Paper for 2013 BISA Annual Conference (21st June 2013, Birmingham)

Alfred Zimmern, International Intellectual

Cooperation and World Commonwealth, 1914-1930
(* title modified)
Tomohito Baji (University of Cambridge)1
Work in progress: not to be cited without permission

Introduction
Alfred E. Zimmern (1879-1957) was a distinguished liberal internationalist in early twentiethcentury Britain. After serving at the Foreign Office to prepare for the 1919 Paris Peace Conference,
Zimmern was appointed the inaugural Woodrow Wilson professor of International Politics at the
University College of Wales, Aberystwyth. Later he also held the Montague Burton chair of
International Relations at Oxford (from 1930 to 1944). With the use of knowledge produced in the
embryonic academic field of International Relations (IR), he strove to enact a liberal reform of
both the League of Nations and the British Empire during the twenty years in crisis.2
In 1926 Zimmern assumed the post of deputy-director of the Institute for Intellectual
Cooperation (IIC) based in Paris, an institution designed to lead the League of Nations project of
international intellectual cooperation.3 Launched in 1922, this League project was initially directed
1

PhD Candidate in Politics and International Studies. Email: tb450@cam.ac.uk

Paul Rich, Alfred Zimmerns Cautious Idealism: The League of Nations, International Education, and the
Commonwealth, in David Long and Peter Wilson eds., Thinkers of the Twenty Years Crisis: Inter-war Idealism
Reassessed (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995); Jeanne Morefield, Covenants without Swords: Idealist Liberalism
and the Spirit of Empire (Princeton, N.J.; Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2005); Mark Mazower, No
Enchanted Palace: The End of Empire and the Ideological Origins of the United Nations (Princeton, N.J.;
Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2009), ch. 2, Alfred Zimmern and the Empire of Freedom.
3
For this League enterprise, see Akira Iriye, Cultural Internationalism and World Order (Baltimore, Md.;
London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1997), 51-90; Jean-Jacques Renoliet, LUnesco Oublie: La Socit
des Nations et la Coopration Intellectuelle, 1919-1946 (Paris: Publications de la Sorbonne, 1999); Daniel
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by French Philosopher Henri Bergson, who declared that a great ideal of fraternity, solidarity and
harmony among people could be achieved more easily within the high intellectual spheres.
World harmony would progressively go down to nations from this point forward.4 Zimmerns
approach to intellectual cooperation reflected this litist view of cultural internationalism. In
Learning and Leadership (1928), his manifesto for the League project, Zimmern argued that the
goal of intellectual cooperation was to create an upper stratum of world citizens able to produce
educated public opinion on the global res publica (public good).5 The body of world citizens
would be nurtured through cultural interaction with various nations and through a deeper
understanding of nations spiritual legacies, such as home, institutions and traditions.6
This essay conducts a preliminary examination of Zimmerns conceptual scheme of
international intellectual cooperation. It tries to show how Zimmern linked intellectual cooperation
with the creation of World Commonwealth,7 a global polity that he envisaged from the
beginning of World War I until around 1930.
Paul Rich and Mark Mazower argue that Zimmern expected international intellectual
cooperation to disseminate liberal values (including freedom, the rule of law and cooperative
spirit) embodied in a British Commonwealth.8 Influenced by T.H. Greens idealist thought on
ethical development, Zimmern had long been focused on adult education in the metropole of the

Laqua, Transnational Intellectual Cooperation, the League of Nations, and the Problem of Order, Journal of
Global History 6 (2011).
4
From his inaugural speech at the first session of the Leagues International Committee on Intellectual
Cooperation (ICIC). Discours de Cloture du Prsident, Minutes of the International Committee on Intellectual
Cooperation (5th August, 1922), reproduced in Henri Bergson, Mlanges (Paris: Presses Universitaires de Paris,
1972), 1351.
5
Alfred Zimmern, Learning and Leadership: A Study of the Needs and Possibilities of International Intellectual
Co-operation (London: Oxford University Press, 1928), 10-11, 20. This book was based on his essays submitted
to the ICIC from 1926 to 1927. See also Alfred Zimmern, Education for World Citizenship in Problems of
Peace, 5th series (New York: Books for Libraries Press, 1931).
6
Zimmern, Learning and Leadership, 30.
7
Alfred Zimmern, German Culture and the British Commonwealth, in Nationality and Government with other
war-time essays (London: Chatto & Windus, 1918), 23; Alfred Zimmern, The Things of Martha and the Things
of Mary, in The Prospects of Democracy and other essays (London: Chatto & Windus, 1929), 114.
8
Rich, Alfred Zimmerns Cautious Idealism, 85-88; Mazower, No Enchanted Palace, 72-73, 87-88.
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British Empire.9 At the IIC Zimmern broadened the scope of his educational activities to the
transnational level so as to inculcate the liberal-democratic morality in peoples around the globe.
Rich and Mazower are correct in pointing out that Zimmern extrapolated his vision of world
order from an idealised depiction of the British Commonwealth. International intellectual
cooperation would be a means to shape a global commonwealth with the liberal norms that
underpinned what he termed the Third British Empire.10 However, both Rich and Mazower fail
to reveal the conceptual complexities that were essential to Zimmerns project on intellectual
cooperation as well as on the remaking of world order.
I advance two main arguments: first, Zimmern strictly demarcated statehood and national life.
For him the state was an objective, political and territorialised authority, whereas the nation was a
subjective, spiritual and deterritorialised unity. This separation between the spheres of states and
national entities formed a fundamental basis of his scheme of World Commonwealth. Second,
Zimmern conceived of international intellectual cooperation as cross-cultural interaction that
would take place exclusively in the sphere of nations. He thought that immersion in a national
culture was indispensable for participating in intellectual cooperation. The deficiency of national
sentiments would lead to alienation not only from the cross-cultural cooperation but also
qualification for world citizenship.
The next section focuses on Zimmerns dichotomous categories of statehood and national life. It
shows that in demarcating the realms of states and nations, he attempted to create a public space
for intergovernmental cooperation untrammelled by crusades for self-determination. The second
section examines his scheme of international intellectual cooperation. It demonstrates that for him
intellectual cooperation meant a cross-cultural communication among depoliticised nationalities. It
9

