Project's Overview

The Twilight of Internationalism aims to offer new perspectives to the growing scholarship on internationalism by directly addressing its decline, focusing specifically on the end of the Cold War and its aftermath. The project’s primary hypothesis is that the full emergence of economic globalization and the ideas of Western hegemony in the world order after the collapse of Soviet communism represented only in appearance the peak of internationalism while posing, in fact, the premises of its twilight. The project analyzes the perspectives and the context of the last political visions of internationalism in order to understand their contradictions and historicize them.

Institutions involved in the Project

• Scuola Normale Superiore di Pisa
• University of Bologna
• University of Trento 

University of Trento's Research Team

• Sara Lorenzini, School of International Studies - University of Trento
• Francesco Magno, School of International Studies - University of Trento
• Laura Chiara Cecchi, School of International Studies - University of Trento

University of Trento’s research unit will explore how Europe’s international role was reconceptualized during the 1990s, analyzing how the EU emerged as a model of democratic governance and balanced economic growth. It will study how it adapted to changing times while retaining its value system through a stubbornly principled approach to peaceful foreign policy, social welfare solidarity, and environmental protection.
The research unit will follow three specific lines of inquiry:

• Sara Lorenzini will work on the relationship between internationalism and environmentalism in the late 1980s and 1990s, as it played out in Europe, specifically at the level of the European Community/European Union and at the level of the Socialist International. A particular focus will be on Gro Harlem Brundtland and how the concept of sustainable development was framed to navigate the neoliberal order.
• Francesco Magno will investigate Eastern European environmental activism during the first stages of the post-communist transition, highlighting how local actors interpreted the idea of international environmentalism and their original contributions to the continental environmental debate. Scholarly production has predominantly focused on external drivers of transformation or the exogenous influences on Eastern European protest forms. The project, instead, explores local conceptualizations of transnational environmental governance, with a specific focus on the Romanian Ecological Movement (Mișcarea Ecologică Română) and the Bulgarian Ekoglasnost.
• Laura Chiara Cecchi will investigate the reorganization of Euro-African relations by reconstructing the shift in the concept of development that the EU fostered in the 1990s, which eventually culminated in the Cotonou agreement of 2000. In the process, the EU abandoned the generalized, NIEO-inspired criteria that had informed the Lomé Conventions and developed a vision that considered regional integration as a necessary base for ACP countries' economic and political development. 

Funding

European Union – Next Generation EU, in the framework of PRIN 2022 Call, project “The Twilight of Internationalism” (2022M9HP3X) – CUP E53D23000260006