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.

The Great War created new challenges for the proponents of pre-1914 cosmopolitanism. This article explores this theme by studying the Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU), an international association of members of parliament active in the interwar period. The IPU is first taken as a case study to discuss the difficulty of clearly differentiating between national politicians and agents of international civil society during the years between the wars. The article then shows how pre-war liberal internationalists had to reorient after the First World War, and how socialists and nationalists brought new agendas to the realm of international cooperation at the non-governmental level. These new perspectives shaping the international system even led to far-reaching plans for a world parliament. However, the IPU's history also shows how domestic political polarization contributed to the failure of interwar internationalism.

During the First World War, civil society groups across the North Atlantic put forward an array of plans for recasting international society. The most prominent ones sought to build on the Hague Conferences of 1899 and 1907 by developing international legal codes and, in a drastic innovation, obligating and militarily enforcing the judicial settlement of disputes. Their ideal was a world governed by law, which they opposed to politics. This idea was championed by the largest groups in the United States and France in favour of international organizations, and they had likeminded counterparts in Britain. The Anglo-American architects of the League of Nations, however, defined their vision against legalism. Their declaratory design sought to ensure that artificial machinery never stifled the growth of common consciousness. Paradoxically, the bold new experiment in international organization was forged from an anti-formalistic ethos – one that slowed the momentum of international law and portended the rise of global governance.

This article examines debates on the decentralization of the League of Nations that took place in the civil society networks surrounding it. Set in the wider framework of regionalist debates, particularly in Latin America, it focuses on two organizations, the International Federation of League of Nations Societies, which promoted the League, and the Comité Fédéral de Coopération Européenne, which focused on European cooperation. The analysis of the debate on regionalism and universalism highlights the role that Europe played in the League, and points to the use of universalist arguments to further British imperial ends. It shows that interwar internationalism was a multifaceted phenomenon, in which national, imperial, regional, and universal projects and concerns were profoundly entangled. Finally, the article stresses the overlap between official and civil society networks, which complemented each other's activities.

This article considers Asianism in the Indian trade union movement, against the backdrop of increasing international cooperation between Asian trade union movements in the interwar period, which culminated in the short-lived Asiatic Labour Congress (1934–37). It demonstrates how Asianist enthusiasm both propelled and hampered Indian workers’ representation at the International Labour Organization and other international bodies. Finally, it considers Asianism as a crucial characteristic of Indian trade unionism in the interwar period, by showing how the All-India Trade Union Congress, once the hope of Indian labour as an organized force, split into rival federations over the issue of its Asian affiliations.

If the concept of global civil society offers a way of thinking about the interwar period that does justice to the new linkages that were developing at the time, it also offers an opportunity to reflect on ‘the varied, contingent meanings of the global – and the limits to such globalist visions’, as this special issue makes clear. This article explores these themes in an African context in relation to two government periodicals, Mambo Leo and the Gazette du Cameroun, both of which first appeared in the early 1920s, and a settler-edited newspaper aimed at an African audience, L’Éveil des Camerouniens, published 1934–35. It argues that such official and semi-official publications serve to illustrate both the unexpected ways in which this period witnessed the birth of new forms of global connection and the limits of such connection.

The social history of colonial Southeast Asia has often been narrated through the lens of ‘plural societies’, where various ethnic groups rarely mixed. This article challenges that narrative by pointing to traditions of multi-ethnic interaction, particularly in port cities, dating back to an early modern age of commerce. Although colonialism introduced new racial hierarchies that reinforced stark ethnic divides, it also created arenas where these could be transgressed. In the interwar era, international organizations, such as Rotary clubs, provided a way of breaking the colour bar of colonial society and a venue for multi-ethnic representation in a shared associational space. They converged with existing notions of civic duty, while promoting a public intellectual culture in cities for both men and women, as well as a new sense of regionalism. In ethnically divided Malaya, Asian Rotarians questioned the importance of race and debated the possibilities of a multi-ethnic future for the nation. While such cosmopolitan ideals were more vulnerable in the post-colonial era of nation-states, the organizations of the interwar era left important legacies for civil society in the region.