Zimmern was an active member of the Workers Educational Association that constituted one of the major
camps of the Edwardian social reform movement.
10
Alfred Zimmern, The Third British Empire: Being a Course of Lectures Delivered at Columbia University,
(London: Oxford University Press, 1926).
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also shows that he deemed this process to be the source of cultivated public opinion as a
fundamental moral authority of World Commonwealth. I conclude with a claim that his conception
of intellectual cooperation provided a ground for him to reject racialised visions of world order.

1. Demarcating States and Nations

Zimmern can be classified in the rank of industrial globalists as Daniel Deudney calls them.11 In
the wake of the worldwide spread of the industrial revolution a variety of seminal thinkers, such as
Halford Mackinder, John Dewey, H.G. Wells, Norman Angell and E.H. Carr (to mention only a
few), devised global institutional schemes for transcending the anarchical international system.
Zimmerns project for a global commonwealth was on the similar lines of responding to the earlytwentieth century proto-globalisation. He aimed at replacing the system of nation-states to govern
more effectively what he designated World Industry.12
Zimmerns global polity was not a world state. Rather it was a polity hinging on a standing
intergovernmental conference composed of the Great Powers.13 He expected these Powers to
discard their sovereignty and jointly lodge it in multilateral cooperation based at a League of
Nations.14 The group of the Great Powers was to act as a sort of executive committee of the
11

Daniel H. Deudney, Bounding Power: Republican Security Theory from the Polis to the Global Village
(Princeton, N.J.; Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2007), esp. 216-217.
12
Alfred Zimmern, Introductory, in R.W. Seton-Watson et al, The War and Democracy (London: Macmillan &
Co., 1914), 7. His description of the World Industry can be found elsewhere. In the sphere of science and
invention, of industry and economics, he depicted, the world is already one Great Society. For the merchant,
the banker, and the stockbroker political frontiers have been broken down. Trade and industry respond to the
reactions of a single, world-wide nervous system. Shocks and panics pass as freely as airmen over borders and
custom-houses. And not big-business only, but the humblest citizen, in his search for a livelihood, finds
himself caught in the meshes of the same world-wide network. Zimmern, German Culture and the British
Commonwealth, 22-23.
13
Zimmern indicated by the Great Powers (at the end of World War I) the United States, Great Britain, France,
Italy, Japan and, provided stable constitutional governments were established, Germany and Russia. Alfred
Zimmern, The League of Nations and the Rule of Law 1918-1935 (London: Macmillan, 1936), 203.
14
Subsequent to the armistice Zimmern drafted a proposal for a League of Nations. His draft provided a base
for the Cecil Plan that the British delegation took to the Paris Peace Conference. George W. Egerton, Great
Britain and the Creation of the League of Nations: Strategy, Politics, and International Organization, 1914-1919
(London: Scholar Press, 1979), 99. Zimmerns original ideas were more comprehensive than the League of
Nations established at Paris and accorded with his scheme of global commonwealth. Cf. A.E. Zimmern, A
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whole body of sovereign States and cope with not only security issues but also transnational
socio-economic problems, including epidemic diseases, discrimination in trade and racial
conflicts.15 For Zimmern cooperation between the Great Powers at a permanent conference was a
global extension of the British Empire where the Imperial Conference functioned as the fulcrum of
coordination between Great Britain and dominion countries.16
Zimmern developed a vision of intergovernmental cooperation that drew heavily on the work of
Arthur Salter, who also realised the administrative limitations of the nation-state. Based on his
own wartime experience, Salter advocated the dispersal of authorities from over-centralized and
over-concentrated national governments.17 He entrusted to a League of Nations the role of
tak[ing] public policy away from the few overstrained centres of excessive power.18
Championing Salters argument for a transnational shift in political authority, Zimmern formulated
the principle of organic co-operation between independent governments as a cornerstone of his
global polity.19 The expression organic signified permanency and the interlocking of state
sovereignties.20

