Internationalism Reconfigured: Transnational Ideas and Movements Between the World Wars 9780755625536, 9781350165502

Citation preview

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LIST OF ABBREVIATIONS

BNV

Bund Neues Vaterland

DFG

Deutsche Friedensgesellschaft

DLM

Deutsche Liga für Menschenrechte

EFO

Economic and Financial Organisation of the League of Nations

IAW

International Alliance of Women for Suffrage and Equal Citizenship (formerly International Woman Suffrage Alliance)

ICICI

International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation

IIIC

International Institute of Intellectual Cooperation

ICW

International Council of Women

IFLNS

International Federation of League of Nations Societies

IFUW

International Federation of University Women

ILO

International Labour Organisation

IULA

International Union of Local Authorities

LNU

League of Nations Union

MTE

Maritime Transport Executive

SEC

Supreme Economic Council

SPD

Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands

UDC

Union of Democratic Control

WILPF

Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom

YWCA

Young Women’s Christian Association

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ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This collection originated in a one-day workshop which Katharina Rietzler and I convened at University College London (UCL) in May 2008: Interwar Internationalism: Conceptualising Transnational Thought and Action, 1919– 1939. Katharina made significant contributions to this project, both in the organisation of the workshop and at various stages of the editorial process. Her input was crucial for making this project happen, and I am grateful for her helpfulness. After the workshop, we continued our discussions, elaborating on the aims and scope of this volume. After extensive correspondence and consultation, the contributors developed their papers. The volume is a testament to their willingness to rework their pieces quite substantially and to hone in on the key questions that we identified. A draft version of Patrica Clavin’s piece provided helpful guidance in this context. I am also grateful for the authors’ comments on each other’s contributions. Thanks are also due to the historians who offered their input as chairs and panellists at the Interwar Internationalism workshop: Robert Boyce, John Breuilly, Kathleen Burk, Jan-Georg Deutsch, Dina Gusejnova, Mary Hilson, Axel Körner, Algo Rämmer and Bernhard Rieger. In the process of preparing this volume, I was grateful for the support of my commissioning editor at I.B.Tauris, Jo Godfrey, as well as the proofreading/copyediting of Peter Barnes. At various stages, this volume has benefited from comments and suggestions by Charlotte Alston, Axel Körner, Anne-Isabelle Richard, Pierre-Yves Saunier, Wouter Van Acker and Christophe Verbruggen. From the very start, Patricia Clavin lent her support to this project, providing much appreciated advice in the process. Finally, I would like to mention my parents who, during my visits in the winter of 2009/10 and Easter 2010, provided a setting conducive to the work on this volume.

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The book would not have been possible without generous support from a number of institutions: the Interwar Internationalism workshop in 2008 was made possible by the Royal Historical Society, the European Doctorate programme ‘Building on the Past’ (funded through the European Union’s Sixth Framework Programme) and the UCL Centre for Transnational History. The School of Arts and Social Sciences at Northumbria University provided financial support for travel and copyright clearance, and the Bijzonder Onderzoeksfonds of Ghent University supported me towards the end of the publication process. As many of the contributions in this volume suggest, institutional support can play an important role in facilitating or preventing the success of transnational endeavours. This book – a transnational project in itself – is no exception, and I am glad that Northumbria, UCL and Ghent facilitated its publication.

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PREFACE Daniel Laqua

Entitled Les murailles de Jéricho (‘The Walls of Jericho’), the cover illustration of this book is taken from the collection Le Testament de Genève, which the Hungarian cartoonist Emery Kelen published in 1930 with the help of his compatriot Alois Derso.1 Kelen and Derso tell the history of the League of Nations through texts and images which take their cue from stories of the Old Testament. They gently poke fun at the missionary zeal of many supporters of the League of Nations, whilst also acknowledging the central role which the League played for the hopes and aspirations of internationalists. The illustration depicts several prominent internationalists of the interwar years, for instance Christian Lange, Nobel Peace laureate (1921) and secretary-general of the Interparliamentary Union (1909–33); the Swiss politician Giuseppe Motta, president of the Fifth General Assembly of the League of Nations (1924–25); and Daniel Serruys, a French official who became chairman of the League’s Economic Committee in 1927.2 The image refers to efforts to bring down the tariff walls between the states of Europe, either through a ‘tariff truce’ or the creation of a European Customs Union. In the second half of the 1920s, these ideas were debated at international forums, from the World Economic Conference of 1927 to meetings of the Interparliamentary Union and the Paneuropean Union.3 However, the image alludes to a wider issue: at a time of considerable international tensions, the protagonists trumpet the onward march of rapprochement and reconciliation. This resonates with a key theme of this volume: the chapters highlight the extent to which particular groups and individuals sought to influence international relations in the period between the two World Wars, yet they also reveal the national barriers to transnational endeavours.

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National categories often serve as the lens through which we view the two decades between the World Wars. Most studies on the interwar period either are dedicated to individual countries or, when dealing with international relations, concentrate on the actions of governments. The contributions to this volume suggest, however, that the vitality of internationalism is frequently underestimated. Even when acknowledging the existence of interwar internationalism, many historians seem to favour ‘rise and fall’ narratives: they focus on the seemingly ill-fated hopes vested in the League of Nations, or allude to the inherent limitations of accords such as the Locarno Treaties and the Kellogg-Briand Pact. 4 This volume opts for a slightly different approach: it investigates the efforts of individuals, groups and associations, and their interaction with the new international structures that had been created in the wake of the Great War. The contributions to this book acknowledge the diversity of transnational thought and action between 1919 and 1939. The use of ‘transnational’ – both in the sub-title and in the individual contributions – is a conscious one: the term stresses the role of networks and transmission processes; in the field of international history, it emphasises the role of non-state actors.5 Accordingly, the authors examine how different groups, bodies or individuals sought to influence and transform international politics. In this respect, the book reflects recent scholarly interest in the League of Nations system, as exemplified by new histories of the International Labour Organisation, the Economic and Financial Organisation, and the League’s Mandates section.6 A related strand of enquiry focuses on the concepts that underpinned transnational action. ‘Internationalism’ was a term used by the actors themselves; despite its ambiguous meaning and a variety of possible connotations, it can be described as the impulse to create new networks and bonds that reached beyond the nation-state.7 Akira Iriye’s concept of ‘cultural internationalism’ describes the ambitions that motivated several actors discussed here.8 As a whole, the volume suggests that internationalism often relied on transnational structures and movements – and that, in turn, transnational action was driven by particular understandings of internationalism. The contributions Owing to its multifarious nature, the subject of internationalism is wellsuited for a collection of essays. Combining the input of ten contributors from five different countries, the volume covers considerable geographical

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and conceptual ground. Patricia Clavin’s introduction sets the agenda and establishes the analytical framework for the different contributions. Her essay conceptualises the interaction between ‘internationalism’ and ‘transnationalism’ in greater depth than this preface can hope to. The subsequent chapters are arranged into three different parts. Part A explores the discourses and concepts that underpinned different varieties of internationalism. Waqar Zaidi examines the role of science and technology in internationalist theorising. As he shows, many internationalists portrayed scientific and technological change as a driving force for global interdependence and as a justification for increased transnational cooperation. Katharina Rietzler subsequently explores the ideas that underpinned a specific form of transnational action, namely the work of American philanthropic foundations and their engagement with both the League of Nations system and academic institutions in Europe. In this context, she underlines the role of transatlantic funding networks in developing the ‘scientific study’ of international relations. Providing the third contribution in this section, Stefan Couperus presents yet another impetus for transnational cooperation – one which was rooted in local contexts and which focused on the collaboration between municipal authorities or urban reformers. He draws attention to different concepts for international organisation, from bodies such as the Union Internationale des Villes to further-reaching schemes for an international ‘League of Cities’. To some extent, all the essays in this volume relate to the League of Nations. The contributions in Part B, however, look more directly at the workings of the League system and its engagement with non-state actors. Amalia Ribi underlines that both the British Anti-Slavery and Aborigines Protection Society and the Bureau International pour la Défense des Indigènes sought to get the League to adopt new legal instruments against slavery and forced labour. Yet she also shows how the cause of anti-slavery could serve as a pretext or smokescreen for power politics and for Italy’s imperial ambitions. Yann Decorzant traces the meetings and negotiations that led to the creation of the League’s Economic and Financial Organisation. In this respect, he draws attention to the importance of Allied networks that were created during the First World War. Frank Beyersdorf sheds light on a different aspect of economic and financial cooperation – the interplay between League expertise, business networks and national politics in the financial stabilisation of Austria. In his concluding comments, he points out that the supporters of the League of Nations portrayed Austria’s ‘financial

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reconstruction’ as a shining example of the League’s significance. As a whole the contributions in this section suggest that the League of Nations system opened new avenues for the cooperation of governments and civil-society agencies. Part C builds on the ideas that were the focus of Part A and on the institutional interplay discussed in Part B. It tackles the transnational and national contexts of advocacy and campaigning, focusing on women’s activism, on support for the League of Nations and on pacifism. After the Great War, the internationalism of such movements operated in a new setting – a political landscape marked by the challenge of reconciliation and by the existence of new international institutions. Marie Sandell studies the efforts of international women’s organisations to expand beyond the ‘West’. She discusses the involvement and staging of the participation of women from the ‘East’, yet also comments on the limitations of such processes. Helen McCarthy considers the League of Nations Union (LNU) in Britain and its effort to promote the work of the League (as well as the principles on which the League was premised) in a national setting. As she shows, the LNU was merely one manifestation of a wider process in which voluntary associations targeted both national and international politics in the interwar years. Finally, my own chapter – a case study of the Deutsche Liga für Menschenrechte (DLM), a German peace association – sheds light on the emergence of new pacifist currents and the significance of transnational collaboration for peace activists. By its very nature, pacifism engaged with transnational questions, yet the obstacles encountered by the DLM illustrate the significance of national frameworks and boundaries. Being an edited collection, this book can hardly provide a comprehensive account of the League of Nations and the work of non-state actors. It would be possible – and indeed desirable – to produce a volume which broadens the geographical scope beyond the largely European and North American examples discussed here. Moreover, the emphasis of most chapters is clearly placed on the 1920s, when enthusiasm for transnational action was evident in many different domains. However, as Patricia Clavin argues, this does not mean that we should neglect the 1930s. Indeed, examples such as the Peace Ballot organised by the League of Nations Union (McCarthy) and the role of anti-slavery internationalism during the Abyssinia Crisis (Ribi) demonstrate how even at a time of mounting international tensions, there are transnational movements and ideas worth exploring. Over the past few years, many historians have discussed the ways in which transnational history might be written.9 The chapters in this volume provide

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some examples of the points from which such an enquiry might start. Some authors take national associations as a launch pad for their discussions, pointing out that these associations were not only dependent on their national context but also shaped by their engagement with international structures (Rietzler, McCarthy, Laqua and – with regard to the British AntiSlavery and Aborigines Protection Society – Ribi). Another starting point is the work of associations that were explicitly construed as ‘international’ ones (Couperus, Sandell, and – with regard to the Bureau International pour la Défense des Indigènes – Ribi). A third approach focuses on the League of Nations system and its engagement with non-state actors (Decorzant, Beyersdorf, Ribi), or on concepts in which the League played a key role (Zaidi). The protagonists in this volume are quite different from the political leaders who normally dominate historical accounts of the interwar years. An international civil servant like Arthur Salter, head of the League’s Economic and Finance Organisation, does not normally feature in books about the interwar years, but here he is mentioned in three of the chapters (Decorzant, Beyersdorf, Zaidi). Similarly, the efforts of Adriaan Pelt, Director of the League’s Information Section, are mentioned with regard both to the financial stabilisation of Austria (Beyersdorf ) and to the re-establishment of transnational municipal links (Couperus). Rietzler speaks of American foundations  – but one of the main protagonists, Raymond Fosdick, also appears in the essays by Clavin and Zaidi. The pacifist Hellmut von Gerlach is a key figure in my contribution on the Deutsche Liga für Menschenrechte, yet he also acted as a correspondent for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, one of the main subjects of Rietzler’s essay. These crossconnections underline that the volume explores a transnational constituency which involved League of Nations staff, politicians and academics. Taken together, the essays demonstrate the scope of transnational aspirations, as caricatured so strikingly by Emery Kelen. However, they also reveal the manifold constraints of ‘interwar internationalism’. The latter included the competition and rivalry between different transnational ventures, the need for funding and institutional backing, as well as the cultural/civilisational notions which informed and delimited European internationalism. Finally, the chapters illustrate how the transnational related to the national – how internationalism responded to and was influenced by the nationalisms of the period.

