Nationalism, Internationalism, and Cosmopolitanism: Comparison and Commensurability

This essay, written as a response to Partha Chatterjee's on the same three concepts—nationalism, internationalism, and cosmopolitanism—in India (published in Comparative Studies of South Asia, Africa and the Middle East 36, no. 2), first considers the validity and terms of comparison and commensurability between the Indian and Ottoman/post-Ottoman cases. It then goes on to offer a sketch of how the three concepts play out in the more indeterminate political world of the Ottoman space, looking not to cases of formal colonialism in the Middle East, but to the beginning and endpoints of the devolution of the Ottoman world and its transformation into the many nation-states of the post-Ottoman world. It poses the emergence of Greece (in the 1820s) and of Turkey one century later as crystallizing moments in a different but related process to that of the colonization and decolonization of the Indian subcontinent. The goal of the exercise is to use the three concepts of nationalism, internationalism, and cosmopolitanism to arrive at a new kind of comparison, and perhaps a new kind of model of power in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries for areas that were not formally colonized but were nevertheless crucial to the formation of modern relations of power.