Internationalism, Imperialism, and the Problem of Entanglement
The rise of right-wing populist leaders around the world threatens to dismantle the legal and political institutions that frame the contemporary international order. However, internationalists who would defend those institutions must overcome another, compelling criticism: the history of international law and of international institutions is thoroughly “entangled” with the history of European imperialism. As a consequence of these historical entanglements, international laws and institutions cannot but reproduce the violence, exploitation, expropriation, and exclusion for which European imperialism is rightly reviled. In this paper, I call this the “problem of entanglement.” I show how the problem of entanglement has arisen within decolonial theory, providing a history and critique of the decolonial turn in Latin American political thought. I then describe an alternative way of understanding the historical relationship between internationalism and imperialism that, I argue, clears the way to a defense of internationalism against its right-wing populist attackers.
Joshua Simon is Assistant Professor of Political Science. Before coming to Johns Hopkins, he studied at Reed College, Yale University, and the Colegio de México, and he taught at the New School for Social Research, King’s College London, and Columbia University. In 2018-19, he was the Fulbright-García Robles Chair of U.S. Studies at the Instituto Tecnológico Autónomo de Mexíco (ITAM).
Professor Simon’s research interests lie at the intersection of political theory and comparative politics, focusing on the relationship between political ideas and political institutions in the United States and Latin America. He is the author of The Ideology of Creole Revolution: Imperialism and Independence in American and Latin American Political Thought (Cambridge, 2017), a comparative account of constitutionalism in the period of the American independence movements. He is currently researching efforts to build regional and hemispheric legal orders and political institutions in the Americas in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.
At Johns Hopkins, Professor Simon teaches courses on political theory, American, Latin American, and international political thought, interpretive, critical, and comparative approaches to the study of political ideas, and imperial and anti-imperial ideologies.