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1. 2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

Alois Derso and Emery Kelen, Le Testament de Genève: Dix années de coopération internationale. Histoire du people élu (Geneva, 1931). The other figures shown on the image are Hendrikus Colijn (Dutch Prime Minister at various times in the 1920s and 1930s, head of the Dutch delegation to the League of Nations, 1927–29, and chairman of the Economic Commission of the World Economic Conference, 1933); the British Labour politician William Graham (Financial Secretary to the Treasury in 1924, and President of the Board of Trade, 1929–31); the Spanish politician Alejandro Lerroux (president of the League of Nations Council during his first stint as Minister of Foreign Affairs in 1931); Werner von Rheinbaben (a Reichstag deputy for the German People’s Party, and German delegate to the League of Nations General Assembly); and the Dutch diplomat J.F. Beelaerts Van Blokland. On the role of such schemes in the wider context of Europeanism in the interwar years, see Carl H. Pegg, Evolution of the European Idea, 1914–1932 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1983), esp. pp. 76–87. For instance, Sally Marks’s handy survey of international relations in the interwar period, The Illusion of Peace: International Relations in Europe, 1918– 1933 (2nd edn.; Basingstoke, 2003), says relatively little about the League of Nations and the efforts of non-state actors. Similarly, focusing on the 1930s, Piers Brendon’s acclaimed book on the interwar years, The Dark Valley: A Panorama of the 1930s (London, 2000), hardly comments on the League or the efforts of internationalists. Surprisingly, the textbook by Anthony Best, Jussi Hanhimäki, Joseph Maiolo and Kirsten Schulze, International History of the Twentieth Century and Beyond (2nd edn.; London, 2008), hardly discusses the League beyond a few comments on post-war peacemaking and colonial policies. Patricia Clavin, ‘Defining transnationalism’, Contemporary European History, vol. 14, no. 4 (2005), pp. 421–39; Gunilla Friederike Budde, Oliver Janz and Sebastian Conrad (eds.), Transnationale Geschichte: Themen, Tendenzen und Theorien (Göttingen, 2006); Akira Iriye, Global Community: The Role of International Organizations in the Making of the Contemporary World (Berkeley, CA, 2002). The entries in Pierre-Yves Saunier and Akira Iryie (eds.), Palgrave Dictionary of Transnational History (Basingstoke, 2009) treat a great variety of subjects, going far beyond the role of non-state actors in international politics. However, the Dictionary also includes many entries which exemplify this approach to transnational history. For a survey of recent work in this field, see Susan Pedersen, ‘Back to the League of Nations?’, American Historical Review, vol. 112, no. 4 (2007), pp. 1091–117. For examples of work in different fields, see for example Jasmien Van Daele, ‘The International Labour Organisation (ILO) in past and present

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8.

9.

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research’, International Review of Social History, vol. 53, no. 3 (2008), pp. 485– 511; Sandrine Kott, ‘Une “communauté épistémique” du social? Experts de l’OIT et internationalisation des politiques sociales dans l’entre-deux-guerres’, Genèses, no. 71 (2008), pp. 26–46; Patricia Clavin and Jens-Wilhelm Wessels, ‘Transnationalism and the League of Nations: understanding the work of its Economic and Financial Organisation’, Contemporary European History, vol. 14, no. 4 (2005), pp. 465–92; Susan Pedersen, ‘Metaphors of the schoolroom: women working the Mandates system of the League of Nations’, History Workshop Journal, no. 66 (2008), pp. 188–207, and idem, ‘The meaning of the Mandates system: an argument’, Geschichte und Gesellschaft, vol. 32, no. 4 (2006), pp. 560–82. Both Zara Steiner’s monograph The Lights that Failed: European International History, 1919–1933 (Oxford, 2007) and Robert Gerwarth’s edited volume Twisted Paths: Europe, 1914–1945 (Oxford, 2007) have helpful chapters on the League of Nations, one of these (‘Europe and the League of Nations’, in Gerwarth (ed.), pp. 325–54) written by Patricia Clavin. For the pre-1914 manifestations of internationalism, see Martin Geyer and Johannes Paulmann (eds.), The Mechanics of Internationalism: Culture, Society and Politics from the 1840s to the First World War (Oxford, 2001). Akiria Iriye, Cultural Internationalism and World Order (Baltimore, MD, 1997). E.H. Carr dismissed many of Iriye’s protagonists as ‘idealists’ in his The Twenty Years’ Crisis, 1919–1939 (London, 1939). More recently, however, the role of several League supporters has been reconsidered, partly as a result of the interest in the origins of the discipline of international relations; see David Long and Peter Wilson (eds.), Thinkers of the Twenty Years’ Crisis: Interwar Idealism Reassessed (Oxford, 1995). See for instance Deborah Cohen and Maureen O’Connor, ‘Introduction: comparative history, cross-national history, transnational history – definitions’, in idem (eds.), Comparison and History. Europe in Cross-National Perspective (London, 2004), pp. ix–xxiv; Christopher Baily et al., ‘AHR conversation: on transnational history’, American Historical Review, vol. 111 (2006), pp. 1440–64. On the relation between transnational and social history, see for instance Jürgen Osterhammel, ‘Transnationale Gesellschaftsgeschichte: Erweiterung oder Alternative?’ and Albert Wirz, ‘Für eine transnationale Gesellschaftsgeschichte’, both in Geschichte und Gesellschaft, vol. 27, no. 3 (2001), pp. 464–79 and 489–98 respectively; cf. Marcel Van der Linden, Transnational Labour History (Aldershot, 2003).

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Conceptualising Internationalism

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INTRODUCTION Conceptualising Internationalism Between the World Wars

Patricia Clavin

During the past decade, the field of transnational history has ‘grow’d like Topsy’. Harriet Beecher Stowe’s hugely popular anti-slavery novel, Uncle Tom’s Cabin, which gave life to both the young slave girl Topsy and this common expression, also offers a fictional insight into the marginalised voices and international phenomena that historians have sought to recover by adopting a transnational approach.1 The study of anti-slavery activism in the United States is being transformed by contextualising its history into a wider appreciation of international anti-slavery activism, at a sub-state level, around the world.2 The study of transnational connections (or, as some would have it, ‘transnational’, to emphasise its cross-national quality), was a marked feature of the international history of finance and economics, migration and business history for most of the 20th century. However, the approach was given an important boost by the ‘transnational turn’ of the 1990s, which opened up the study of connections at a supra- and sub-state level into new fields of history in the search for l’histoire croisée or Transfergeschichte.3 This emerged from the determined attempt of French and German historians to refocus historical study away from a preoccupation with ‘the nation’ or with comparisons between nations, such preoccupation being itself understood as an important methodological challenge to histories written as part of the process of nation-building. Instead, transnational history has sought to stress the entanglement of peoples, ideas, technologies and economies with

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cultural, political and social movements. But these new transnational histories demonstrated that borders are not so easily dissolved, and that nations, and comparisons made between them, remain an important concern. The main pioneering texts in the United States, France and Germany were written with limited reference to one another, and in transnational history the study of entanglement has also become one of delimitation and ‘othering’. Fragmentation and conflict also formed important parts of the story as the forces of attraction and repulsion often became deeply intertwined. Transnationalism in practice It is generally accepted that the term ‘transnational’ first surfaced in a discussion of migration and identity in the United States in 1919, although new work on its Begriffsgeschichte has attempted to identify its origins alongside those of modern internationalism in the 19th century.4 If 1919 was the point when the term first gained currency, then it shares the same starting point as many chapters in this volume. From then until the 1950s ‘transnational’ was primarily taken to mean ‘extending or having interests beyond national bounds or frontiers’.5 The term was re-energised in the 1970s by political scientists preoccupied with the phenomenon of globalisation,6 and by a new breed of historians influenced by a culturallyorientated methodology interested in ‘comparing concepts without simply comparing nations’.7 A definition of transnationality was adopted by American scholars of international relations, who used the term to describe ‘contracts, coalitions and interactions across state boundaries’ that were not directly controlled by the central policy organs of government.8 In all cases, at least one of the members of a transnational relationship represented a non-governmental organisation, in an encounter that spans three or more countries. (It is a perspective also adopted by most of the contributors in this volume.) By the early 1990s, studies of sub-state dynamics in international relations were, in turn, bolstered by historians interested in drawing out the variety of connections or ‘border crossings’ at levels both below and above that of the nation-state (sub- and supra-levels).9 Part of transnational history’s undoubted appeal is its capacity to connect and absorb fields of historical enquiry that were hitherto discrete. But as a number of chapters in this volume illustrate, transnational connections do not necessarily break down frontiers. Some transnational encounters seek to exploit or even reinforce barriers. For the historians of the interwar period whose path-breaking research is showcased here,

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transnationalism in the interwar period is a force that takes life inside nation-states. The ‘nation’ does not stand in opposition to transnationalism as a border-crossing understanding of the latter term implies, but rather is an essential element in shaping the phenomenon. The histories of transnational encounters in the interwar period therefore tell us as much about the national contexts which condition and inscribe them as they do about the world they seek to reshape. At the same time, the search for the transnational recovers aspects of international history long lost to view – the history of the anti-slavery movement, the co-ordination and integration of European road and electricity networks, the role of philanthropic organisations in funding scientific research, and the emergence, following Paul-André Rosental and company, of the ‘diplomacy of expertise’.10 Many of these connections are fundamental to shaping the international history of the period after the Second World War. They speak to the emergence of the new emphasis on continuities of global history that stretch across the period from 1929 to 1973, challenge the caesura of the Second World War and dispute a narrative which characterises the 1930s as a period of ultranationalism in which no spirit of internationalism could survive. One challenge to transnational history is the different preoccupations that underpin historians’ explorations of their subject. For cultural historians, charting the existence of cross-border encounters is what matters. In David Thelan’s words, it describes ‘how a particular phenomena passed over the nation as a whole, how it passed across the nation, seeing how it bumped over natural and manmade features, or how it passed through transforming and being transformed.’11 For economic, financial and business historians, the fact of transnational or international encounters is much less remarkable, because the economic history of a nation is always configured in an international context: no nation’s economy is an island. Economic boundaries are always porous, a point best illustrated by the regime that sought to make its nation the exception to the rule: National Socialist Germany. While Hitler’s regime may have craved autarky, the complex system of barter arrangements in the 1930s, and the rush to conquer territory in Central and Eastern Europe to make good the privations autarky exercised, proved that economic selfsufficiency was a fiction.12 Economic historians are primarily interested in measuring the ebb and flow of these encounters and assessing their value. The need to demonstrate utility is a concern which surfaced powerfully in the rhetoric of international and transnational organisations seeking to

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legitimate (and frequently to re-legitimate) their role in international society. Historians have long struggled to break free from both the search to exculpate or condemn the history of the League of Nations in this period. New work in the field of the transnational history of international organisations, exemplified also in this volume, has reinvigorated the once moribund field of international history. The study of how the League facilitated the creation of epistemic communities, for example, has demonstrated there is more to its history than the popular caricature of its farcical disarmament programme.13 For many international historians, power plays an important part in their analyses, although they are not always explicit about its role, and although its impact can be particularly difficult to measure or locate in the diffuse setting of a transnational network (differing, perhaps, from an intergovernmental setting). Transnational connections need to be separated out from the attempt to dominate, on the one hand, and the will and ability to resist, on the other. Power, of course, comprises different elements – economic, financial, strategic or cultural – situated in relationship to one another. Yet the character and impact of power in a transnational context can be very different to that found in an inter-national or intergovernmental setting. The essays in this volume challenge easy assumptions about the impact of hard power in the interwar period. The arsenals a nation-state could command did not always play a decisive role in intergovernmental meetings or negotiations. The book demonstrates that international encounters are far richer and more diverse than are captured in the notion of diplomatic meetings. Characterised in this period by the very large number of nationstates engaging one another in a multi-polar world, such meetings did not generate a fixed or agreed hierarchy of power. The transnational impact on the international relations of the interwar period also poses important questions for international and transnational organisations. How did this fluid and dynamic context shape the role of international organisations such as the League, and the cadre of professional civil servants it helped to create in this period? Was the role of the Secretary-General of the League of Nations, for example, really an ‘Office Without Power’?14 My own research into the transnational network of economists created by the Economic and Financial Organisation (EFO) offers a complicated picture. While financial, economic and military power helped to determine which countries played the most decisive role in international (intergovernmental) meetings, superior scientific expertise, whether in economics or statistics, produced a different definition of power and

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its location in this transnational network. The Estonian Ragnar Nurkse, the Dutchmen Jan Tinbergen and Tjalling Koopmans, and the Austrian Gottfried Harberler, for example – men with very different personal and professional backgrounds and widely differing political views – all made decisive contributions to the network of expertise put together by the League and to the history of 20th-century economic thought, from national bases that were somewhat short on conventional power. In this story, the power of ideas and social contacts seem much more important and carry with them different questions: what were the boundaries of the network’s power, and when did that power dissipate? I would argue, for example, that the intellectual power of the EFO lived on far longer than the international organisation that helped generate it, or the social network that sustained it, but also that the intergovernmental dimension of its work was essential to EFO’s intellectual reach. But, as the chapters of this book demonstrate, it is not easy to generalise. The relationship between a transnational community of experts and the history of intergovernmental relations is complex. It may be that transnationalist encounters generate a paradox of outcome: transnational networks and epistemic communities need coherent nations and intergovernmental cooperation to have its biggest impact. Making sense of internationalism The sub-title of this volume, ‘Transnational Ideas and Movements Between the World Wars’, provokes a critical response to the framing of transnational thought and action in the language of the 21st century, but the book’s main title and many of its chapters evoke instead the term ‘internationalism’. In the world of globalisation and transnationalism, the reference to ‘internationalism’ seems curiously old-fashioned or obscure. There are few present-day invocations to internationalism, and even these are more about the past than the present, such as the title of the magazine published by the American branch of the International Communist Current, Internationalism.15 The communist movement’s relationship to internationalism is absent as a concern in many histories of internationalism in the first half of the 20th century. But there is no doubt communism played a central role as a defining ‘other’ in the liberal internationalism of the interwar period that was embodied, for example, in the League of Nations or the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Indeed, the etymology of ‘internationalism’ lies in the aspiration for world peace, in the notion of

