Bibliographie complète

The rise of the European socialist movement under the leadership of the Second International at the turn of the century and its breakup with the outbreak of the 1914 war is a persistent historical problem. The contradiction is obvious. Here was a movement that firmly proclaimed "proletarian internationalism", but which, when the time came to implement it, affirmed the necessity of "national defense". The concrete forms of this contradiction are illuminated by a study of the impact of the rise of imperialism on the internationalism of French and German socialists in the period leading up to the war, from the London Congress of 1896 to the resolution of the Agadir crisis in 1912. The Second International is a movement whose organizational and practical forms are rooted in a national framework, while its fundamental conceptions are those of internationalism. Imperialism reinforces this contradiction, and becomes at the same time the source of a concretization of socialist internationalism in theory, and of its abandonment in practice. Emphasizing the analysis of internationalism as a political rather than a cultural or sentimental phenomenon, this work demonstrates the existence of a chasm between the theoretical discourse and the practice of the movement. The rise of imperialism is accompanied by the rise of reformism within the socialist movement, which, along with other phenomena, reinforces its national tendencies. The national tendencies of the movement persisted at key moments, notably the imperialist crises of Tangier (1905) and Agadir (1911), to the point of calling into question the internationalist foundations of the movement.