Video via https://online.ucpress.edu/gp/article/6/1/144299/213522/The-Contested-History-of-the-Global-A-Conversation?

* Video conversation: The Contested History of the Global — A Conversation with Or Rosenboim.  Global Perspectives (2025) 6 (1): 144299. doi

URL = https://online.ucpress.edu/gp/article/6/1/144299/213522/The-Contested-History-of-the-Global-A-Conversation?

Description

"In this episode, Or Rosenboim, Professor of Contemporary History at Bologna University, joins us to explore the evolving concept of global order—from classical frameworks to contemporary debates about the future. She invites us to see globalization not just as a process, but as a lens through which to interpret the world. Rosenboim questions whether the idea of a fixed “world order” is itself misguided and provocatively suggests that embracing disorder could help us reimagine planetary politics. Is it time to rethink the very notion of “world order”? Could embracing disorder offer new approaches to global governance? And what lessons can today’s leaders draw from historical debates about global order? This episode is hosted by Hagen Schulz-Forberg from the Center for New Critical Politics and Governance at Aarhus University."

Speaker details

"Or Rosenboim is Professor of Contemporary History at Bologna University. She has written a book some years ago now, some seven years ago, I think, called ‘The Emergence of Globalism and Intellectual History of World Order’. And ever since then, and already, of course, obvious before, she’s been an erudite student of all things that intellectual history can provide you with when it comes to understanding questions of global governance, global intellectual history, history of economic thought, the history of federalism, and the history of international relations, giving it a critical, historical glance. So, on the one hand, understanding what they’re doing, how governance functions in the IR relations actually play out, and being their critical student."

(https://online.ucpress.edu/gp/article/6/1/144299/213522/The-Contested-History-of-the-Global-A-Conversation?)

Excerpt

A Critique of the Planetary and of Planetarity

Or Roisenboom, interviews by Hagen Schulz-Forberg:

HSF: Why is the planetary so, interesting and so, emancipatory for so, many these days? It provides finally, after what feels like a long time of struggling, a concept that allows for building new future ideas that are inclusive, that are constructive, and that give some energy that are positive. Rather in a world that seems to be going bananas, that’s kind of exactly what you need. And so, you’re warning us against, wait a minute. If you start to measure everything and you start to ignore democracy, you ignore all sorts of other human ideas that are always around, then we will come to a same old technocratic, power-driven rule order. Is that what you’re saying, scenario? But still, it’s one of the futures that seems to be emerging. Which other futures do you see emerging today, other than as a constructive future order? As a student of global studies or global order, we’ve seen many various versions of that, the communist version, the fascist version, the liberal version, the liberal versions, going through mutations over history. And right now, I mean, I guess my question is, do you share the notion that we are at a critical juncture and that the planetary is one of the future visions that may create its own dystopias or may create its own totalitarianisms, which then would need to be tackled along the way. But where else can we go?

OR: Well, maybe to Mars. I think it’s true that we’re in kind of a critical moment. I think that it’s not the only critical moment. These things go in kind of waves. But I’m also fascinated with this idea of the future. I think humans have sought to imagine the future constantly throughout history. So, this is one of the motivations, really, of humanity to act, right? To try to imagine the future, to predict what might happen, and to create plans accordingly. So, that’s something that one of my current projects explores, why we predict the future in what way our predictions lead us towards directions that might be right or wrong. So, often we actually get it very wrong about what the future might be. learning from how people did do it in the past is always useful. But also, it’s good to know what directions we might not want to take and what directions might be more promising and then do our own thinking. So, don’t just replicate what they’ve already done. So, currently, I’m interested also in the ways in which prediction was a tool of thinking about our relations with nature. So, how people used scientific prediction to think about politics and political order. But again, I think one of the lessons that history tells us is that there aren’t really any kind of promised ways to success. The exercise of imagining the future should be continuous. That’s really the way to go instead of sticking to plans that might not be the right ones. So, I think that the historical lesson here is really to engage in constant thinking about futures and to invite to this conversation as many voices as possible, because that would really lead to a much more rich experiment instead of, you know, when it typically went very wrong, is that when people had a plan or vision of the future, you just did not move an inch from it and just go on with it towards the bitter end and then kind of had to live with it for the rest of their lives. So, that was something that I think history would tell us not to repeat. But I’m all in for imagining futures. I think this is something that is indispensable if we want really to have a political conversation because politics without thinking about the future is really empty or dangerous.