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world citizenship inscribed in institutions like the League of Nations, which for some of its advocates lay in aspirations for democratic globalisation through the creation of a world government.16 For others, of course, effective internationalism and peace were best secured by respect for the sovereignty of nations and a federal structure for world relations. Unlike so-called ‘proletarian’ internationalism, liberal internationalism embodied more theoretical contradictions – internationalism and imperialism, the primacy of the nation-state – in the minds of its advocates. The practice of international communism, too, was beset by these ambiguities. Like communist internationalism, liberal internationalism had its crusaders, and a language associated with that crusade. Indeed, the term ‘internationalism’ is a word shared, in various forms, by many other widely-used languages; by being adopted in this way, ‘internationalism’ represents the value of the practice that it defines. The process of becoming what one seeks to define is also captured by the chapters of the book: in common with the field of transnational studies as a whole, it brings together historical topics and theoretical fields which all too often form separate specialisms or sub-groups within the subject. Social science, engineering and economics are all grist to the mill here, and the authors of the chapters represent a wide variety of educational and national backgrounds and of institutional affiliations. The study of transnationalism is itself a vehicle for transnationalism. How often, for example, does the history of science or gender find itself in the same volume as the history of finance or public diplomacy? This multi-disciplinarity opens up the opportunity to identify connections across and between subjects that lie otherwise unseen, but it also poses interesting intellectual and conceptual challenges. Continuities and discontinuities The two World Wars serve as the bookends of the volume, although many contributions focus on the 1920s. It was a period in which the world, in the words of the Director of the International Labour Organisation (ILO), Albert Thomas, seemed ‘big with new ideas’.17 It promised a future, in the imagination of Raymond Fosdick, the short-lived American UnderSecretary-General of the League of Nations that ‘belonged to new creative ideas and not to men whose eyes are bloodshot from the past’.18 For both men, the Paris Peace Conference was an obvious starting point: it established the League of Nations and satellite organisations like the ILO and the

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League of Nations Health Organisation, which provided front-row seats at the creation of new intergovernmental forums that regenerated established transnational networks as well as creating new ones. But this book questions how far the year 1919 marks a concrete change in internationalism, and draws out how links to the pre-war years are more important for some areas of internationalism than others. The International Labour Conference in Berlin in 1890, for example, presaged the ILO’s work on a variety of labour issues, including the treatment of child labour. It brought together representatives of national governments, leading industrialists and academic experts in the field of labour, and enjoyed the support of a large and quite sophisticated secretariat.19 The League of Nations is the implicit starting point for many of the studies, which explore how the norms and practices of this novel institution were forged from the architecture of international and transnational relations that preceded it. In this same vein of trying to explore the paradox of outcomes in the international history of this period, it is important to ask how the failures of the League facilitated the emergence of new forms of international action, or transnational connections elsewhere. To give a concrete example from 1919: the battles on Capitol Hill over American membership of the League, for example, quickly cut the lines of intelligence between American internationalists and those reconfiguring the architecture of international relations in Europe. These obstacles caused the transnational network to be reshaped, in response to the failure of intergovernmental cooperation. In 1919, the League’s Secretary-General Eric Drummond was instructed that important communications to American internationalists who were not part of the administration were better facilitated by messages sent via the British Embassy to non-governmental US agencies, rather than through the State Department.20 The latter now had to be seen to be neutral. Here, transnational connections came to the rescue where intergovernmentalism failed, and these practices in turn eventually came to reshape the content and character of League practices. As League membership and credibility fell away in the 1930s, American non-governmental agencies stepped into the breach. The Carnegie Endowment became one of a number of important American paymasters of the League, and the priorities and research timetables of NGOs came to influence and modify the research and political agenda of the League and, more generally, the character of internationalism.

8

Internationalism Reconfigured

Actors and institutions There is also a strong sense of a generational transition in this history: the baton of internationalism being passed to the Americans in the later 1930s, thus helping to establish the agenda of American globalism practised in the Second World War, the Cold War and beyond. It is also clear that much of the earlier energy of internationalism resided in the francophone world, embodied in men like Albert Thomas and Aristide Briand, with Germany an important beacon for labour activism.21 Whether writing in 1919 or 1939, the battle for internationalism adopted a self-conscious generational language: ‘we will never have another chance – at least not in this generation – to initiate an international project on so hopeful a basis’; and when America fails the League ‘our generation of America has betrayed its own children … it is the tragedy of the next generation.’22 Given that histories of transnational networks centre more on people than institutions, the chapters in this book raise important questions on the chronology of internationalism and of the mid-20th century more generally, a chronology hitherto determined by the two World Wars, whether one takes a Eurocentric view on when the wars began and ended or a global one.23 The essays ask questions about the origins and legacies of internationalism, and also attempt to integrate personal and social histories with the history of intergovernmental and non-governmental institutions. Social history demands a different historical tool kit to that usually deployed by institutional historians. It invites us to consider in much greater detail, for example, the motivations and context which shape the ideas and performance of our leading actors. New theories – notably new theoretical work on cosmopolitanism, such as Sidney Tarrow’s formulation of ‘rooted cosmpolitanism’ – can help us to situate the nation in relation to the internationalism of individuals.24 The issue of how national identities shape an individual’s internationalism remains a crucial challenge, and one which is rather similar to the priority accorded to the sovereign rights of nation-states in the constitution of the League of Nations. Political scientists believe that international actors remain loyal to the political priorities of the nation-state from which they are recruited to act on the international stage.25 A number of essays in this volume test this notion, and avoid inadvertently clumping actors together into undifferentiated national or international categories. It is possible to argue that whatever its claims to universality, the League of Nations was a very European institution, although by the late 1930s and during the war years it was also important in facilitating cooperation between

Conceptualising Internationalism

9

Central and South American states. If we remain sensitive to regional and national proclivities, it will help us bring out the connective ties between global organisations and regional ones. There are important connective strands between the League and the European-centred institutions that emerged after the Second World War. One such strand which has emerged in my own work is the link the between the League of Nations and the European Economic Community. Both institutions emphasised the importance of agriculture, in general, and the role of the peasant farmer in particular, to Europe’s future economic, political and physiological health. In short, aspects of the Common Agricultural Policy had their origins in the interwar period.26 But the lessons and policies defined by the League were not confined to post-war Europe; they also spilled over into plans for agricultural development elsewhere, and as a result open up the wider question of how we might map transnational/international links around the world. Although the book’s predominate focus is on Europe, the chapters by Marie Sandell and Amalia Ribi extend beyond the ‘West’, while Waqar Zaidi and Katherina Rietzler explore the entanglement of scientific-technological and philanthropic relations across the Atlantic. These authors address the central question of transnational history: how should historians relate different parts of the world, or communities within nations or regions, to one another and to the global whole? The book’s notional end point is also important, and questions whether we are right to see internationalism ending with the outbreak of the Second World War. Most of the agencies which shaped transnational encounters in the interwar period did not die in 1939: the League lived on in Geneva, albeit in a truncated form, while some of its agents and agencies, notably the EFO and the ILO moved to North America (the USA and Canada respectively). The Rockefeller Foundation, too, became an element in the reshaping of American foreign policy during the war. At the same time, the character that this internationalism took on in wartime is very different in quality to that evident in the decade after the First World War. In the 1920s, internationalism was strongly characterised by its claims and aspirations to international democracy. Picture the various ethnic groups, and the regiments of women, marching on Geneva to secure and protect their rights. This, and the League’s commitment to openness and inclusivity, however much it might have fallen short of them, was an important part of its bid for international support. As one American League enthusiast put it: ‘The American people – the people of all democracies – are instinctively

10

Internationalism Reconfigured

suspicious of public business conducted behind closed doors.’ For the League to succeed, he believed, it needed ‘to marshall the faith and belief of the common people, understanding and sharing in the plans and purposes of their leaders. If the proceedings of the Council are surrounded with secrecy, if the sole information to the public is through a series of colorless and empty communiqués, the confidence of the people in the sincerity of the enterprise will be undermined.’27 The League’s claim to be some sort of international parliament was echoed in its structure, notably in the Assembly and Council, and also formed part of the institution’s public presentation of its activities. But this claim to democracy inflated expectations that were bitterly dashed in the 1930s, and from the beginning also raised important fears regarding its intentions. American statesmen were not alone in their fear of misconception abroad that the League might be ‘some sort of super-government and that there is something in the Covenant which subtly transfers authority in our national concerns from Washington to Geneva’.28 The aspect of the League’s work which thrived in the 1930s and continued through the Second World War was the technocratic side of its agenda. Here, health care, labour conventions, economic intelligence gathering and the co-ordination of transportation and energy networks all spring to mind. Technocracy, therefore, was not just about optimising production but seen as a means of addressing problems of social instability and conflict, unemployment, disease and economic depression.29 The examples of the Puricelli plan for a coordinated network of motorways across Europe and the discussion of how to create an integrated European supply grid for electricity might be both coordinated and used to facilitate internationalisation (both initiatives date from 1927).30 Here social and intellectual networks were made concrete, and energised. But much of this technocratic internationalism ran counter to the democratic internationalism it sought to promote. It was conducted in a rarefied and technical language by specially selected experts, and, in some instances, as in the field of financial cooperation, it needed covert diplomacy rather than transparency to be effective. Of course, the technocratic aspects of internationalism sought to generate support for the cause – an integrated motorway network was seen by its supporters as a powerful incentive to keep trade free, and vaccination programmes sponsored by pooling national expertise at an international level as an incentive to keep migration and social barriers down.

Conceptualising Internationalism

11

It is the technocratic side of interwar internationalism, and its structures, that survived the Second World War largely intact. But what happened to the popular enthusiasm that defined the creation of new institutions of globalism after the First World War? Where did the people go? The immediate answer, of course, is that it was one of the many victims of the Cold War. But beneath this collapse also lay the history of international relations in the interwar period, which had brought the League to its sticky end. Technical cooperation, facilitated by the diplomacy of expertise, was much easier to effect than inter-state cooperation and the practical cementing of a global sense of ‘humanity’ that emerges in the modern world beyond the differences of culture, location and wealth.31 The reflections of one of the most active servants of interwar internationalism, the Briton Alexander Loveday, who ended his career as director of the EFO of the League of Nations and was in charge of League operations in the USA in the Second World War, are instructive. Writing in the late 1950s, Loveday reflected that the practice of interwar internationalism, while not always effective, was hugely creative because ‘before the war it was the practice to appoint advisory bodies composed of individuals acting in a personal capacity entrusted with the task of examining questions dispassionately’. In the post-World-War era, by contrast, ‘the political organs of international institutions compose such bodies as a rule only of persons who receive prior instructions from their governments and bargain rather than discuss. The best solution is rarely sought, only the easiest compromise.’32 At the same time, he was forced to recognise that while étatisme stifled creativity and limited the authority of the international civil servant in comparison with his (or her?) national counterpart, the shift in power ‘from the legislature to the administration in national governments greatly increased the scope for international cooperation’. There was no escaping the primacy of the state and the nation in determining the character of transnational and international encounters. Reflecting on his 40-year career as a servant of internationalism, Loveday was never in any doubt as to the vibrancy of internationalism before the Second World War. The exciting new research that fills the pages of this book gives us the opportunity to see if he was right.

12

Internationalism Reconfigured Notes

1.

2.

3.

4.

5. 6. 7.

8. 9.

10.