Memorandum Prepared for the Consideration of the British Government in Connextion with the Forthcoming
Peace Settlement (November 1918), Bodleian Library, Oxford, MS Zimmern, Box 82, fol. 38-40. This
classified document was later reproduced without any modification in Zimmern, The League of Nations and the
Rule of Law, 196-208.
15
Ibid., 203. In tackling these transnational problems the standing conference of the Great Powers was to
supervise a body of international administrative organisations as well as permanent expert committees. Ibid.,
204-207.
16
Alfred Zimmern, The British Commonwealth in the Post-war World (London: Oxford University Press, 1926),
28; Alfred Zimmern, Great Britain, the Dominions and the League of Nations, in The Prospects of Democracy,
288; Zimmern, The League of Nations and the Rule of Law, 190.
17
During the War Salter worked at the Allied Maritime Transport Council, an inter-allied organisation for
coordination in shipping policies.
18
The League of Nations, Salter continued, has to be administratively a great effort of decentralization. It
needs to replace centralization by co-ordination. Arthur Salter, Allied Shipping Control: An Experiment in
International Administration (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1921), 254, 255.
19
Zimmern, The League of Nations and the Rule of Law, 148 (italics in original). See also
Alfred Zimmern, The Prospects of Democracy, in The Prospects of Democracy, 340-341.
20
Zimmern viewed the structure of intergovernmental cooperation as far superior to the nineteenth-century
system of sovereign states. [S]overeignty and co-operation, he thus argued, are antithetical conceptions,
representing antithetical tendencies. Sovereignty is a conception applicable to a world of self-contained units.
Co-operation is a conception applicable to a world of interdependent groups. [I]n an interdependent world the
term sovereignty, with its picturesque ancestry of Great Monarchs, is silently dropping out. Ibid., 331.
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Zimmern denounced colonial campaigns for self-determination as an antithesis to quests for a

global political community.21 The nation-state that they were seeking was no more than a
Victorian remnant, as great an anachronism in the large-scale world of today as the stage-coach
and the sailing ship, and other relics of a vanished past.22 He identified the intellectual paragon of
these worldwide campaigns in J.S. Mills theory of nationality. In chapter sixteen of
Considerations on Representative Government (1861) Mill suggested that freedom of a nation was
contingent on the existence of a sovereign polity of its own.23 He argued that it is in general a
necessary condition of free institutions that the boundaries of governments should coincide
with those of nationalities.24 Zimmern condemned this national government thesis:
I believe from the bottom of my heart that Mills idea is fundamentally wrong wrong in fact, wrong as an ideal,
and that all forward-looking men who desire better international relations and a better political organisation of the
world must set their hope, not in the Nation-State, which is a stage, and in the West an outworn stage, in the
political evolution of mankind.25

Zimmern also criticised Ramsay Muir, a British historian and Liberal Party politician, as one of the
present-day ardent liberals who were cherishing Mills national government thesis as if a gospel
of indefeasible right.26
21

For transnational movements for self-determination at the end of the War, see Erez Manela, The Wilsonian
Moment: Self-determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2007).
22
Alfred Zimmern, True and False Nationalism, in Nationality and Government, 72.
23
John S. Mill, Considerations on Representative Government (Memphis, Tenn.: General Books, 2010), ch. 16,
Of Nationality, as Connected with Representative Government.
24
Ibid., 128. But note that Mill added several qualifications in order to restrict the applicability of his argument.
Examining these qualifications, Georgious Varouxakis advances that rather, Mill appears to prefer the
coexistence of different national and ethnic groups in one state. Ibid., 128-131; Georgios Varouxakis, Mill on
Nationality (London; New York: Routledge, 2002), 7, 22. Also, Mill was hesitant to acknowledge the sovereign
independence of settler colonies in the British Empire as well as of more dependent colonies including India
and Egypt. See for example Duncan Bell, John Stuart Mill on Colonies, Political Theory 38, no. 1 (2010).
Zimmern disregarded most of these subtleties in Mills arguments.
25
Alfred Zimmern, True and False Nationalism, in Nationality and Government, 65.
26
Alfred Zimmern, Nationalism and Internationalism, in The Prospects of Democracy, 89. In his Nationalism
and Internationalism (1916) Muir argued for the recognition of the demands of self-determination, maintaining
that where the spirit of nationality genuinely exists, it is clearly to the advantage both of the nation and of the
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On the one hand, Zimmern sought to sever the links between nation and sovereignty while on
the other, he tried to carve out a space for global cooperation between the governments of the
Great Powers. To attain these two goals simultaneously, he conceptualised the disassociation of
the sphere of states from that of national entities.
During World War I Zimmern elaborated his concept of depoliticised nationality.27 He
conceived of nations as essentially deterritorialised spiritual realities. According to him the
members of a nation would be unified through their strong attachment to its national spiritual
heritage surviving in its definite home-country.28 To become a member of a nation would not
demand any physical contact with the land of its native country.29 It would be sufficient only to
retain a deep affection for the homeland and for the nations spiritual inheritance preserved in it.
Zimmerns notion of deterritorialised nations was strongly influenced by cultural Zionist Ahad
Haam (Asher Ginzberg), who argued that renewed Hebrew cultural traditions, practiced in
Palestine, would function as the spiritual bond of the national unity of Jewry scattered around the
world.30
In Nationality and Government (1915) Zimmern articulated the distinction between statehood
and national life based on his conception of an emotionally-integrated, deterritorialised nation:

world that the nation should be left free to work out its own destinies. Ramsay Muir, Nationalism and
Internationalism: The Culmination of Modern History (Memphis, Tenn.: General Books, 2010), 19.
27
Zimmerns concept of nationality is highly unique and, as will be mentioned, shaped by a scheme of cultural
Zionism. I detailed this subject in a paper for another conference. If interested, please email me.
28
Alfred Zimmern, Nationality and Government, in Nationality and Government, 52, 54; Alfred Zimmern,
The Passing of Nationality, in Nationality and Government, 96; Zimmern, Nationalism and Internationalism,
84. He instantiated national spiritual heritage with language, folklore, music, literature, drama,
poetry, sport and the knowledge of the countryside.
29
For instance, Zimmern argued: the fact that every nation has a home does not mean that membership in a
nation, participation in its common life and consciousness necessarily involves residence within a fixed area, or
contact with it by visits or economic ties. Consciousness can overleap the barriers and ignore the qualifications
fixed by political authority for the world of statehood. Zimmern, Nationalism and Internationalism, 86-87.
30
For Ahad Haams scheme of cultural Zionism, see Jacques Kornberg ed., At the Crossroads: Essays on Ahad
Haam (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1983); Steven J. Zipperstein, Elusive Prophet: Ahad
Haam and the Origins of Zionism (London: Peter Halban, 1993); David H. Weinberg, Between Tradition and
Modernity: Haim Zhitlowski, Simon Dubnow, Ahad Ha-Am, and the Shaping of Modern Jewish Identity (New
York; London: Holmes & Meier, 1996), 217-291.
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Nationality, like religion, is subjective; Statehood is objective. Nationality is psychological; Statehood is political.
Nationality is a condition of mind; Statehood is a condition in law. Nationality is a spiritual possession; Statehood
is an enforceable obligation. Nationality is a way of feeling, thinking and living; Statehood is a condition
inseparable from all civilised ways of living. 31

The nation as a subjective, psychological and spiritual unity would have its own distinctive
universe. Its existential space would not be coterminous with any state as an objective, political
and territorialised entity with a law-enforcing authority. Glenda Sluga situates Zimmerns concept
of nation, along with those of other British internationalists such as A.J. Toynbee and Gilbert
Murray, in the context of the psychological turn of nationality the turn-of-the-century deeper
penetration of psychological language and concepts into the characterisation of national entities.32
In The Things of Martha and the Things of Mary (1923) Zimmern developed the strict
separation between the spheres of the state and the nation.33 He equated the things of Mary of
Bethany (or the things of God) with the realm of national entities and the things of Martha of
Bethany (or the things of Caesar) with the realm of the state:34
On the one hand we have the realm of Martha, the world of politics or common affairs, a world of public spirit and
efficiency, always tending to enlarge its scale, and now becoming increasingly international. On the other we
have the realm of Mary, the world of the individual human soul, a world personal and intimate, intense in its

31

Zimmern, Nationality and Government, 51.

Glenda Sluga, What is National Self-determination?: Nationality and Psychology during the Apogee of
Nationalism, Nations and Nationalism 11, no. 1 (2005), 11.
33
Alfred Zimmern, The Things of Martha and the Things of Mary, in The Prospects of Democracy.
34
In the Gospel of Luke, Martha of Bethany was depicted, in contrast to her sister Mary listening to the
discourse of Jesus, as a figure preoccupied with catering on his visit to their home. The Gospel according to St.
Luke, ch. 10: 38-42, The Holy Bible: Containing the Old and New Testaments (Oxford: Oxford University
Press, 1993), 1053. Zimmerns comparison of the state with Martha reflected his long-held conviction that the
state was intrinsically an instrument to improve the outward conditions for the spiritual development of
humanity.
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feelings and attachments, and capable of inspiring not the duty-bound activities of public spirit, but the allpervading and integrating passion, alike unreasonable and unfathomable, which we call love.35

Zimmern attempted to legitimate the distinction between the worlds of political statehood and
de-political national existence with the authority of Christs teachings:
The contrast was formulated, if not for the first time, at least in the most explicit and memorable shape, by the
teacher. In teaching men to draw the distinction between their duty to Caesar and their duty to God Jesus set
forth a view of the relation between personality and nationality, on the one hand, and political obligation, on the
other.36

In the name of Christ Zimmern condemned movements for self-determination for conflating the
realms of the state (Caesar, Martha) and national entities (God, Mary). He strenuously demanded
the depoliticisation of nationality on the one hand, and the de-emotionalisation of politics on
the other.37
Zimmern used the term commonwealth to denote the political jurisdiction of the state.38 As
opposed to the realm of nations pervaded with private emotion and passion, the commonwealth
was unified through the sense of duty to the public good. He designated this feeling of obligation
as idem sentire de republica (the shared sentiment about the public good).39 He maintained that
this essential bond of the commonwealth would rest on the historical accumulation of citizens
common experience, sacrifice and achievement over the res publica.

35

Zimmern, The Things of Martha and the Things of Mary, 105-106.

Ibid., 95.
37
Ibid., 108. He elsewhere stipulated this solution as the doctrine of cultural self-determination. Zimmern, The
Third British Empire, 143.
38
He illustrated this usage by stating that The English nation is something different from the British
Commonwealth and (though this is not so commonly recognized) the American nation is something different
from the American Commonwealth. He continued, demarcating what is English and what is British, what
belongs to each national personality and what belongs to the commonwealth of nations. Zimmern, Nationalism
and Internationalism, 81; Zimmern, The Third British Empire, 144.
39
Zimmern, Learning and Leadership, 10; Zimmern, Great Britain, the Dominions and the League of Nations,
308.
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In conceiving the spiritual bond of the commonwealth Zimmern applied the definition of nation
of French historian Ernest Renan.40 In his 1882 lecture at the Sorbonne, Quest-ce quune nation?
(What is a Nation?), Renan postulated the nation as a spiritual community in possession of a rich
heritage of common memories and glories.
the essence of a nation is that all its individual members should have many things in common; and also, that all of
them should hold may things in oblivion. 41
The nation, like the individual, is the outcome of a long past of efforts, and sacrifices, and devotion. A heroic
past, great men, glory, these form the social capital, upon which a national idea may be founded. To have common
glories in the past, a common will in the present; to have done great things together, to will to do the like again,
such are the essential conditions for the making of a people.42

