The World
Celestial Sphere
This sculpture by Paul Manship was officially inaugurated at the League of Nations’ Geneva headquarters in August 1939. It was a memorial to President Woodrow Wilson, who had represented the United States of America at the Paris Peace Conference. Wilson spent months in Europe, making the case for a post-war order that would accord with an American vision for an international order. This would include the much-discussed “self-determination” of national peoples (a right quickly denied to colonised nations) and the protection of a liberal economic world order that would open up markets for American investment and goods, in the face of an emerging communist alternative. Despite this, Wilson failed to convince American politicians to join the League he had helped create. Manship’s sculpture represented the heavenly constellations, worshipped throughout history and witnessed by all of humankind. The geometry of the sphere referenced the unity of all humans on planet earth, a key visual and terrestrial tenet of liberal internationalism. The sculpture was designed to rotate, although the motor did not function during the war years, when the sculpture also developed major structural faults, and has not been used since. The sphere is currently at risk of collapse; an unkindly metaphor for liberal internationalism, perhaps.
Further information:
For the campaign to save the statue: http://worldpatrimony.org/celestialsphere/index.html
For information on Paul Manship: https://americanart.si.edu/artist/paul-manship-3096
On Wilson and self-determination: https://www.academia.edu/24180827/Woodrow_Wilson_Imperialism_and_Self-Determination
International Map of the World
The International Map of the World (IMW) was an eye-catching example of early 20th century geographical internationalism. The idea of an internationally recognised 1:1 million world map, compiled by existing national cartographic agencies from the huge cartographic archive that existed by the end of the 19th century, was first proposed by the German geographer Albrecht Penck (1858-1945) at the International Geographical Congress in 1891. Penck’s proposal had distinctly utopian objectives to create a new, 20th century and post-national image of the entire globe. The explicit objective was to encourage collaboration between national cartographic agencies previously dominated by military concerns and national rivalries. IMW conferences in London and Paris, in 1909 and 1913, thrashed out agreements on the projection, symbols, colouring and style, based on the Greenwich meridian and the metric system. The IMW suffered a significant set-back in 1913 when the United States, previously closely involved, withdrew from the project which then foundered completely, at least as initially imagined, during World War One, though some national cartographic agencies produced their own versions of IMW sheets for different reasons. Following a request from the War Office, the Royal Geographical Society prepared a simplified 1:1 million base map of Europe and the Middle, based on IMW protocols, for use in future peace negotiations. The IMW was revived after 1918 and spawned related mapping projects, notably the beautiful 1:1 million Map of Hispanic America prepared during the interwar decades by cartographers in the American Geographical Society (AGS). On completion, the 100 plus Hispanic Map sheets were given pride of place in a large exhibition, The World in Maps, at the AGS headquarters in the Washington Heights district of Manhattan in the summer of 1939. In a memorable exercise in cartographic ‘street theatre’, the Hispanic Map sheets were also assembled into a single cartographic image of Latin America and the Caribbean in the AGS courtyard, just off Broadway. A colour photograph of that event later appeared in Life magazine on 8th December 1941, the day after the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbour.
Further information:
The index sheet of the Map of Hispanic America can be viewed at the AGS website here: https://collections.lib.uwm.edu/digital/collection/agdm/id/4829/
The Life colour photograph of the Map of Hispanic America, unfurled in the AGS courtyard, can be viewed here: https://books.google.co.uk/books?id=Yk4EAAAAMBAJ&lpg=PA18&pg=PA104#v=onepage&q&f=false
The World of the League of Nations
From 1920 the League of Nations constructed a new international geography of the world. Resulting from the Paris Peace Conference and written in to the 1919 Treaty of Versailles, the League sought to guarantee international peace and cooperation. This map from a 1927 school manual designed for the use of University students and teachers of Secondary Schools in India, Burma and Ceylon shows the world divided in to League members (yellow), mandates (red), colonial dependencies (brown) and nations outside the League (green). The extent of the League’s coverage marks the enthusiasm for internationalism that emerged from the 1914-18 war. Its failings, however, are mapped here in anticipation. The USA never joined the League, while the USSR was a member only between 1934 and its expulsion in 1939 (Germany joined in 1926 but left in 1933, shortly after Adolf Hitler’s rise to power). Mandates were territories in Asia, Africa and the Pacific that were annexed from Axis powers (Germany and the Ottoman Empire) after the war and handed over to the victorious powers for trusteeship. Like the colonial dependencies, mandates were denied self-representation in Geneva. For mandates and dependencies the League’s internationalism was felt to perpetuate imperialism. Note that India is shaded yellow. Despite being a non-self-governing part of the British Empire, having signed the Treaty of Versailles it became a founding member of the League. The anomaly between its domestic and international status was widely commented upon at the India Round Table Conference held in London between 1930-32.
Further information:
A League of Nations research portal: http://www.leagueofnationshistory.org/homepage.shtml
A guide for researching the League of Nations: http://libraryresources.unog.ch/leagueofnationsarchives
On the League of Nations and India: https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0305748813000376
Sándor Radó’s Atlas of Political Economy
While liberal internationalists hoped for a new era of global harmony after World War One, overseen by the League of Nations, the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution in Russia, inspired by the ideas of Marx and Lenin, prompted communist internationalists to develop radical, left-wing geopolitical visions of the world. Geographers sympathetic to socialism and communism, including the Hungarian cartographer Sándor Radó (1899-1981) and British educationalist and Labour MP JF Horrabin (1884-1962), sought to visualise the emerging spatial division between capitalism and communism, the incipient fault lines of the post-1945 Cold War, in maps and atlases intended for a wide readership. These colourful atlases provided a radical left-wing alternative to the propaganda maps prepared by nationalist geopolitical theorists in Weimar and Nazi Germany, notably by Karl Haushofer, and in fascist Italy. For most of the interwar period and World War Two, Radó’s work as a cartographic publisher producing journalistic maps for newspapers and magazines from offices in Berlin, Paris and Geneva served as a cover operation for his primary activity as Soviet intelligence agent, operating latterly in the so-called Rote Kapelle anti-Nazi resistance movement which was known to the British as the Red Orchestra.
Further information:
For a less than entirely reliable CIA report and a related article on Radó’s activities, see: https://www.cia.gov/library/center-for-the-study-of-intelligence/kent-csi/vol12i3/html/v12i3a05p_0001.htm and https://www.cia.gov/library/readingroom/docs/DOC_0000620593.pdf
For a recent article on Radó: https://kundoc.com/pdf-the-interrogation-of-sandor-rado-geography-communism-and-espionage-between-world.html
For Radó’s KGB-approved memoir Pod Psevdonimom 'Dora' (in Russian): http://militera.lib.ru/memo/other/rado_s/index.html. An English translation was published by fictional publishing houses in New York and London, covers for the respective Soviet embassies, as Codename Dora: Memoirs of a Russian Spy (London: Abelard, 1977; New York: The Book Service, 1977)