Harriet Beecher Stowe, Uncle Tom’s Cabin; or Life Among the Lowly (Boston, MA, 1852); for an example of its transnational impact see Anna Brickhouse, ‘The writing of Haiti; Pierre Faubert, Harriet Beecher Stowe, and beyond’, American Literary History, vol. 13, no. 3 (2001), pp. 407–44. For example, see David Huw, ‘Transnational advocacy in the eighteenth century: transnational activism and the anti-slavery movement’, Global Networks: A Journal of Transnational Affairs, vol. 7, no. 3 (2007), pp. 367–82. Deborah Cohen and Maura O’Connor, ‘Introduction: comparative history, cross-national history, transnational history – definitions’, in Cohen and O’Connor (eds.) Comparison and History: Europe in Cross-National Perspective  (New York and London, 2004); David Thelan, ‘The nation and beyond: transnational perspectives on United States history’, Journal of American History, vol. 86, no. 3 (1999), pp. 965–74; Thomas Bender, Rethinking American History in a Global Age (Berkeley, CA, 2002), pp. 1–21. Kiran Klaus Patel, ‘Überlegungen zu einer transnationalen Geschichte’, Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft, vol. 52, no. 7 (2004), pp. 628–30. For the term’s older roots, see Madeleine Herren, ‘Sozialpolitik und die Historisierung des Transnationalen’, Geschichte und Gesellschaft, vol. 32, no. 4 (2006), pp. 542–59; Akira Iriye and Pierre-Yves Saunier, The Palgrave Dictionary of Transnational History (London, 2009); Pierre-Yves Saunier, ‘Learning by doing: notes about the making of the Palgrave Dictionary of Transnational History’, Journal of Modern European History, vol. 6, no. 2 (2008), pp. 159–80. Patricia Clavin, ‘Defining transnationalism’, Contemporary European History, vol. 14, no. 4 (2005), pp. 421–39. Susan Strange, ‘Transnational relations’, International Affairs, vol. 52, no. 3 (1976), pp. 333–45. Pierre-Yves Saunier, ‘Taking up the bet on connections: a municipal contribution’, Contemporary European History, vol. 11, no. 4 (2002), pp. 512– 14. Robert O. Keohane and Joseph S. Nye (eds.), Transnational Relations and World Politics (Cambridge, MA, 1981), p. xi. See for example Sebastian Conrad, Das Kaiserreich transnational: Deutschland in der Welt, 1871–1914 (Göttingen, 2004); John Brewer and Frank Trentmann (eds.) Consuming Cultures, Global Perspectives: Historical Trajectories, Transnational Exchanges (Oxford and New York, 2006); Matthew Connelly, Fatal Misconception: The Struggle to Control World Population (Cambridge, MA, 2008). Thomas Cayet, Paul-André Rosental and Marie Thébaud-Sorger, ‘How international organisations compete: occupational safety and health at the ILO, a diplomacy of expertise’, Journal of Modern European History, vol. 7, no. 2 (2009), pp. 174–94. The development of social scientific networks has

Conceptualising Internationalism

11. 12.

13.

14.

15.

16. 17. 18. 19.

20. 21.

13

been the focus of particularly concentrated study recently. See for example the special issue ‘Health and Safety at Work: A Transnational History’, Journal of Modern European History, vol. 7, no. 2 (2009); the special issue ‘Sozialpolitik transnational’, Geschichte und Gesellschaft, vol. 32, no. 4 (2006); Dominque Marshall, ‘Children’s rights and children’s action in international relief and domestic welfare: the work of Herbert Hoover between 1914 and 1950’, Journal of the History of Childhood and Youth, vol. 1, no. 3 (2008), pp. 351–88. On technology between the wars, see the special issue ‘Technological Innovation and Transnational Networks: Europe between the Wars’, Journal of Modern European History, vol. 6, no. 2 (2008). Thelan, ‘The nation and beyond’, p. 968. Royal Institute of International Affairs, The Balkan States: A Review of the Economic and Financial Development of Albania, Bulgaria, Greece, Romania and Yugoslavia since 1919 (Oxford, 1939). Patricia Clavin, ‘Europe and the League of Nations’, in Robert Gerwarth (ed.) Twisted Paths: Europe 1914–1945 (Oxford, 2007; 2nd edn. 2008), pp. 325– 54. Barros did attempt to take on the challenge, but in a rather conventional way. See James Barros, Office Without Power: Secretary-General Sir Eric Drummond, 1919-1933 (Oxford, 1979). See at http://en.internationalism.org/index.php, accessed 20 March 2008. Paul Krugman’s Pop Internationalism (New York, 1996) seeks to challenge what he sees as an overly simplistic approach to the ways in which the relationship between the national and the international economy is defined. ‘Internationalism’, in Oxford English Dictionary, at OED Online, accessed 5 October 2009. International Labour Organisation and Albert Thomas, The International Labour Organisation and the First Decade (London, 1931), p.12. Raymond B. Fosdick, Letters on the League of Nations: From the Files of Raymond B. Fosdick, (Princeton, NJ, 1966), p. 21. M. Finnemore and K. Sikkink’s work on norm entrepreneurs might be useful here. They argue for three stages of normalisation of novel social concepts: ‘norm emergence’, then ‘norm cascade’ and finally ‘norm internalisation’. Each of these stages has its own combination of actors, motivations and dominant mechanisms. Finnemore and Sikkink, ‘International norm dynamics and political change’, special issue ‘International Organization at Fifty; Exploration and Contestation in the Study of World Politics’, International Organization, vol. 52, no. 4 (1998), pp. 887–917. Fosdick, Letters on the League of Nations, p. 65. See for example Victor-Yves Ghebali, ‘Before UNESCO and the WHO’, Contemporary European History, vol. 11, no. 4 (2002), pp. 659–63; Sandrine Kott, ‘International Labour Organisation’, Encyclopaedia of Europe (New York, 2006).

14 22. 23.

24.

25.

26.

27. 28. 29. 30.

31. 32.

Internationalism Reconfigured Fosdick, Letters on the League of Nations, pp. 123–5. The key distinction, of course, being the outbreak of war between China and Japan in 1937, as opposed to a European war beginning with the invasion of Poland in 1939. Sidney Tarrow, Rooted Cosmopolitans: Transnational Activists in a World of States (Cornell, NJ, 2001); Eleonore Kofman, ‘Figures of the cosmopolitan’, Innovation: The European Journal of Social Sciences, vol. 18, no. 1 (2005), pp. 83–97, offers an interesting exploration of the ways in which cosmopolitanism may be interpreted as positive in the privileged national but seen as negative and problematic in the migrant. Bertjan Verbeek, ‘International organizations: the ugly duckling of international relations theory?’, in Bob Reinalda and Bertjan Verbeek (eds.), Autonomous Policy Making by International Organizations (London, 1998), p. 22. Patricia Clavin and Kiran Patel, ‘The role of international organisations in europeanization: the case of the League of Nations and the European Economic Community’, in Martin Conway and Kiran Patel (eds.) Europeanization in the Twentieth Century: Historical Approaches (Basingstoke, 2010). Fosdick, Letters on the League of Nations, p. 6. Ibid, p. 116. Charles Maier, In Search of Stability: Explorations in Historical Political Economy (Cambridge, 1987), pp. 19–69. Johan Schot and Vincent Langendijk, ‘Technocratic internationalism in the interwar years: building Europe on motorways and electricity networks’, Journal of Modern European History, vol. 6, no. 2 (2008), pp. 196–217. Gary Bass, Freedom’s Battle: The Origins of Humanitarian Intervention (New York, 2008). Alexander Loveday, Reflections on International Administration (Oxford, 1958), pp. 36–7.

Internationalist Approaches to Science and Technology

17

LIBERAL INTERNATIONALIST APPROACHES TO SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY IN INTERWAR BRITAIN AND THE UNITED STATES Waqar Zaidi

A peculiar approach to international relations gained unprecedented prominence in Britain and the United States during the interwar period. Diplomatic initiatives, political rhetoric and an emerging academic discipline – the study of international relations – became suffused with newly emergent and newly invigorated ideas on war and international organisation. It became increasingly common to hear that war was now too dangerous to contemplate, and that international organisation was needed to deal with this and with the ever-increasing list of challenges too internationally widespread for any one sovereign state to tackle. Those thinking about international relations in this way included journalists, civil servants, writers, diplomats, politicians, academics and lawyers. Their ideas circulated transnationally, through books, journal articles and the media, through participation in international organisations and through newly emergent organisations dedicated to liberal internationalist causes, such as the League of Nations or collective security. These individuals and organisations became deeply concerned with addressing not only the problems of peace and justice between nations, but also transnational transport and communications, unhindered trade and commerce, and international law and regulation. They believed that increasing international interdependence and the development

18

Internationalism Reconfigured

of civilisation were reducing the sovereignty of the nation-state. But they also emphasised the retarding effects of nationalism, which they portrayed as a powerful negative force acting contrary to interdependence, and a leading cause of war.1 In this chapter I explore, first, the ways in which science and technology were imagined in the interwar liberal internationalist worldview on international relations, and incorporated into that worldview; and secondly, how they related to particular diplomatic proposals and initiatives.2 By doing so, I intend to go beyond the current literature, which in the British case has examined the incidence of science and technology in interwar internationalrelations theorising, but only in limited ways.3 There has been more recognition of science and technology in the American case, though with a strong focus on social lag and the presumption of American exceptionality.4 I will show that, in both Britain and America, liberal internationalist thinking on the impact of modern science and technology was much more prevalent than has been recognised. I will also illustrate how this prevalence extended not only to theoretical discourse, but to wider public rhetoric, particularly in relation to policy proposals for aviation and collective security.5 International communications In relation to science and technology, the theme most evident in interwar international-relations thinking is that of modern transport and communications inventions bringing the world together. International intercourse increasingly relied on such modern inventions, the argument went, which required international organisation to run efficiently and to fulfil their potential. The increased intercourse between nations, engendered by these inventions, also necessitated the formation of modern and international technical and administrative organisations. The growing importance of such inventions, and the changes they were creating, were, many believed, a defining feature of modern international relations. Leonard Woolf and J.A. Hobson were early and influential theoretical exponents of this view in Britain, and their writings in this regard capture much of the subsequent thinking of the interwar period. Woolf ’s 1916 Fabian Society pamphlet International Government argued that international connections increasingly required international government, some forms of which were already emerging. He presented ‘communications’ (‘the Post, the Telegraph, the Telephone, the Railway, the Steamship, the Motor Car, and the Aeroplane’) and science (primarily international associations, congresses and

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19

personal communication) as two areas where this was occurring. The growth of these new methods of communication was itself presented as a driving force behind such international interconnection.6 Hobson, in his Towards International Government (1915), couched his call for such government in terms of the need to give ‘governmental aid and supervision’ to international ‘scientific and expert co-operation’.7 As Woolf also considered, this cooperation was required in order to deal with the growing complexity and internationalisation of international activity, though in Hobson’s thinking international trade and commerce figured more prominently as driving forces. Such intervention, argued Hobson, would allow ‘political internationalism’ to catch up with an ‘economic internationalism’ which was based on ‘a most elaborate network of commercial, physical and personal communications’ and through which Britain had historically built its wealth and power.8 In the United States, this type of theorising was most influential in the work of Reinsch and Potter. The diplomat and political scientist Paul S. Reinsch’s Public International Unions (1911) saw such bodies as the harbinger of a ‘new internationalism’. In a detailed discussion on the relationship between these unions, communications and war he presented communications, ‘instrumentalities which are most essential to international intercourse, namely, telegraphic service, postal communication, and railways’, as essentially civilian and commercial in nature, yet likely to be ‘made use of by belligerents for military purposes’.9 He explained the reasons why a state at war may want to do this, but called for their return to their natural use after the war. His conclusions clearly stated the opposition between these ‘instrumentalities’ and the unions formed to nurture their development, on the one hand, and war (‘old-fashioned, cruel, and universally harmful’) on the other.10 Political scientist Pitman B. Potter’s Introduction to the Study of International Organization, which was first published in 1922 and went through numerous editions up to the post-World War Two period, also emphasised the need to create international organisations to deal with modern technical issues. A central theme was that modern international relations were characterised by a ‘modern cosmopolitanism’ created through international intercourse and a ‘commercial revolution’. This was enabled by the latest ‘scientific inventions’: The basic causes for this commercial revolution, comparable only with the commercial revolution of the thirteenth, fourteenth, and fifteenth centuries, are scientific inventions, such as steam locomotion on sea and

20

Internationalism Reconfigured land, and the electric telegraph. The railroad, the steamship, and the telegraph have reorganized the world.11

This ‘cosmopolitanism’ was so powerful that if nations failed to cooperate internationally, they ‘[would] be overrun against their will by a unified world civilization’.12 The focus on international issues as peculiarly modern and technical, and the argument that they required solution through international technical organisations, became commonplace among British and American liberal internationalists in the interwar period, particularly among supporters of the League of Nations. Political scientists such as H.R.G. Greaves, in the face of criticism of the League’s ineffectiveness in political and diplomatic matters, turned to the argument that the organisation’s real contribution to peace was through the work of its technical committees and international technocrats. By the early 1930s he and others had increasingly come to claim that this technical work was able, at least partially, to overcome the entrenched nationalism of the League’s member states, and thus to solve global problems of a technical nature.13 Modern scientific war The destructiveness of World War One impelled many liberal internationalists to understand warfare in terms of the birth of new scientific armaments and, sometimes, the advent of a new scientific way of warfare. Modern warfare was assumed to be significantly different from the pre-1914 variety, different in such a way as to require fundamental revisions in modern international relations. This difference was attributed to the invention of new armaments, which were assumed to be civilian in origin and indicative of a new scientific, industrial and offensive method of warfare. These gave an overriding advantage to the aggressor, adding further instability to the already anarchic state of international relations. Yet the very same weaponry – indeed, the very same science – was held up as offering the solution to the pressing problem of peace. It could be used by international government to institute and police international law and order amongst nations. An industrial magnate and Liberal MP, David Davies (later a Baron), was an influential British exponent of this view throughout the 1920s and 1930s, and put it at the heart of his magnum opus on international relations, The Problem of the Twentieth Century: A Study in International Relationships, published in 1930.14 Davies presented a lengthy articulation of the argument