Zimmern accepted Renans arguments with a twist. Zimmern firstly confirmed that he [Renan]
define[d] nationality in spiritual values common experience, common sacrifice, common
achievement. But he then diverged from Renan by arguing that these spiritual values would not
constitute the narrower tie of nationality. Rather they would establish the political tie of the
commonwealth, that is, idem sentire de republica or the combination of a common way of
regarding public affairs [and] a common public spirit.43
Zimmern clearly differentiated statehood (or commonwealth) and national life. The former was
the political world underpinned by the individual sense of duty towards the res publica. The sphere
of states ha[d] nothing whatsoever to do with nationality and nationhood and provide[d] little

40

Renan had been famed since the late nineteenth century as a prominent secular intellectual and positivist
thinker who, nonetheless, esteemed his Christian cultural legacy. David C. J. Lee, Ernest Renan: In the Shadow
of Faith (London: Duckworth, 1996).
41
Ernest Renan, What is a Nation? in The Poetry of the Celtic Races, and other studies, trans. by William G.
Hutchison (London: Walter Scott, Ltd., 1896), 67.
42
Ibid., 81.
43
Zimmern, Great Britain, the Dominions and the League of Nations, in the Prospects of Democracy, 308-309
(italics in original).
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or no clue as to the nature or importance of the relations between the nations of the globe. The
relations among nations signified the interaction exclusively of the cultures, traditions, attitudes,
[and] ingrained ways of thinking and feeling.44 Zimmern did not grant any governmental
authority to nations. With this rigid demarcation he attempted to construct a public space for
worldwide cooperation between the governments of the Great Powers while safeguarding this
space from national aspirations for sovereign independence.

2. Intellectual Cooperation as Cross-national Fertilisation

In 1927 Zimmern declared, at the Royal Institute of International Affairs, that [t]he great
weakness of the League comes out very clearly when it is compared with the British
Commonwealth. The League is too much of a mere mechanism and lacks the moral authority
which constitutes the heart and reality of modern government.45 The extant League of Nations,
which Zimmern deemed to be an imperfect embodiment of his scheme of World Commonwealth,
was deficient in public opinion as the moral underpinnings of government. He reiterated this
diagnosis in 1931:
such international institutions as have been painfully brought into existence, such as the League of Nations, are
really suspended in mid-air, without any adequate foundation. Therefore there is, at present, practically no public
opinion on international affairs. there is no organized democratic public opinion.46

Zimmern was committed to the Leagues project of intellectual cooperation to overcome this
deficiency by yielding a collection of world citizens as the bearers of educated public opinion on
the global res publica.

44

Zimmern, The League of Nations and the Rule of Law, 3, 6.

Zimmern, The Prospects of Democracy, 360.
46
Zimmern, Education for World Citizenship, 307-308.
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Zimmern maintained that world citizens would be created through persistent cross-cultural
interaction between people of various national backgrounds. This was the process to achieve the
international mind an enlarged moral perspective for identifying the global res publica and
would unfold exclusively in the universe of nations.47 He adopted the expression internationalism
to signify not dealings between states (or the governments of states) but the intellectual
cooperation as cross-cultural communication:
internationalism, properly understood, is not contact between states; nor is it contact between super-nationalists
and cosmopolitans who have torn themselves loose from affiliation with their nation. True internationalism is
contact between nations in their highest and best and most distinctive representatives and manifestations. 48

The intellectual cooperation as internationalist educational process, accordingly, would require

the embrace of national cultural traditions in the first place. Too often, Zimmern maintained, has
the advocate of intellectual cooperation been identified with the dracin [the rootless]:
In reality the two are at opposite poles. He [the dracin] is not only useless but mischievous, for he is
constitutionally incapable of entering into that which is the deepest element in all political and social experience
the attachment of a people to its home, its traditions, and its institutions. 49
No one can render true service in the cause of international co-operation if he has not first thoroughly absorbed in
his own mind and soul the meaning and value of nationality. It [Nationality] supplies the permanent element in
political appreciation and judgement. Without it, no political opinion is of value. 50