HSF: ... Let’s talk about the future. Let’s create a platform. Let’s create an institution which is able to create these kinds of ideas, various perspectives that don’t necessarily all need to agree, but as a platform for conversation from which, like in the past, like ideas of globalism, from which then these various shades of global order ideas emerge. Do you see even the possibility of such a conversation today?

OR: Well, I think there are multiple millions of such conversations going on. I think what we would do well is to try to find ways to constantly challenge our own views about the future by looking at places we don’t usually look. So, perhaps to engage with different historical narratives, to go and seek the story of individuals who were typically ignored, to look at, for example, now in international relations, there’s been a huge move to look more at women thinkers and to see what they’ve done differently. So, every step in these directions has really created whole universes of ideas that weren’t available to us before, because we just followed the pattern that was much more common and easy. So, I’m against, I don’t have a big global solution for everything, but I think if each of us does these kind of small steps to include stories that might have been out of the usual pattern of thought, to look at forgotten thinkers or even thinkers who are just intentionally marginalized because they didn’t fit into the mainstream approach, that would really help us to generate new ideas about our possibilities. Because even what we consider as possible or impossible is determined by our own knowledge. And so, expanding that would already lead us to consider what this planetary might be. So, as an intellectual historian, obviously my immediate move would be to kind of go back to previous thinkers and see, had they thought anything interesting that I can build on my own ideas? And I think this is kind of a move that can be shared also by non-historians. So, this is something that people can do in their own literal spheres as well, to try and consider ideas that are not common to our daily lives and to look somewhere else in order to connect also with different approaches to politics. So, in my own work, I try to do that by looking at sources that were marginalized, looking at the ideas of ordinary people, looking at migrants who typically have been non-central to political debates, but often bearing the burden of political decisions that were taken elsewhere. So, this is another way to shift our gaze on power relations. Instead of just looking at policymakers and people who decide what global governance and what planetary policies we should have, we can look at the people who will be actually the objects or would be influenced mostly by these changes."

(https://online.ucpress.edu/gp/article/6/1/144299/213522/The-Contested-History-of-the-Global-A-Conversation?)

The Book

* Book: Or Rosenboim. The Emergence of Globalism and Intellectual History of World Order.

URL =

Or Rosenboim (OR):

"So, the book started off as a project to understand how public intellectuals during and after, immediately after the Second World War, thought the world should be organized after the war. so, as you can imagine, the Second World War led many people, especially in the West, or we can say in Britain and Western Europe and the United States, to rethink about the future, the rise of totalitarianism, let them think that they may need to set up a new kind of order in the post-war era to guarantee peace, but also prosperity and democracy. And so, they came up with various schemes to do that. And the book explores these competing visions that they had about global order. I created a loose network of public intellectuals who were based in Britain and the United States, but many of them were émigrés from Europe. so, they escaped fascism and joined forces with liberal thinkers in Britain and the US to think about the future. And I explored the various ideas that they had about how the world should be organized. so, starting off with the nation state and going in different scales from regional federations, regional blocs to post-imperial organizations, and then obviously to universal orders, I explored their ideas of globalism, because what brought them together was a constant reference to the global as a relevant scale of political order. So, they did try to abolish everything that was smaller than the global, let’s say, but they were keen to argue that everything should be remeasured and reorganized in relation to this new scale of things that was the entire planet. And they perceived new technologies like the airplane or the telephone and also the nuclear bomb as the motivations for this global thinking. But at the same time, they all had different ideas about what this global order should look like. They were keen to argue that democracy must be a common value on a global scale. Yet at the same time, many of them wanted to embrace pluralism because they were concerned that obviously imposing any political order could continue and maintain the same constraints of the imperial and totalitarian age. So, pluralism was also a value. And as you can imagine, these two principles that they attached to the global could also clash. And so, my book explores these kinds of visions that they came up with in pamphlets and in public lectures. So, it wasn’t just a university elite. They were keen to communicate with a wider audience. And the book critically addresses these ideas and tries to understand not only what they proposed, but also what were the limits of this way of thinking about politics on a global scale."

(https://online.ucpress.edu/gp/article/6/1/144299/213522/The-Contested-History-of-the-Global-A-Conversation?)

Or Rosenboim on the History of the Global World Order

Contents

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Contents

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Excerpt

A Critique of the Planetary and of Planetarity

The Book

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