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21

that World War One had ushered in a new era of destructive warfare based on modern, science-based weapons: [A]ll the discoveries and inventions which ultimately were responsible for the introduction of modern weapons were primarily intended to increase the wealth of the world and to expand its peaceful industries. They were the products of civilian brains and occupations and were undertaken to promote the interests and the welfare of humanity. Transformed for the purposes of war, they became a menace to civilisation and a trap for the unwary. Instead of ministering to the economic needs of the peoples, they provided them with the most formidable engines of destruction with which they might lash and tear each other to pieces … Science has thus assumed a dual personality – the one benevolent, the other malignant …15

He presented Stephenson’s steam engine, the aeroplane, the Haber process, the caterpillar tractor and the wireless as examples of ‘scientific discoveries and inventions’ which had been increasingly applied to warfare after 1914.16 The most powerful of these new weapons, and indeed all weapons, he considered to be ‘aeroplanes and poison gas’.17 In support of these arguments he cited a number of well-known and recent works which emphasised the significance of new weapons of war, and the consequent need for diplomatic and military reform – Churchill’s The World Crisis, 1916–1918, Noel-Baker’s Disarmament, J.F.C. Fuller’s Tanks in the Great War, 1914–1918 and Victor Lefebure’s The Riddle of the Rhine.18 Many others also put forward these arguments – most prominently the academic classicist G. Lowes Dickinson and the political scientist and diplomat Philip Noel-Baker. Many (including Noel-Baker) expressed these views in support of their contention that disarmament was now such a technical matter that it required specialised experts for its negotiation and implementation.19 Davies went much beyond this literature, however, by developing a typology of armaments based on this understanding. Civilian discoveries and inventions originally intended for peaceful purposes had been, for the first time, converted into weapons of war. These new scientific weapons were subsequently a divergent development from traditional weaponry, which was less scientific and not based on peaceful inventions.20 The crucial dividing line was 1914:

22

Internationalism Reconfigured The era of intense application of scientific discoveries to the art of war may be said to have begun in 1914. During the four years which followed it reached its highest pitch of intensity, culminating in the gigantic preparations for the anticipated campaign of 1919 … The year 1914 may therefore be taken as the dividing line which, broadly speaking, marks the vital change in the character of weapons. The years which followed may be described as the golden age of military scientists. The principle of differentiation can therefore, with few exceptions, be applied by contrasting the naval and military establishments of 1914 with those which exist to-day.21

This new science-based warfare was one of the central problems of modern international relations, he reasoned, but could be solved through the very weapons which threatened mankind. The principle of ‘differentiation of weapons’ became the cornerstone of Davies’s attempts, over the next ten years, at the reconstruction of international relations through disarmament, collective security and international organisation. By ceding these new scientific weapons to international organisation, leaving the older and less effective ones in the hands of nations, it was now possible, he declared, to abolish war. The machine age Whereas Davies, and many others, focused on World War One or the late nineteenth century as the transformational moment for modern international relations, there were others who placed this moment in an earlier time. Prominent amongst them was the American historian, Leaguesupporter and Carnegie Endowment member James T. Shotwell. Shotwell, a longstanding believer in the supreme importance of science for the shaping of human civilisation,22 had by the 1920s also begun to characterise the modern age as a new post-Industrial Revolution era of the ‘machine’. His argument that ‘The Industrial Revolution and the machine will inevitably furnish the central text of those histories of the future which deal with our era’ became a reoccurring theme in Shotwell’s talks across America, particularly at engineering colleges, in the 1920s and 1930s.23 In his view: There have been two great epochs in the history of our civilization; that of ancient Greece and that of today. The one produced critical thought; the

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23

other applied it to produce machines. Besides these two contributions to secular society, all others rank as minor.24

From the late 1920s onwards Shotwell extended this thinking into international relations. Science’s transformation of international relations was due to its enablement of rapid change: ‘For as the law of the pre-scientific era was repetition, that of the scientific era is change. This is what we mean by the dynamic character of our age.’ A ‘dominant historical character’ of the scientific age was the growth of a ‘world community’. The global spread of free trade and industrialisation had brought with it peace.25 Wars were simpler in the pre-scientific era, but in this new ‘industrial and financial era of today’: all the processes in war were ‘speeded up’. Moreover, not only does war involve the entire economic structure of the belligerent nations, but it spreads like a contagion throughout all those other countries whose economic life has become involved with that of the nations at war.26

Science’s transformation of war since the Industrial Revolution had been gradual, culminating in the First World War, where raw materials and industries were as important as fighting forces: This change in the practice of war, which makes armies merely the distributors of the destruction stored up for them in factories, began with the invention of gunpowder in the beginning of modern history and has kept pace with all the intensified progress of the Industrial Revolution. Indeed, science applied to war has perhaps outstripped invention and discovery in the fields of peace.27

Science was the foundation of modern civilisation, and so mankind should not ‘limit science, because the measure of advance in those very chemical arsenals is the measure of advance in modern civilization’:28 The same scientific processes are the very ones, with but minor changes in their apparatus, that are the modern equivalents for the armies of Caesar or Tamerlane. The same scientists, with the same formulae, can make

24

Internationalism Reconfigured both things – the life-saving and the life-destroying – in one and the same laboratory.29

Instead, throughout the 1920s and 1930s he maintained that a scientific approach to politics, through the application of ‘intelligence’, offered the solution to war: There is a place in the world for intelligence. The day is coming when science will pass from engineering to statecraft. It has just begun to tear down the old local frontiers of our loyalties to ancient things and is now creating truer loyalties to ourselves and our State by making them part and parcel of a great world problem.30

By stressing the industrial revolution in their rhetoric on international relations, internationalists such as Shotwell were able to strengthen their arguments for greater international interdependence, and thus a need for greater American involvement in international organisations (such as the League of Nations), against isolationist criticism. The notion of a ‘machine age’ was already a commonplace in discussions on the rapid pace of domestic social change (within the United States).31 Using this metaphor in debates on international relations allowed internationalists to connect the national to the international more strongly, by arguing that the factors driving change in domestic and international affairs were the same. Cultural lag One important way in which internationalists incorporated science and technology into their worldview was through the concept of a ‘cultural’ or ‘social lag’. This concept functioned as a master trope: structuring the various other claims about technology and society, and allowing internationalists to deal effectively with the rebuttal that there was precious little internationalism to be found in relations between states. In the interwar years the lag argument was to be found in the writings of almost every British and American liberal internationalist one might care to name. There were several somewhat different, though related, types of lag arguments. The first focused on armaments, asserting that modern sciencebased technologies had advanced beyond society’s means to understand or control their effects. The second focused on the newest forms of mechanical and electrical transport and communications which, it was reasoned, had

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brought the world closer together, leaving man’s social and/or governmental institutions unable to deal with the consequences. In both these arguments, nationalism, nation-states and traditional militaristic thinking were seen as increasingly redundant relics of an earlier era of civilisation, which were now holding back scientific and technological advance. Nationalism was more dangerous now than ever before because modern communications were putting peoples into increasing contact with each other, causing their nationalist impulses to clash, and leading to war. Thirdly, many declared that society as a whole lagged behind technical advance: that people did not understand the potential, dangers and effects of modern science and invention. Often, diplomats and politicians were characterised as embodying the worst of this lag, of being even more backward and nationalist than the masses around them. Fourthly, talk of culture or society lagging behind modern scientific technology merged easily into talk of man’s ‘intelligence’ or his ‘understanding’ of social affairs lagging behind his understanding of scientific and technical matters. Although the natural sciences allowed man to manipulate nature, it was argued, he was unable to do the same with society and international relations due to his lack of social-scientific understanding. If this understanding could be gained and the lag closed, the social effects of modern science and its applications could be controlled, and international government instituted. Norman Angell’s 1933 Nobel Prize acceptance speech, which bemoaned the lag between the ‘application of intelligence to the management of human relations’ and the ‘application of human intelligence to the management of matter’ is typical of this argument,32 which in turn was often distilled into a specific concern with the state of the political and social sciences – that it was these which lagged professionally, methodologically and financially behind the natural sciences.33 For many, these new sciences appeared to offer the theoretical grounding for an internationalist response to the world’s problems. Although their earliest use in international-relations writing was in Britain (prominently by Norman Angell in 1913, Alfred Zimmern in 1914 and Arthur Greenwood in 1916), arguments based on cultural and social lag arguments were elaborated in the greatest detail in the United States.34 A prominent example can be found in a widely read collection of lectures by the prominent internationalist Raymond B. Fosdick, The Old Savage in the New Civilization (1928). Fosdick argued that man would not be able to control the great powers that modern science had put at his disposal unless the social sciences were developed too, allowing man himself to develop

26

Internationalism Reconfigured

in line with the effects of the ‘scientific revolution’. He lamented the gap between ‘the brilliant development of scientific knowledge on the one hand and the almost stationary position of our knowledge of man on the other’, and the ‘divergence between the natural sciences and the social sciences’. He called for the development of the social sciences, of ‘economics, political science, and sociology’ with ‘the same enthusiasm, the same approach, and something of the same technique that characterize our treatment of physics and chemistry’. In terms of international relations he was sure of what the outcome of such a development would be: the principle that the world we live in is an economic unit and that the process of integration and interrelationships has developed to a point where some international machinery like a league of nations is necessary to handle the common interests of mankind that overflow national boundaries’.35

In a letter to Paul Mantoux (the co-founder, along with William Rappard, of the Geneva-based Graduate Institute of International Studies), he noted that It is a platitude that the recent war, together with our stupendous scientific advances, such as transcontinental trains, fast steamers, airplanes, wireless, etc., have brought the nations practically to each other’s door-steps without having provided an adequate corresponding advance in their methods of dealing with each other. The relationships between nations since 1914 have been so fundamentally revolutionized that practically all the pre-war studies and theories have been swept by the board and a wholly new set of difficulties created.36

The lag argument was also central to John Herman Randall’s World Community, a significant American internationalist tract of the interwar period, which held that ‘the new means of communication which science has devised’ was the crucial driver behind the creation of a single global consciousness. Citing the works of prominent British and American internationalists, Randall asserted that within one century modern sciencebased communications had brought ‘us all together into one physical neighbourhood; we are living today on this planet in what amounts to one

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geographic community, thanks to all these new means of communication.’37 Whereas the ‘physical sciences’ had transformed the world in this way, the ‘social sciences’ remained underdeveloped. Referring to modern warfare, he noted: ‘It is this wide gulf between the brilliant development of the physical sciences on the one hand, and the almost stationary position of our knowledge of man, that presents to the twentieth century its profoundest problem.’ They had to be developed so as to stop society from ‘cracking under the strain’.38 He called for the increasing development of the same scientific method and spirit in the social sciences that has already found expression in the physical sciences, and a frank recognition that it is only though the scientific, rather than the older political methods, that the desirable changes can be brought about. To this end the social engineers and technicians … must be recognized and accepted for what they are – the trained and competent experts in their particular field of social control and social reorganization, to whom rulers and statesmen must look for light on the new problems that old methods and formulas have proved themselves unable to solve.39

For both Randall and Fosdick there existed a strong connection between this thinking and their internationalist activity. Foundations such as the Rockefeller, Fosdick believed (he was a Trustee from 1921 to 1948, and President from 1936 to 1948), were at the forefront of combating this lag.40 Randall set up his World Unity Foundation, active between 1927 and 1935, in order to foster his call for unity. Its World Unity Magazine (‘Interpreting the Spirit of the New Age’) was particularly well known, and published articles by both American and British internationalists. In Britain, meanwhile, the most popular exposition of the lag argument was probably by H.G. Wells in The Shape of Things to Come (1933). He used the argument in three ways in his description of the First World War. The first explained the onset of the war: on the one hand the ‘new means of communication and transport, and the new economic life … were necessitating the reorganization of human affairs as a World-State’. The world was, however, ‘already parcelled up’, leading to ‘steadily intensified mutual pressure to develop into more or less thinly disguised attempts at world conquest’.41 A second kind of lag explained the ‘peculiar frightfulness’ of the Great War – armaments had become much too advanced for the ‘small and antiquated disputes’ for which they were used.42 Lastly he observed