47

He described the international mind as a power of reaching out across ones own country to problems in
other countries as well as to the peoples whose roots are in different soil. Alfred Zimmern, The Development
of the International Mind, The Problems of Peace: Lectures Delivered at the Geneva Institute of International
Relations at the Palais des Nations, August 1926 (London: Oxford University Press, 1927), 2, 5.
48
He illustrated this by continuing that, for example, [t]he true contact between the West European national
triangle must be a contact so to speak, between Shakespeare, Molire and Goethe. Zimmern, Nationalism
and Internationalism, 93. Similarly he argued elsewhere that: the road to Internationalism lies through
Nationalism, not through levelling men down to a grey indistinctive Cosmopolitanism but by appealing to the
best elements in the corporate inheritance of each nation. Zimmern, True and False Nationalism, 85.
49
Zimmern, Learning and Leadership, 30.
50
Ibid.
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Zimmern thought that an increased understanding of different national institutions, traditions and
characters would lead to the acquisition of the international mind. Individuals having this open
mind would be able to enlighten public opinion so as to fortify a prospective global
commonwealth with moral authority.51 Despite his strict demarcation between the spheres of states
and national entities, Zimmern subtly linked these two realms through the effect of international
intellectual cooperation.
For Zimmern the emerging academic field of IR was a catalyst for this intellectual cooperation.
He viewed IR as a progeny of the global interdependence that ha[d] made us members of the
body politic of the world.52 The field of IR had been founded to comprehend the dynamism of
globalisation and especially to examine the manner of the consequent multiple contacts of nations,
national attributes, national traditions and national methods and habits of reasoning.53 Zimmerns
delimitation of the disciplinary space of IR was obscure: he viewed IR as a combination of diverse
areas of study, including political theory, international law, economics, history, sociology and
geography.54 But he emphasised as the focus of IR scholarship the appreciation of differences
between various nations in their cultural attributes the discernment of this manifold and
glowing diversity, of the infinite shades of spiritual pigmentation exhibited on a vast palette in
the community of the nations.55 The study of IR would be conducive to the internationalist
education for infusing a new City of the World with cultivated public opinion.56
51

Zimmern, The Development of the International Mind, 3.

Alfred Zimmern, The Study of International Relations: An Inaugural Lecture (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1931),
14-15.
53
Zimmerns remarks in The Conference of Institutions for the Scientific Study of International Relations,
Journal for the Royal Institute of International Affairs 8, no. 3 (1929), 201.
54
Alfred Zimmern, Introductory Report to the Discussions in 1935, in University Teaching of International
Relations: A Record of the Eleventh Session of the International Studies Conference Prague, 1938 (Paris:
International Institute of Intellectual Co-operation, 1939), 9. Zimmern edited this volume as rapporteur of the
1938 Prague session of the International Studies Conference. At the IIC he took the initiative in founding and
sponsoring this first transnational academic association in the field of IR. For this association, see David Long,
Who Killed the International Studies Conference? Review of International Studies 32, no. 4 (2006).
55
Zimmern, The Study of International Relations, 22.
56
Ibid., 18.
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Zimmern thought that the attainment of the international mind an extended moral perspective
would parallel the development of individual personality. Personality indicated the
individuality or the uniqueness that every human being potentially had.57 The assertion of this
individuality, he stressed, was inseparably bound up with life as a member of a nation:
Personality and nationality are simply two forms of the same thing, because we cannot express ourselves
without also expressing something of the national group to which we belong. 58

Accordingly individual personality would develop in its organic relationship with a nationality:
The greatest men that the world has seen were also the completely individual, the most different from all other men.
Jesus was a Jew, and every one who knows the Jewish soul can recognize the Jewish quality in his personality. But
he achieved his supremacy not by remaining true to the Jewish type, but by being himself, by becoming himself.
Plato is an Athenian transfigured; Shakespeare an Englishman, and yet more than an Englishman; Goethe a
German, yet not a typical German; Dante an Italian, yet a miracle of human power and passion for all time. Their
greatness is built up on their nationality and cannot be disjoined from it; but it is distinct and unique in itself. 59

Enlightened public opinion on the global res publica would reflect the quality of individual
personality both moulded and developed inherently through an affiliated national culture and
tradition.
In Zimmerns scheme of intellectual cooperation immersion in a national culture was a sine qua
non for the cultivation of the international mind. He pejoratively labelled people without
embracing national cultural legacies as cosmopolitans or the drachin (the rootless) and
excluded them from being qualified for world citizenship.60 His usage of cosmopolitanism

57

Zimmern, The Things of Martha and the Things of Mary, 103.

Zimmern, The Third British Empire, 130.
59
Zimmern, The Things of Martha and the Things of Mary, 103-104.
60
Zimmern, True and False Nationalism, 75. Cosmopolitans were also equivalent to the agnostic. Zimmern,
The Passing of Nationality, 99.
- 14 58

disagreed with those of other contemporary British intellectuals. A prominent writer and socialist
H.G. Wells, for instance, used the term in a positive tone to describe a future global community
and institutions with a group of the prescient and highly-dedicated technical lite.
Cosmopolitanism, he noted in 1929, is something entirely different from internationalism. It
does not see world peace as an arrangement between states, but as a greater human solidarity overriding states.61 For Zimmern Cosmopolitanism was a negative and derogatory phrase. It stood in
contrast to internationalism, denoting the spiritual degradation which befalls men who have
pursued Progress and lost contact with their own national spiritual heritage.62
In depicting cosmopolitans Zimmern often drew on a book of Sir Mark Sykes, an English
traveller and Conservative M.P. specialised in the Middle East. Sykess Caliphs Last Heritage,
published in 1915, was a large volume that integrated a historical study on Islam and his diary of
extensive journeys throughout the Ottoman Empire.63 In the book Sykes portrayed a young brisk
Armenian he had encountered in Kurdistan:
He said he was studying to be an ethnologist, psychologist, hypnotist and poet; he admired Renan, Kant, Herbert
Spencer, Gladstone, Spurgeon, Nietzsche and Shakespeare. It afterwards appeared that his library consisted of an
advertisement of Enos Fruit Salt, from which he quoted freely. He wept over what he called the punishment of
our great nation, and desired to be informed how in existing circumstances he could elevate himself to greatness
and power.64

