2012 Volume 2012 Issue 168 Pages 168_16-29
Alfred E. Zimmern (1879–1957), scholar on Hellenism, the first Woodrow Wilson professor of International Politics at Aberystwyth and exponent of international intellectual cooperation, played a pioneering role in the development of International Relations (IR) discipline in early twentieth-century Britain. Nevertheless, he has long been forgotten in the historiography of IR since E.H. Carr's denunciation that branded him as one of the inter-war “idealists/utopians”, who transplanted the outmoded nineteenth-century Benthamite rationalism into the international realm. Yet, a number of recent revisionist studies on early IR thought have revealed much more complicated and nuanced aspects of inter-war internationalists including Zimmern. The present article aims at adding to these revisionist historiographical literature by providing a novel reinterpretation of Zimmern's international political thought.
This article argues that Zimmern's intellectual trajectory can be reinterprete as pursuing the shaping of an international welfare society, a society which, with both cooperative spirit and organic character saturated, could govern global economic interdependence and competition to redistribute some wealth across the nation-states; therefore, it continues to contend that he can be enumerated as one of the thinkers espousing “social democracy beyond the national boundaries”.
This argument is advanced in the following sequence. First, the article adopts a method of dissecting the manner in which welfarist categories and sensibilities derived from British idealist philosophy were reflected in Zimmern's imperial-cum-international thinking. Second, it analyses a pivotal cognitive shift that occurred in Zimmern's mind during the First World War: that is, he came to realise that origins of the War consisted in the ethic underpinning the nineteenth-century liberal capitalism. On the basis of this realisation, the article demonstrates, Zimmern formulated the principle of Commonwealth and applied this principle to the post-War international order, aspiring to publicly govern global economic network with an ideal of “the welfare of the world as a whole”. Third, the article explores the ways in which Zimmern, as a self-pronounced social democrat, strove to fashion an international welfare society throughout the twenty-years interlude in “crisis”. Whilst Zimmern manifestly veered away from the League of Nations system onto the configuration of a trans-Atlantic community specifically from the mid 1930s, he, the article insists, adhered to the execution of international welfare policies revolving around the principle of Commonwealth. Finally, after articulating an implication of the new understanding of Zimmern for further scholarship on IR historiography, future research work to buttress the aforementioned argument is indicated.