28

Internationalism Reconfigured

that man’s ‘social invention’ lagged behind ‘mechanical invention’ more generally, and not only in relation to war. This lag ‘reached its maximum in the twentieth century’.43 Liberal internationalism’s view of international relations came embedded with a history of international relations itself, and indeed a history of the development of human society. These histories played an indispensable role in contextualising and explaining the development of modern-day international relations, in making the prognosis for an internationalist future and in setting the stage for a powerfully rendered lag argument. The writings of British political scientist C. Delisle Burns provide a clearly distilled example of this. Burns’s Short History of International Discourse (1924) presented a progressive view of human society in which science played a central role in defining and propelling the advance of civilisation. Although born in the Enlightenment, science’s most profound global effect had finally arrived with the advent of science-based inventions in communications and transport after the Industrial Revolution. This allowed for greatly increased international intercourse, and the subsequent formation of international organisations such as the Universal Postal Union and the International Office of Public Health to deal with international issues which could not be tackled by nation-states alone.44 Burns’s International Politics (1920) provided a corresponding and contrasting history of the development of the system of inter-state relationships. These he saw as having developed through three periods: The first ends with the great international lawyers of the seventeenth century, the second with the French Revolution and the third with the European War, the effects of which still govern the situation. In international politics the first period is the age of diplomacy, the second is the age of the Balance of Power, the third is the age of nationalism and imperialism, sometimes in opposition, sometimes combined.45

Yet human intercourse had developed rapidly in the nineteenth century, leading to the opening of a dangerous lag between the system of international relations and the advancing reality of this intercourse: Almost independently of the state system, popular passions and political incompetence, the peoples of the world have been brought into much closer and more continuous contact. The third period to which reference

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is made above (1815–1919) has witnessed a material revolution. Communication has become easier and more rapid through telephones, telegraphs and wireless, as well as railways, steamships and aeroplanes. This has made a great part of the old diplomatic organisation simply ludicrous, since the ‘principals’ now communicate more effectively without representatives: but it has also made the methods of warfare more serious, because more rapid and more destructive.46

The solution was more international cooperation and intercourse rather than political attempts at peace. The nations of the world should focus on the ordinary work of peace in art, in science and in commerce. If people of many different nations learn to co-operate in such simple tasks as the conquest of disease and the control of natural forces, they will soon learn to value co-operation.47

Aerial internationalism The differing ways of thinking about science and technology noted above were not confined to international-relations theories or textbooks, but were actively mobilised in support of diplomatic and policy proposals. This is particularly true in the case of calls for the internationalisation of aviation, which came to be widespread in Britain and France by the early 1930s.48 Calls for the creation of some form of international police force to ensure international peace and security became increasingly prominent during and after World War One and in the 1920s. Internationalist supporters of collective security believed that such a force would not only significantly reduce the chances of war, but also curtail arms races and eventually lead to the withering of national military forces. Leading proponents, for example David Davies in Britain, initially imagined a multi-service force, but by the late 1920s had turned to make aviation the primary, and for most the sole, weapon of such a force. Indeed Davies’ Problem of the Twentieth Century was a plea for the creation of such an international air force, and the concurrent abolition of national air forces. By the early 1930s such proposals also incorporated the international control of civil aviation. Taking only military aviation out of the control of the nation-state was insufficient as that would leave civil aviation, which provided the potential for military aerial force, in national hands. Both civil and military needed to be internationalised together.

30

Internationalism Reconfigured

In proposals current in the early 1930s, a League organisation was to take control of international civil and military aviation. National air forces were to be disbanded, and national airlines either licensed and policed by an international air authority, or owned outright, along with factories and airports, by this international authority. These proposals were discussed at various League disarmament meetings in the latter half of the 1920s, and gained particular prominence during the 1932 Disarmament Conference in Geneva. They found their most significant support around the centre of the political spectrum in France and particularly Britain, where prominent organisations such as the New Commonwealth Society and the League of Nations Union advocated them through public lectures, conferences and publications, generating direct and indirect pressure on politicians. In France the proposals were prominent enough in pacifist circles by 1931 for the centre-right Tardieu ministry to adopt them as an opening negotiating position at the 1932 Geneva Disarmament Conference. In Britain, leading Labour and Liberal politicians came to espouse them openly for most of the 1930s. The proposals gained traction in Britain and France as they not only allowed for a way to curtail the growth of German military and civil aviation, but could easily be reconciled with growing British and French aerial armament. They found little support however amongst internationalists in interwar America. For them, convincing the American public of the need for membership of the League was hurdle enough, without also calling for a radical scheme for the reorganisation of aviation.49 The connection between these proposals and the liberal internationalist view on science and technology came about through the assumption that aviation was a product of modern science. The aeroplane, it was widely believed, was the latest in a line of inventions which brought the world closer together, and transformed modern warfare. Aviators were modern apolitical technical experts, untainted by nationalist or traditionalist impulses. The modernity, the transformative powers and the inherently international nature of aviation and the aeroplane would work its magic on international relations, if only this invention were freed from the shackles of the nation-state. The rhetoric of David Davies and his New Commonwealth Society provides many examples of this type of argument, but it was common much more broadly in liberal circles. It can be found for example in Clifford Allen’s radical liberal Next Five Years Group, which placed the internationalisation of aviation at the forefront of its foreign policy manifesto in the thirties. Jonathan Griffin, editor of the weekly news

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digest Essential News and a leading member of the Group, noted in his 1935 book on internationalisation: I see civilisation – by which I mean all that we value – in danger of being destroyed by precisely those gifts of science with which we can make it available, for the first time in history, to all men, and enrich it with their contribution. And yet civilisation can be saved and advanced by the intelligent use, now, of precisely that invention by which it is most menaced – aviation. Aviation is the key to security and disarmament. It must be used before the chance is gone.50

Commerce and economic efficiency were important too. For many decades prior to World War One, liberal thought had centred around an opposition between industry and trade on the one hand and war and militarism on the other. Central to this understanding was the assumption that modern science and industry were essentially civilian and peaceful in character, and that military developments were a perversion external to modern science itself. Salvador de Madariaga, the Spanish diplomat and League civil servant, based his call for the internationalisation of civil aviation on the premise that ‘Military and naval reasons warp, distort and even subvert economic laws at every turn’. Aviation, in order to develop to its fullest potential in an economically efficient and rational manner needed to be free from the control of nation-states. His 1929 book Disarmament noted that Great Britain has turned down the Channel tunnel scheme time and again, the last time under a Labour government, on the mere unfavourable advice of its Committee of Imperial Defence. The decisions of general staffs are wont to be inscrutable, but that which denies England and the Continent the immense benefits of a prompt and convenient land connexion by rail and road must be put in a class apart for its egregious absurdity … A similar case arises in connexion with aviation. Commercial aviation is kept going by military protection, But this protection is the reverse of a blessing in disguise. It is a curse in disguise. It prevents a clear and unprejudiced case for aviation being made on its civil merits only. Further, it maintains a kind of tutelage on civil aircraft construction, thus hindering the free development of civil aircraft design by imposing on it military specifications.51

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Internationalism Reconfigured

World War One, De Madariaga claimed, had accelerated the military development of this ‘new-born invention’ and so had, in effect, hindered its actual development, which was civilian and peaceful in nature.52 Internationalists drew upon a widespread view of aviators as modern, internationally minded, heroic yet technical individuals, allowing them to be portrayed as the precursors and eventual guarantors of an internationalist world order. The Fabian internationalist and political scientist G.E.G. Catlin declared in 1934 that in an international air force ‘the chivalry of honour and the cavaliers of glory are able to serve a cause of lasting good to humanity.’53 In response to criticisms that his proposed internationalised commercial air fleet could still be misused for national military purposes, Griffin fell back on to the international-mindedness of the modern international aviator/ technocrat: ‘The international fraternity of the world’s most skilled pilots and airway administrators will almost certainly be a strong factor making for peace generally, and in particular rendering the misuse of civil aviation almost impossible.’54 Internationalists also maintained that the internationalisation of aviation would create an internationalist fraternity of aviators that would transcend national difference. Davies argued that the ‘young men’ of an international air force would be able to overcome their national prejudices and serve together, just as they did in the ‘World Civil Service’ (the Secretariat of the League) and the French Foreign Legion.55 De Madariaga’s memoirs recalled that ‘if we developed a team of 40 to 50,000 pilots and mechanics of all nations, all working for the same line, their brotherhood would have been sufficient to ensure that not a single plane could be diverted to nefarious deeds.’56 Davies hoped that the force would double as a ‘world technical college of the highest standing’. Recruits would ‘undergo an intensive educational and scientific training’ and emerge from service as ‘graduates of a world university superbly equipped with technical knowledge … and fully trained to embark upon a civilian career in the allied professions and industries’.57 On returning home they would spread the ‘international spirit’, reducing ‘national outlook’ world-wide.58 In making such arguments, these internationalists were expressing hopes of technocratic rule already in wide circulation, and drawing on widely-held notions of aviators as brave, noble and courageous heroes.59 Such thinking was also not too far from similar thinking about scientists and technologists. For Randall, for example, scientists and technicians were the harbingers of his new internationalised ‘world order’. Through the ‘spirit of scientific investigation and the

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cooperation of many minds’ they would ‘foster the sense of a world unity’ leading to even better ‘scientific advance’.60 Much of this way of thinking about science, technology and international relations came together in the public rhetoric of Arthur Salter. Salter had worked on Anglo-American shipping co-ordination during the First World War, and was Director of the Economic and Finance Section of the League between 1922 and 1931. On his return to London in the 1930s he became a prominent propagandist for various internationalist causes, including lower trade barriers and international disarmament (even accepting appointment as a vice-president of the New Commonwealth Society). He often emphasised the industrial nature of modern society, and the significance of international technical organisations for international relations. In 1932 he argued in Foreign Affairs: The whole tendency of modern industrial development is towards a large scale organization which is only compatible with secure access to markets which are larger than those comprised within national frontiers. The economic life of the world, as it grows and finds expression through all the multitudinous activities of man, implies more and more world trade and a world order.

Technical experts, ‘whether they are scientists, or schoolmasters, or financiers, or industrialists, or trade unionists’, and meritocratic international technical organisations, ‘in science, education, finance, industry or labor conditions’ would lead to the withering away of international political disputes, and allow for the ‘basis of international relations’ to be ‘broadened’.61 In an April 1933 lecture delivered at McGill University (and published by Oxford University Press, as Modern Mechanization and its Effects on the Structure of Society), he argued, like Shotwell, that ‘The dividing line in human history is the Industrial Revolution and not the accelerated mechanization that accompanied and has followed the late war’.62 The lag thesis was prominent: The pace set by progress in scientific invention and improved industrial technique is too hot for man’s regulative control to overtake. And when it lags behind, every new progress in specialized activity is a new danger; every new access of power threatens destruction to what he has more than it promises increase. That is why mechanization is compelling, and will compel, profound changes in the whole structure of society.63

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Internationalism Reconfigured

In a series of talks for the BBC he explained how ‘Transport and Telegrams Transform the World’, and how the ‘entirely new problem of world government’ has been brought about by ‘scientific inventions, and especially those which have improved transport and the transmission of news …’. The ‘hurrying procession of train, steamship, motor-car, and aeroplane; of the telegraph, telephone, and wireless …’ were transforming the world. All was not rosy however: Science has given us a monster of illimitable power, to serve us or to destroy us. If we allow it, like a Frankenstein, to escape the control of our regulative wisdom, it will destroy us. But if we can keep control it can be the instrument of our salvation. The task of our age is to see that this Frankenstein remains our servant and does not become our master.

He called for a limited form of world government focused on tariffs and armaments, and imagined a techno-internationalist future in which delegates to the League of Nations in 1957 would travel by aeroplane and remain in instantaneous contact through wireless receiving-sets in their waistcoat pockets.64 Opponents Internationalists positioned themselves as being uniquely aware of the underlying drivers of change in international relations. Shotwell claimed that his conservative opponents, displaying ossified and out-dated worldviews, believed that the place of war in international relationships is not affected by the changes wrought in the economic and social life of the world by science. The world of nations today is held to be substantially the same as it has been throughout all modern times. The growth of communications between the nations, their increased trade and commerce, their overlapping financial and business dealings have left untouched their attitudes toward one another and may even accentuate their hatreds.