61

H.G. Wells, The Common-Sense of World Peace [April 1929], in After Democracy: Addresses and Papers
on the Present World Situation (London: Watts, 1932), 55, quoted in John S. Partington, Building Cosmopolis:
The Political Thought of H.G. Wells (Aldershot: Ashgate, 2003), 7.
62
Zimmern, Nationality and Government, 54.
63
Sir Mark Sykes, The Caliphs Last Heritage: A Short History of the Turkish Empire (Reading: Garnet, 2002).
For the background of this work, see James Barr, A Line in the Sand: Britain, France and the Struggle That
Shaped the Middle East (London: Simon & Schuster, 2012), 7-19.
64
Sykes, The Caliphs Last Heritage, 429.
- 15 -

For Zimmern this was a prime example of cosmopolitanism.65 Cosmopolitans were shaped
through the contact of races and nations and social groups at different levels of civilisation and
different standards of life and conduct.66 By trying to imitate what they felt to be the latest
fashions of culture and knowledge, cosmopolitans broke the links with their national spiritual
inheritance and simultaneously lost opportunities to develop their individualities.
Cosmopolitanism entailed decadence and the complete eclipse of personality.67 Zimmern
assumed that cosmopolitans could potentially be found everywhere in the present-day globalised
world with highly-advanced information and communication technologies. Against this trend he
applied Aristotles dictum to underline the organic relationship between the maturing of individual
personality and absorption in a national cultural life: man is by nature a social being, and he can
only find his full development as a personality in a society where he can truly himself, his best
self.68
Furtheremore, Zimmern grounded the intellectual cooperation as cross-cultural interaction on
the practice of mutual respect for different national cultures. He maintained that internationalist
education would be the process for a nation to make its distinctive contribution to the common
stock of civilization. This process is contingent on the preservation of the diversity of nations, so
that the basis of internationalism must be toleration tinged with heartfelt respect.69 Zimmern
drew on Lord Actons essay Nationality (1862) to theorise about tolerance and mutual respect
towards different national traditions. As a justification for multinational empires Acton argued that
a free state was not a nation-state but a polity in which authority was distributed among a number
65

Zimmern, Nationality and Government, 54. Sykess description might be an Orientalist picture, and in
relying on this Zimmerns cosmopolitanism might also be an Orientalist construction. Edward W. Said,
Orientalism (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978).
66
Zimmern, True and False Nationalism, 75.
67
Zimmern, Nationality and Government, 53.
68
Zimmern, True and False Nationalism, 75. Note that Zimmern translated Aristotles man as a political
being into man as a social being tied up with a depoliticised nationality.
69
Alfred Zimmern, Education, Social and National, in Nationality and Government, 125; Zimmern, The
Passing of Nationality, 91.
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of its constituent nations. It was, he insisted, by exercising autonomy and checking the excessive
use of power by the central government that each nation could successfully safeguard its own
liberty.70 Explicitly referring to Actons arguments for national liberty, Zimmern formulated the
concept of freedom of worship, which signified not merely the freedom of religious belief but
freedom to express any cultural form of national consciousness.71 Zimmern argued that every state
had a responsibility to protect the freedom of worship of all nations under its jurisdiction. This
measure would encourage reciprocity among citizens in both tolerating and respecting the national
cultural practices of their neighbours.72
Zimmern criticised any vision of Anglo-Saxon-centred world order for its hierarchical
assumption about the relationship between constituent peoples. The rise of the global politics of
race at the turn of the twentieth century had been accompanied by burgeoning schemes for
unifying the scattered Anglophone countries into a transcontinental political community.73 These
schemes, ranging from the British imperial federation to Anglo-American union, were largely
premised on the predominance of the Anglo-Saxon race over other white peoples and non-white
racial constellations. Zimmern denounced the notion of the supremacy of the Anglo-Saxons on the
grounds that it would defy the principle of mutual respect towards other national cultures and thus,
would hamper the international intellectual cooperation for moral cultivation.74

70

Lord Acton, Nationality, Home and Foreign Review 1 (July 1862). For more on Actons defence of the
multinational state, see Rocco Pezzimenti, The Political Thought of Lord Acton: The English Catholics in the
Nineteenth Century (Roma: Gracewing, Millennium Romae, 2001); Timothy Lang, Lord Acton and the
Insanity of Nationality, Journal of the History of Ideas 63, no. 1 (2002).
71
Zimmern, The Passing of Nationality, 96 (italics in original).
72
Ibid.
73
Marylyn Lake and Henry Reynolds, Drawing the Global Colour Line: White Mens Countries and the
International Challenge of Racial Equality (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2008); Duncan Bell, The
Project for a New Anglo Century: Race, Space, and Global Order, in Peter Katzenstein ed., Anglo-America and
Its Discontents: Civilizational Identities beyond West and East (London: Routledge, 2012); Duncan Bell,
Beyond the Sovereign State: Isopolitan Citizenship, Race, and Anglo-American Union, Political Studies
(2013, forthcoming).
74
Zimmern arraigned the vision of Anglo-American union proposed by Philip Kerr (Lord Lothian), a leader of
the Round Table movement, for his advocacy of a British-American co-operation on Anglo-Saxon lines.
Alfred Zimmern, Fiscal Policy and International Relations, in The Prospects of Democracy, 236 (italics
- 17 -

