68] B. Honig, Democracy and the Foreigner (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2001) and B. Honig, Emergency Powers (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2009).

[69] A. Dobson, ‘Thick cosmopolitanism’, Political Studies, 54:1 (2006), 165–184.

[70] M. Hardt and A. Negri, Empire (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2000); M. Hardt and A. Negri, Multitude: War and Democracy in the Age of Empire (New York: Penguin Press, 2004); M. Hardt and A. Hardt, Commonwealth (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2011).

[71] K. Shapiro, ‘The myth of the multitude’, in P. A. Passavant and J. Dean (Eds), Empire’s New Clothes: Reading Hard and Negri (London: Routledge, 2004), 308, 289–314.

[72] Marcel Lopes de Souza, ‘“Feuding brothers”?: Left-Libertarians, Marxists, and socio-spatial research at the beginning of the twenty-first century, in M. Lopes de Souza, R. J. White, and S. Springer (Eds), Theories of Resistance. Anarchism, Geography, and the Spirit of Revolt (London: Rowman and Littlefield, 2016), 124–153.

[73] D. Harvey, Marx, Capital and the Madness of Economic Reason (London: Profile, 2017).

[74] S. Newman, The Politics of Post-Anarchism (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2010) and S. Newman, Postanarchism (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2015).

[75] S. Newman, ‘Crowned anarchy: Postanarchism and international relations theory’, Millennium, 40:2 (2012), 259–278.

[76] P. Di Paola, ‘The Game of the Goose. Italian anarchism: Transnational, national, or local perspective?’, in Bantman and Altena, Reassessing, 118–138.

[77] D. R. Gabaccia, Italy’s Many Diasporas (London: UCL Press, 2000), 45–57.

[78] W. J. Fishman, Jewish Radicals: From Czarist Shtetl to London Ghetto (London: Duckworth, 1974); F. Biagini, Nati altrove: il movimento ebraico tra Mosca e New York (Pisa: Biblioteca F. Serantini, 1998); A. Bertolo (Ed), L’anarchico e l’ebreo. Storia di un incontro (Milan: Elèuthera, 2001); B. P. Gidley, ‘Citizenship and Belonging: East End Jewish radicals 1903–1918’, PhD thesis, Goldsmiths, University of London, 2003; J. Moya, ‘The positive side of stereotypes: Jewish anarchists in early twentieth-century Buenos Aires’, Jewish History, 18:1 (2004), 19–48; K. Zimmer, Immigrants against the State. Yiddish and Italian Anarchism in America (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2015).

[79] M. Löwy, Rédemption et Utopie: Le judaïsme libertaire en Europe centrale (Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 1988); N. Sznaider, Jewish Memory and the Cosmopolitan Memory (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2011); Gildley, ibid.; Zimmer, ibid.

[80] Ferguson, Emma Goldman, 67–175; P Avrich and K. Avrich, Sasha and Emma. The Anarchist Odyssey of Alexander Berkman and Emma Goldman (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 2012).

[81] Gidley, ‘Citizenship and Belonging’, Zimmer, Immigrants.

[82] C. B. Maurer, Call to Revolution: The Mystical Anarchism of Gustav Landauer (Detroit: Wayne State University Press, 1971); E. Lunn, Prophet of Community: The Romantic Socialism of Gustav Landauer (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1974); C. Levy, ‘Max Weber, anarchism and libertarian culture: Personality and power politics’, in S. Whimster (Ed), Max Whimster, anarchism and the Culture of Anarchy (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 1999), 83–109; G. Landauer, Revolution and other Writings: A Political Reader, ed. and trans. G. Kuhn and preface by R. J. F. Day (Oakland, CA: PM Press, 2010).

[83] J. Horrox, Living Revolution: Anarchism in the Kibbutz Movement (Edinburgh: AK Press, 2009).

[84] M. Graur, ‘Anarchy-nationalism: Attitudes towards Jewish nationalism and Zionism’, Modern Judaism, 14:1 (1994), 1–19.

[85] D. Miller, National Responsibility and Global Justice (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007) and D. Miller, Strangers in Our Midst: The Political Philosophy of Immigration (Cambridge, MA, 2016).