Only the interwar internationalists were aware of the transformations wrought in international relations by science and invention:

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Now the post-war peace movement, on the other hand, rests upon a different conception of history – that of the interdependence of nations, an interdependence which has been chiefly brought about through the inventions and discoveries of science … This marks it out from peace movements of the past.65

Those opposing liberal internationalist policies did indeed see the current state of international relations and war, and its future evolution, in a different way. In the United States isolationists denied that changes in transport and communications had or were transforming international relations. John Bassett Moore, a senior authority on international law and once a judge on the Permanent Court of International Justice (1921–28), noted in 1933: It is argued that increased population, industrialism, and interdependence, and the increased variety and speed of communications, have made neutrality increasingly ineffective, and have also made it likely that war, when it starts in any part of the world, will envelop the whole. In reality, the better and speedier the means of communications the more effectively can a government enforce its neutrality. That the enforcement of neutrality by the United States became easier and more effective with improvement in communications is as notorious as it was natural. The supposition that the recent great war is entitled to pre-eminence as a world war, that improved means of communication caused it to become so, and that it shows that every local war is now likely to cover the earth, is remarkably unfounded. It did not begin as a local war, but embraced all the European Great Powers and some of the lesser. It did not exceed the spread of all previous wars, or equal that of some of them. Its extent in no sense resulted from improved means of communication. The numerous local wars that have since occurred, but have remained local, clearly demonstrate that the supposed greater likelihood of spread is fanciful.66

He also attacked the ‘hasty supposition’ that ‘by various modern devices, by which men may more rapidly and more frequently communicate, and more quickly hurt or help one another, discordant races and peoples have been harmoniously united in thought and in action and in brotherly love’. Instead:

36

Internationalism Reconfigured Where congeniality is lacking, propinquity does not tend to create affection; on the contrary, it tends to breed hatreds. Where are today the danger spots of the world? They are coterminous countries. The French and the Germans have for centuries lived side by side. No artificial device is needed to enable them quickly to come into contact.67

Many on the Right, meanwhile, pointed to increasing overpopulation as a cause for conflict between nations and races, rather than any radical change in modern armaments. This grouping included many who opposed internationalised aviation, and instead supported a strong RAF, for example the Air Ministry lawyer James M. Spaight.68 Yet there were some important overlaps in thinking: opponents of internationalisation did not attack the notion that aviation was a modern and modernising international activity, or that it was a world-changing scientific invention in terms of both warfare and international communication. Rather, they argued that because of these qualities more national aviation was needed, as war was now more deadly, enemies more threatening and traditional armaments more obsolete. Many argued that strong national aviations might actually reduce international warfare through deterrence. Although international aviation would need to be organised and regulated at some time in the future, it was not possible to do so now.69 Some used this understanding of aviation, shared with liberal internationalists, to call for the development of aviation in the British Empire. P.R.C. Groves, once air correspondent for The Times, and editor of the Air League of the British Empire’s journal Air, in addresses to Chatham House on ‘The Influence of Aviation on International Relations’ (1927) and ‘The Influence of Aviation on International Affairs’ (1929) emphasised, like the internationalists, the positive integrative effects of civil aviation. Civil aviation would ‘tend to draw the nations closer together. It will facilitate the exchange of knowledge and ideas and will help to develop commercial discourse’.70 It would also ‘help emigration, make for an increase in the world’s prosperity, and tend to diminish population pressure’.71 Yet he used this understanding to plead for increased government spending on civil aviation within the Empire. Aviation allowed for a better integrated, more commercialised, more war-ready, and, he implied, better-controlled Empire. Aviation would offer ‘infinitely quicker communications, hence closer commercial intercourse and better political contact; in short greatly improved cohesion both in peace and war’.72 Commercial aviation was moreover of importance because of its potential use for military aviation.

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Groves emphasised the destructive and scientific nature of modern military aviation – ‘air power will be a terrific weapon, perhaps even the decisive weapon, in future warfare’.73 It was ‘the latest, swiftest, most scientific and the overriding form of force in Europe to-day’.74 Turning to Europe, he argued that collective security, ‘owing to the speed of the aerial arm, and the terrific nature and scope of its attack’, would not work.75 Britain thus needed to develop its potential for both military and civil aviation. ‘Her stabilising and civilising influence is primarily dependent on communications, and aerial transport offers her a new means to spread her ideas.’76 Some on the Left shared much of liberal internationalism’s view of international relations, though with crucial differences. For example, the Anglo-Indian Marxist intellectual R. Palme Dutt’s major work on international relations, World Politics 1918–1936, published in 1936, also subscribed to the notion that modern transport and communications inventions were bringing nations closer together. Echoing liberal discourse he too warned of the dangers of modern scientific warfare, and the need for eventual international organisation. Yet for him the current international crisis arose from the uneven development of capitalism, and not from nationalism or overpopulation. Although international organisation was required for international peace, aviation was not to play any significant role in it. Instead, its future basis was to be the unity of the global working class and ‘colonial peoples’.77 Similarly, Christopher Caudwell, described by Valentine Cunningham as ‘perhaps British communism‘s sharpest intellectual of his time’,78 attacked the notion that salvation could only arrive through technocrats, scientists or ‘divine bureaucrats’ arriving from Utopia ‘in a glittering aeroplane to put things right from above’. The new world order was not to be moulded by them but rather from below, by the ‘sole creative force of contemporary society’, the proletariat.79 Modern inventions, contended George Orwell in his Tribune column in 1944, had not in any way caused ‘the abolition of distance’ or ‘the disappearance of frontiers’. Rather, the effect of modern inventions has been to increase nationalism, to make travel enormously more difficult, to cut down the means of communication between one country and another, and to make the various parts of the world less, not more dependent on one another for food and manufactured goods … So long as the world tendency is towards nationalism and totalitarianism, scientific progress simply helps it along.80

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These technologies might ultimately have positive internationalist effects under socialism, but ‘we haven’t Socialism. As it is, the aeroplane is primarily a thing for dropping bombs and the radio primarily a thing for whipping up nationalism.’81 Conclusion We are apt to assume that visions of a future techno-world government were the preserve of fantastical writers such as H.G. Wells. Yet the appeal to the transformative powers of modern science, technology and technocracy was common even amongst those with less radical visions of future international organisation. For some, only powerful transnational technical organisations could manage modern problems which cut across national boundaries. For others, the same sciences which threatened mankind could be used to protect him from war. Although liberal internationalism’s conception of science and technology’s relationship to international relations was distinctive, this imagining did not stand entirely apart from more widely-held views of technology’s effects on world affairs. It took inspiration from, and indeed incorporated, widespread views about the efficacy and modernity of particular recent innovations (such as aviation), and presented this efficacy as evidence for its own prognosis on international affairs. Recognising the widespread nature of this way of thinking about science and technology is, I would argue, a big step forward in our understanding of the interwar period, and of liberal internationalism within it. These years are thought of as the ‘morbid age’, a ‘dark valley’ littered with the ‘lights that failed’, in which liberalism and liberal societies reacted with fear and despair to the ‘crisis’ in international relations.82 Yet this chapter points to hope and opportunity – the hope that modern science and scientific invention were transforming the world and propelling its social and political organisation, and the opportunity offered by the image of the aeroplane for the materialisation of these otherwise abstract ideas. Rather than any sense of desperation and despair, the techno-scientific thread in interwar international-relations thinking was driven as much, if not more, by an enthusiasm for the possibilities of modern science and scientific invention.

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Notes For invaluable comments on earlier versions of this article the author would like to thank David Edgerton, Daniel Laqua and Katharina Rietzler. 1.

2.

3.

4. 5.

6.

7. 8. 9. 10. 11. 12.

For (somewhat different) understandings of liberal internationalism relating to the interwar period, see David Long, Towards a New Liberal Internationalism: The International Theory of J.A. Hobson (Cambridge, 1996), pp. 65–9; Casper Sylvest, ‘Continuity and change in British liberal internationalism, c. 1900–1930’, Review of International Studies, vol. 31, no. 2 (2005), pp. 263–83; Andrew Williams, Liberalism and War: The Victors and the Vanquished (London, 2006), p. 25. There were important connections to and continuities with not only liberalCobdenite but also imperialist-federalist thinking on international relations in the late nineteenth century. These are outside the scope of this chapter, but some sense of them can be gleaned from Duncan S.A. Bell, ‘Dissolving distance: technology, space, and empire in British political thought, 1770– 1900’, Journal of Modern History, vol. 77, no. 3 (2005), pp. 523–62; Per A. Hammarlund, Liberal Internationalism and the Decline of the State: The Thought of Richard Cobden, David Mitrany, and Kenichi Ohmae (Basingstoke, 2005). Long, Towards a New Liberal Internationalism, p. 174; idem, ‘International functionalism and the politics of forgetting’, International Journal, vol. 48, no. 2 (1993), pp. 355–79; Peter Wilson, The International Theory of Leonard Woolf: A Study in Twentieth-Century Idealism (London, 2003), pp. 58–61; Peter Wilson, ‘Leonard Woolf and international government’, in David Long and Peter Wilson (eds.), Thinkers of the Twenty Years’ Crisis: Inter-War Idealism Reassessed (Oxford, 1995), pp. 122–60. David Steigerwald, Wilsonian Idealism in America (Ithaca, NY, 1994). I have limited this survey to these two countries, though this way of thinking did extend beyond them – a Norwegian example is Christen Collin, The War Against War and Enforcement of Peace (London, 1917). Leonard Woolf, International Government: Two Reports by L.S. Woolf Prepared for the Fabian Research Department, Together with a Project by a Committee for Supernational Authority that Will Prevent War (London, 1916), pp. 99, 116, 197–200. J.A. Hobson, Towards International Government (London, 1915), pp. 116–7. Idem, Democracy After the War (London, 1917, repr. 1998), pp. 196–7. Paul S. Reinsch, Public International Unions (Boston, MA, 1911), pp. 176. Ibid, p. 186. Pitman B. Potter, An Introduction to the Study of International Organization (New York, 1922), p. 309. Ibid, p. 314.

40 13.

14. 15. 16. 17. 18.

19. 20. 21. 22.

23. 24. 25. 26. 27. 28. 29. 30.

31.

32. 33.

34.

Internationalism Reconfigured H.R.G. Greaves, The League Committees and World Order: A Study of the Permanent Expert Committees of the League of Nations as an Instrument of International Government (Oxford, 1931). David Davies, The Problem of the Twentieth Century: A Study in International Relationships (London, 1930). Ibid, pp. 297–339, quotation from pp. 318–9. Ibid, pp. 316–7. Ibid, p. 275. Ibid, pp. 305, 309, 312, 316; Winston Churchill, The World Crisis. Vol. 3, 1916–1918 (London, 1927); Philip Noel-Baker, Disarmament (London, 1926); J.F.C. Fuller, Tanks in the Great War, 1914–1918 (London, 1920); Victor Lefebure, The Riddle of the Rhine: Chemical Strategy in Peace and War (London, 1921). G. Lowes Dickinson, War: Its Nature, Cause and Cure (London, 1923), pp. 38–9; Noel-Baker, Disarmament, pp. 40–1. Davies, The Problem of the Twentieth Century, pp. 297–339. Ibid, pp. 326–7. See for example James T. Shotwell, ‘History’, Encyclopaedia Britannica, vol. XIII (11th edn. 1910); idem, The Religious Revolution of Today (Boston, 1913). Idem, ‘Mechanism and culture’, The Historical Outlook, vol. XVI, no. 1 (1925), pp. 7–11. Ibid. James T. Shotwell, War as an Instrument of National Policy. And its Renunciation in the Pact of Paris (London, 1929), pp. 27–30. Ibid, pp. 33, 36. James T. Shotwell, On the Rim of the Abyss (New York, 1936), pp. 89–90. Idem, ‘The problem of disarmament’, Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, vol. 126, no. 1 (1926), pp. 51–5. Idem, War as an Instrument of National Policy, p. 37. Idem, ‘International peace’, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, vol. 78, no. 4 (1938), pp. 545–50. A similar argument can be found in idem, Intelligence and Politics (New York, 1921), p. 27. Lewis Mumford would later recall that talk of a ‘machine age’ was widespread in the USA by the early 1930s, and that he himself had taught a course on it at Columbia University. See ‘Introduction to the Harbringer Edition’, in Lewis Mumford, Technics and Civilization (New York, 1934, repr. 1963). See Carl Gustaf Stanesson (ed.), Les Prix Nobel en 1934 (Stockholm, 1935). This argument was advanced by E.H. Carr in The Twenty Years’ Crisis 1919– 1939: An Introduction to the Study of International Relations (London, 1939, repr. 2001), pp. 3–9. Alfred Zimmern, ‘German culture and the British Commonwealth’, in R.W. Seton-Watson et al., The War and Democracy (Port Washington, 1914, repr.

Internationalist Approaches to Science and Technology

35.

36.

37. 38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48.

49.

50.