Specifically, Zimmern attacked the scheme of Rhodes Scholarships for sponsoring AngloSaxon-led imperial reconstruction.75 He believed that Rhodes Scholarships was promoting the
creation of an Anglo-centric Empire in which all non-English subjects of the monarchy would
regard England as their centre and as the model and exemplar of true culture.76 He labelled this
as a cultural imperialism that would strive to impose or dictate or in any way inculcate English
national standards as universal standards.77 The Anglo-centric idea that the Scholarships was
endorsing was incompatible with any real education, as real education would demand not
assimilation into a dominant culture but cross-fertilization based on an equal relationship
between those who learn[t].78 Zimmern warned that the project for an Anglo-Saxon-centred
empire would not merely spawn a mass of cosmopolitans but, eventually, bring about the
deterioration of English culture itself due to the lack of fresh cultural inputs:
the colonies who looked to Oxford for light and leadership would become mere intellectual provinces, peopled
with restless dracins nervously following the latest intellectual fashion from their spiritual home. There would be
a real empire, in the old-fashioned sense of the word, an empire with provinces. And to be provincial is to have
your eyes perpetually on the centre.79

added). In 1922 Kerr argued for an Anglo-American leadership in world policy with approval for the delusion
that all races and nations are equal. (Philip Kerr), A Programme for the British Commonwealth, The Round
Table 12 (1922), 250.
75
In fact, the purpose of Rhodes Scholarships reflected Cecil Rhodes belief that the Anglo-Saxons were the
most superior race in the world. Rhodes thought that the consolidation of the British Empire under the mastery of
the Anglo-Saxon race would bring a more advanced civilisation to the world. For him education of an elite at
Oxford was a means to achieve such an imperial unity. Philip Ziegler, Legacy: Cecil Rhodes, the Rhodes Trust
and Rhodes Scholarships (New Haven; London: Yale University Press, 2008), 8-18.
76
Zimmern, The Third British Empire, 138-139.
77
Ibid., 139.
78
Ibid., 139, 140.
79
Ibid., 140-141.
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If Oxford ever became a self-conscious intellectual metropolis, inculcating an imperial culture, she would very
quickly degenerate; she would lose her own peculiar English vitality, and the regions to which her students
returned would degenerate also.80

Zimmern advanced his idea of a Commonwealth of Nations as an alternative. It was the empire
that would facilitate a cross-fertilisation among depoliticised nationalities on the premise of an
equal relationship between all the advanced cultures and the English.81 He dubbed this culturallyegalitarian empire the Third British Empire. Exposing Zimmerns conservative inclinations,
Jeanne Morefield argues that he developed a quasi-liberal international theory which in effect
defended the undemocratic colonial governance of the Great Powers. Zimmern denied liberal
equality to most of the worlds people under imperial rule despite his ostensible endorsement of
liberal universalism.82 Morefield correctly points out Zimmerns enduring commitment to the
preservation of empire itself. Yet her interpretation of Zimmerns views on imperial structure
needs to be qualified. Zimmern did not deemed the structure of the British Empire to be so
hierarchical and metropole-centred as Morefield claims. He conceived of the relationship between
its constituent nationalities as essentially equal. This notion of national equality was derived from
the depoliticisation and culturalisation of nations.

Conclusion
Zimmerns World Commonwealth rested on the two clearly-differentiated spheres. On the one
hand, public governance at the global level would be shouldered by political, standing
intergovernmental cooperation between the Great Powers. On the other, a democratic basis of the

80

Ibid., 140.
Ibid., 92, 138.
82
Morefield, Covenants without Swords, 133.
81

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Commonwealth would be provided through the depolitical, cross-national fertilisation that would
supply educated public opinion on the global res publica. In spite of a rigid demarcation between
statehood and national life he, therefore, associated the internationalist education with the world of
political governance.83
Zimmerns international intellectual cooperation was based on the equality between and mutual
respect for different national cultures. He thought that the notion of racial hierarchies would thwart
the intellectual cooperation by privileging one supreme culture over other inferior ones. He
often advocated the establishment of racial equality.84 He argued that it was not until the principle
of racial equality [wa]s solemnly accepted by the representatives of fifty nations that the greatest
psychological obstacle in the way to a global commonwealth would be removed.85 Zimmerns
conception of intellectual cooperation formed a foundation for him to refuse prevalent attempts to
draw the colour line.86

83

Zimmern underlined this association with metaphors: Caesars affairs are ever to be set in true order, it will
be because the generation which has done its duty by them has also done its duty to God; because there is at last
a world of men and women who are masters both of their destiny and their environment, who have learned how
best to employ the many treasures of their personal and national inheritance, the broad, flowing stream of a
personal life and a national culture. Zimmern, The Things of Martha and the Things of Mary, 114-115 (italics
added).
84
At the Paris Peace Conference Zimmern endorsed the Japanese proposal for the insertion of a racial equality
clause into the League Covenant. Mazower, No Enchanted Palace, 91.
85
Zimmern, The Third British Empire, 91-92.
86
To him the creation of World Commonwealth, based on the equality of nations, seems to have been a means to
resolve tensions stemming from racial delimitations.[T]he chief political problem of our age, he once argued,
is the contact of races and nations with wide varieties of social experience and at different levels of civilisation.
It is this great and insistent problem (call it the problem of East and West, or the problem of the colour-line) in
all its difficult ramifications, political, social, and, above all, economic, which makes the development of the
supernational Commonwealth the most pressing political need of our age. Zimmern, German Culture and the
British Commonwealth, 29-30.
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