[86] P. Wirtén, ‘Free the Nation-Cosmopolitanism Now!’, Eurozine, 22 November 2002, available at www.eurozine.com; C. Gabay, ‘Anarcho-cosmopolitanism: The universalization of equal exchange’, Global Discourse, 1:2 (2010), available at http://global-discourse.com/contents.

[87] M. Knapp, E. Ayboga and A. Flach, Revolution in Rojava: Democratic Autonomy and Women’s Liberation in Syrian Kurdistan (London: Pluto Press, 2016).

[88] M. Vallance, ‘Rudolf Rocker—a biographical sketch’, Journal of Contemporary History, 8:3 (1973), 75–95; M. Graur, An Anarchist ‘Rabbi’: The Life and Teachings of Rudolf Rocker (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1997); B. Morris, ‘Rudolf Rocker. A Tribute’, Anarchist Studies, 20:2 (2012), 11–21.

[89] Chomsky discusses von Humboldt in American Power and the New Mandarins (New York: Vintage, 1969).

[90] M. Guibernau, The Identity of Nations (Cambridge: Polity Press, 2007).

[91] J. Breuilly, Nationalism and the State, 2nd ed. (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1993); J. Breuilly, ‘Introduction: Concepts, approaches, theories’, in J. Breuilly (Ed), The Oxford Handbook of the History of Nationalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013), 1–21.

[92] B. Anderson, Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism, rev. edn (London: Verso, 2006).

[93] R. Rocker, Nationalism and Culture (New York: Covici-Friede, 1937).

[94] D. Laqua, ‘Freethinkers, anarchists and Francisco Ferrer: The making of a transnational solidarity campaign’, European Review of History: Revue européene d’histoire, 21:4 (2014), 467–484.

[95] L. L. Zamenhof, An Attempt Toward an International Language (New York: Henry Holt, 1889).

[96] C. Levy, Gramsci and the Anarchists (Oxford: Berg, 1999), 30; M. Antonioli and A. Dilemmo (Eds), Contro la Chiesa. I moti Pro Ferrer del 1909 in Italia (Pisa: BFS, 2009).

[97] Landauer, Revolution, 276–279.

[98] Graur, ‘Anarchy-nationalism’.

[99] Ibid., 204–205.

[100] C. Levy, ‘Antonio Gramsci, Anarchism, Syndicalism and Sovversivismo’, in R. Kinna, S. Pinta, A. Prichard, and D. Berry (Eds), Politics in Red and Black: 20th Century Libertarian Socialism (Basingstoke: Macmillan, 2012), 96–115.

[101] A. Carlucci, Gramsci and Languages: Unification, Diversity, Hegemony: Historical Materialism (Chicago: Haymarket Books, 2015).

[102] Levy, Gramsci, 99–102.

[103] C. Levy, ‘Gramsci’s cultural and political sources: Anarchism in the prison writings’, Journal of Romance Studies, 12:3 (2012), 44–62.

[104] Archibugi, Global Commonwealth, 260–262, 271–272.

[105] P. Ives, Language and Hegemony in Gramsci (London: Pluto, 2004); P. Ives, Gramsci’s Politics of Language: Engaging the Bakhtin Circle and the Frankfurt School (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2004),

[106] P. Ives, ‘Cosmopolitanism and global English: Language politics in globalisation debates’, Political Studies, 58:3 (2010), 516–535.

[107] From a quotation in Carter, Political Theory, 168.

[108] Levy, ‘Rooted cosmopolitan’.

[109] D. Turcato, ‘Nations without borders: Anarchists and national identity’, in Altena and Bantman, Reassessing, 37–40.

[110] Levy, ‘Rooted cosmopolitan’, 76.

[111] C. Levy, ‘Da Bresci a Wormwood Scrubs: Il “capo” dell’anarchismo mondiale a Londra’, in Errico Malatesta:“Lo Sciopero Armato”. Il lungo esilio londinese 1900–1913, Opere complete (Milan: Zero in Condotta, 2015), xix.

[112] C. Bantman, ‘The dangerous liaisons of belle époque anarchists: Internationalism, transnationalism, and national in the French anarchist movement (1880–1914)’, in Altena and Bantman, Reassessing, 86–89.

[113] S. M. P. Wilson, ‘Towards cosmopolitan democracy: Reconceptualising cosmopolitan citizenship from an anarchist lens’, Paper, Societias Ethica, Annual Conference, 2015: Globalization and Justice, August 20–23, 2015, Linköping.