ABSTRACT
If the nation-state was the coveted ‘somewhere’ of 1918, the post-war order of 1945 imagined a different ‘somewhere’ that was neither a cosmopolitan ‘nowhere’ nor a national ‘somewhere.’ Various international organisations tried to reinvent the space between nations during that strongest of realist conflicts, the Cold War. The fragility of peace during the interwar years (1918–1939) was due not only to economic crisis, resentment, political extremism and nationalism but also to the lack of liberal international organisations and treaties with the power and moral authority to challenge the tribal ‘somewhere’ of the nation-state. Contemporary disdain for multinational cooperation, human rights and international organisations are linked to three trends: (1) fading memories and mis-memories of 1918 and 1945; (2) nostalgia for phantom homelands before 1945; and (3) a reversal of the third wave of democratisation.
