The fifth International: international or global?

This short piece questions Samir Amin’s interpretation of what he meant by the International. In envisaging a fifth International, Amin tends to rely on a collection of inter-connected self-determined sovereign entities that resembles more of a traditional understanding of internationalism and less of the transnational global expression developed at the World Social Forums. This suggests that such an approach falls into the same problems that Rosa Luxemburg illustrated during the Second International where she outlined the dangers of what we might refer to today as ‘left nationalism’.