Articles

‘This age is the age of associations’: committees, petitions, and the roots of interwar Middle Eastern internationalism*

Andrew Arsan^a1

^a1 110 Jones Hall, Princeton, NJ 08544, USA E-mail: aarsan@princeton.edu

Abstract

This article examines three diasporic campaigns orchestrated by Middle Eastern political entrepreneurs in Paris, New York, and Cairo, in the years bookending the First World War. Mobilizing across borders, their organizers were exemplary denizens of the transnational public sphere created by Ottoman migrants from the 1880s onwards. Exponents of globalism, they regarded the body politic as a diasporic construct unconstrained by territory. Furthermore, they saw the associations that they founded both as instruments of civility capable of reforming society and as practical political vehicles, mouthpieces for the claims that they communicated to the ‘community of nations’ through petitions and telegrams. Such strategies of appeal suggest that many of the features of ‘interwar’ Middle Eastern internationalism emerged not in response to the post-war settlement but in the last decades of Ottoman rule. This article therefore contributes to our understanding of the histories of globalism, the practices and perceptions of public life, and the engagement of non-Western people with international society.

Keywords

• civil society;
• diaspora;
• globalization;
• international society;
• Middle East

Footnotes

* I wish to thank both my fellow co-editors, Su Lin Lewis and Anne-Isabelle Richard, and the JGH editors for shepherding this article to publication. William Clarence-Smith, in particular, has proved an incisive and insightful reader and editor. Two anonymous readers provided judicious and helpful comments. Michael Cook kindly weighed in with useful suggestions and corrections, and conversations with Stacy Fahrenthold, Samir Khalaf, Karam Nachar, and Cyrus Schayegh helped me to shape the piece's arguments, as did interventions by audience members at the American University of Beirut, the University of Cambridge, New York University, and Princeton University.