Fond Hopes and Vital Needs: Abiva Publishing, the UN and the Philippines’ Internationalist Moment

Throughout the twentieth century, enthusiasm for internationalism in the global South expressed itself in waves. This chapter follows one such wave inspired by the United Nations, which crested in an era of decolonisation and nation-building in the 1950s, before retreating in the 1960s amidst interfering visions for the Third World. It follows the diffraction of this liberal internationalist wave, encountered, experienced and interrogated through educational print culture, distilled and disseminated by the Philippines’ oldest educational press still in operation, the Abiva Publishing House. The chapter queries what it meant to be a good citizen of the world during, but not of the Cold War, and not of the global North, but of a nascent Philippine nation whose internationalist moment, hitherto submerged, is now rising to the surface.<p></p>