41

1970), pp. 348–82; Norman Angell, The Great Illusion: A Study of the Relation of Military Power to National Advantage (4th edn. New York, 1913), p. xiii; Arthur Greenwood, ‘International economic relations’, in A.J. Grant et al., Introduction to the Study of International Relations (London, 1916), pp. 66– 112. Raymond Blaine Fosdick, The Old Savage in the New Civilization (Garden City, NY, 1928), pp. 36–7, 40, 44. The first lecture in this collection was entitled ‘Our Machine Civilization’. Idem, A Proposal to Establish an Institute of International Research (undated, c. 1926), File 11, Box 154, Paul Mantoux Papers, Archives of the League of Nations, Geneva. My thanks to Katharina Rietzler for pointing me towards this material. John Herman Randall, Sr, A World Community: The Supreme Task of the Twentieth Century (New York, 1930), pp. 9, 21; italics are Randall’s. Ibid, pp. 50, 52–3. Ibid, pp. 87–8. Raymond B. Fosdick, The Story of the Rockefeller Foundation (New York, 1952), p. 228. H.G. Wells, The Shape of Things to Come (London, 1933, repr. 1993), p. 55. Ibid, p. 56. Ibid, p. 36. C. Delisle Burns, A Short History of International Intercourse (London, 1924). Idem, International Politics (London, 1920), p. 8. Ibid, p. 11. Idem, A Short History, p. 153. Other transport and communications technologies also attracted such internationalist thinking. These are beyond the scope of this chapter, but for a flavour see Noel Newsome, ‘International radio’, Political Quarterly, vol. XVII, no. 1 (1946), pp. 48–60; Johan Schot and Vincent Lagendijk, ‘Technocratic internationalism in the interwar years: building Europe on motorways and electricity networks’, Journal of Modern European History, vol. 6, no. 2 (2008), pp. 196–217. For more on this topic, see S. Waqar H. Zaidi, ‘Technology and the Reconstruction of International Relations: Liberal Internationalist Proposals for the Internationalisation of Aviation and the International Control of Atomic Energy in Britain, USA and France, 1920–1950’ (unpublished PhD thesis, London, 2009), ch. 2; Brett Holman, ‘The Next War in the Air: Civilian Fears of Strategic Bombardment in Britain, 1908–1941’ (unpublished PhD thesis, University of Melbourne, 2009), chapter 5. Jonathan Griffin, Britain’s Air Policy: Present and Future (London, 1935), p. 147. See also idem, World Airways – Why Not? A Practical Scheme for the Safeguarding of Peace (London, 1934); Clifford Allen, Britain’s Political Future: A Plea For Liberty and Leadership (London, 1934), pp. 116–7. On the Next

42

51. 52.

53. 54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59.

60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68.

Internationalism Reconfigured Five Years Group see Next Five Years Group, A Summary of the Book ‘The Next Five Years’: An Essay in Political Agreement (London, 1936); Arthur Marwick, ‘Middle opinion in the thirties: planning, progress and political “agreement”’, English Historical Review, vol. 79, no. 311 (1964), pp. 285–98. Salvador de Madariaga, Disarmament (London, 1929), pp. 7–8. See also idem The World’s Design (London, 1938), pp. 64–9. Idem, Disarmament, pp. 7–8. For other examples of arguments against internationalist militaristic perversion, see Noel-Baker, Disarmament; idem, ‘The international air police force’, in Noel-Baker et al. (eds.), Challenge to Death (London, 1934), pp. 206–39. This argument was commonplace in interwar Britain; for a non-internationalist example, see H. Burchall, ‘The Politics of International Air Routes’, International Affairs , vol. 14, no. 1 (1935), pp. 89–107. G.E.G. Catlin, ‘The roots of war’, in Noel-Baker et al (eds.), Challenge to Death, pp. 21–39. Griffin, Britain’s Air Policy, pp. 48–9. From a speech at Chatham House: David Davies, ‘An International Police Force?’, International Affairs 11 (1932), pp. 76-99. Salvador de Madariaga, Morning without Noon: Memoirs (Farnborough, 1973), pp. 251, 274. Davies, The Problem of the Twentieth Century, pp. 448–9. Idem, pp. 449, 700. Particularly in the interwar work of H.G. Wells. The image of aviators in England is explored in more detail in David Edgerton, England and the Aeroplane: An Essay on a Militant and Technological Nation (Basingstoke, 1991). Randall, A World Community, p. 54. Arthur Salter, ‘The future of economic nationalism’, Foreign Affairs, vol. 11, no. 1 (1932), pp. 8–20. Idem, Modern Mechanization and its Effects on the Structure of Society (London, 1933), p. 9. Ibid, pp. 8–9. Arthur Salter, ‘World government’, in Mary Adams (ed.), The Modern State (London, 1933), pp. 253–316. Shotwell, On the Rim of the Abyss, pp. 41–4. John Bassett Moore, ‘An appeal to reason’, Foreign Affairs, vol. 11, no. 4 (1933), pp. 547–88. Ibid. James M. Spaight, An International Air Police (London, 1932), p. 13. For a sense of the academic literature on overpopulation as a cause of war, see A.B. Wolfe, ‘The population problem since the World War: a survey of literature and research (concluded)’, Journal of Political Economy, vol. 37, no. 1 (1929), pp. 87–120.

Internationalist Approaches to Science and Technology 69.

70. 71. 72. 73. 74. 75. 76. 77.

78. 79. 80. 81. 82.

43

See for example J.M. Spaight, ‘Self-defence and international air power’, Journal of Comparative Legislation and International Law, vol. 14, no. 1 (1932), pp. 20–9; and the addresses by Groves noted below. P.R.C. Groves, ‘The influence of aviation in international relations’, Journal of the Royal Institute of International Affairs, vol. 6, no. 3 (1927), p. 152. Ibid, p. 152. Ibid, p. 143. Ibid, p. 148. P.R.C. Groves, ‘The influence of aviation in international affairs’, Journal of the Royal Institute of International Affairs, vol. 8, no. 4 (1929), p. 305. Ibid, p. 304. Groves, ‘The influence of aviation in international relations’, p. 152. R. Palme Dutt, World Politics 1918-1936 (London, 1936). For his critique of overpopulation see idem, Fascism and Social Revolution: A Study of the Economics and Politics of the Extreme Stages of Capitalism in Decay (London, 1934, repr. 1974), pp. 27–9. Valentine Cunningham, ‘Sprigg, Christopher St John (1907–1937)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004). Christopher Caudwell, Studies in a Dying Culture (London, 1938), pp. 73– 95. George Orwell, ‘As I Please’, Tribune, 12 May 1944. Idem, ‘As I Please’, Tribune, 2 February 1945. Richard Overy, Morbid Age: Britain Between the Wars (London, 2009); Piers Brendon, The Dark Valley: A Panorama of the 1930s (London, 2000); Zara Steiner, The Lights That Failed: European International History, 1919–1933 (Oxford, 2005); Carr, The Twenty Years’ Crisis.

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EXPERTS FOR PEACE Structures and Motivations of Philanthropic Internationalism in the Interwar Years

Katharina Rietzler

When Raymond Fosdick, the long-time president of the Rockefeller Foundation, looked back in 1952 on his almost 40-year involvement with Rockefeller philanthropy, he declared that ‘the Foundation’s entire work in all fields has been aimed at the single target of world peace’.1 Although Fosdick’s insider account of arguably the most iconic of all American foundations is now more than half a century old, one of its basic claims is still alive: the notion that foundation philanthropy can help shape a peaceful international society. A recent edited collection on Rockefeller philanthropy maintains that ‘philanthropic leaders … recognized the importance of building social and cultural links among nations … to overcome the distrust, prejudice and political conflicts which had marked previous centuries of international relations’.2 However, this assertion remains rather vague – how exactly were these social and cultural links to be established? Was this really an explicit aim, who was to do the establishing, and how much importance was attached to national boundaries? Finally, what goals did foundation philanthropy share with internationalism? In this chapter, particular attention will be paid to the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, the Rockefeller Foundation and the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial, and to their activities in Europe and the United States. This essay will analyse which institutions and disciplines American foundations supported in order to promote peace, how they tailored their grant-giving to the new international structures that had emerged after the

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Great War, and to what extent they were influenced by American domestic politics. As unofficial yet powerful and well-connected non-governmental organisations, American foundations occupied a distinct place in interwar internationalism. Philanthropy and internationalism There were certainly numerous personal and financial links between American foundations and American internationalists in the interwar years. Historians have shown that the United States’ philanthropic elite was interwoven with that of the American internationalist movement, to the extent that it is almost impossible to examine one without at least having a look at the other.3 American foundation philanthropy emerged at a time when internationalism on both sides of the Atlantic had just experienced a period of optimism and expansion. During the Progressive era, a number of wealthy families established large philanthropic foundations; these adopted the structures of business organisations and had a professional staff. The new institutions distinguished themselves from other charitable activity by sharing a commitment to shaping public policy. Some expanded their ambitions beyond national borders, turning their philanthropic concerns into a transnational enterprise.4 The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace was founded in 1910, and had its roots in the pre-war peace movement. Its leaders belonged to a group of international lawyers and educators that had taken the helm of American pacifism at the time and pushed it in a more cautious and legalistic direction. The chief figures in the Endowment were former State Department solicitor James Brown Scott, Nicholas Murray Butler, the president of Columbia University, and Elihu Root, a former Secretary of War and Secretary of State.5 In the case of the Rockefeller Foundation, incorporated in 1913, and the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial, created in 1918, the strongest personal link with American internationalism was provided by Raymond Fosdick, who served on the executive committees and boards of trustees of all the important Rockefeller philanthropies. Fosdick, a Princeton graduate and protégé of Woodrow Wilson, had been involved in municipal reform as New York City’s Commissioner of Accounts before turning his attention to international affairs in the course of the Great War. In the interwar years, Fosdick never wavered in his support for the League of Nations and was a leading light in the American League of Nations Association. His most momentous contribution to American internationalism, however, can be

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said to lie in shaping, over several decades, the Rockefeller family’s outlook on world politics. He met John D. Rockefeller, Jr. when the latter made his first forays into social reform as the chairman of the so-called White Slave Grand Jury in New York City in 1910. Two years later, Rockefeller asked Fosdick to study police organisation in Europe and the United States, under the auspices of the Bureau of Social Hygiene, an entirely Rockefeller-funded research bureau, whose work in sex education was pioneering. After the war, Fosdick became Rockefeller’s personal lawyer and was heavily involved in the foundations funded by the family.6 Fosdick was not just an important figure in the Rockefeller philanthropies, he also advised family members on their personal giving, in particular in the areas of peace work, international understanding and research in international affairs. Frequently, such gifts complemented grants pledged by the Rockefeller Foundation or the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial.7 Patterns of grant-giving The beneficiaries of this philanthropic largesse were prominent organisations in the interwar internationalist movement, such as the Council on Foreign Relations, the Foreign Policy Association and the Institute of Pacific Relations.8 However, it is important to note that philanthropic grants went mostly to organisations which could make some claim to conducting research into international affairs. The foundations associated with the Rockefellers, in particular, were wary of supporting any venture which smacked of propaganda, and preferred research to purely educational work.9 One American research institution which received substantial support was the Bureau of International Research, of Harvard and Radcliffe College, which depended entirely on the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial and the Rockefeller Foundation for financial support for the duration of its existence (from 1924 to 1938). Some of the studies completed under the Bureau’s auspices became standard works, for example Sarah Wambaugh’s surveys of plebiscites or Raymond Leslie Buell’s work on colonial Africa.10 The plan for the Bureau had originated at the all-female Radcliffe College in 1923 as a project ‘to equip qualified women with the information and training which will enable them to become teachers and interpreters in the field of international affairs’. The proposal was inspired by the wave of democratisation of the immediate post-war period, in particular the enfranchisement of women in several countries.11 However, these democratising ambitions, and the special role reserved for women with

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regard to international understanding, faded as the Bureau became one of several institutions which promoted the production of authoritative expertise. In Europe, American foundations took a similar approach to that adopted in the United States. They gave grants to institutions which conducted research and teaching in the field of international relations. In practice, this covered mostly history, economics, political science and international law because, in the interwar years, international relations was not yet a clearly defined discipline, but rather one which was just beginning to be institutionalised at American and European universities. It did, however, exist as a distinct field of intellectual enquiry.12 Some European grant recipients were, like the Council on Foreign Relations, foreign affairs institutes which maintained research departments. These included the Institut für Auswärtige Politik in Hamburg and the Royal Institute of International Affairs in London. Others were institutions of higher education, for example the London School of Economics and the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva, both recipients of generous financial support from the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial during the 1920s. The Carnegie Endowment also collaborated with bodies which primarily trained diplomats and government officials, such as the École des Hautes Études Internationales at the University of Paris. Moreover, the foundations supported hubs for transnational expert exchange. The Academy of International Law at The Hague is a case in point. It was one of the most costly projects pursued by the Carnegie Endowment in the interwar years, from July 1923 holding summer sessions which attracted a multinational student body and the crème of the scholarly international-law community.13 American philanthropic foundations played a unique role in Europe, simply because there were no local organisations which could match their financial resources and which were willing to lend support to internationalist projects. This is why news of the creation of the Carnegie Endowment in 1910 had been greeted with enormous enthusiasm by European internationalists. Alfred Fried, co-founder of Germany’s first peace society and editor of the journal Die Friedenswarte, called the Endowment ‘a Christmas gift to the international peace movement’.14 Die Friedenswarte was not only read by pacifist activists but also by international lawyers and by others who regarded internationalism chiefly as an academic pursuit. In the interwar years, it was scholars, academic entrepreneurs and international organisations that

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most successfully laid claim to American philanthropic money in the name of international understanding.15 There were some European foundations, for example the Danish Carlsberg Foundation, which supported the production of knowledge in the field of international relations, but none could rival the wide-ranging activities, the organisational capacities and the vision of American philanthropy.16 But what was the foundations’ specific contribution? Was there such a thing as a distinct ‘philanthropic internationalism’ in the interwar years? Like others who might be labelled internationalists, foundation officers engaged with questions such as the relationship between nationalism and internationalism, the role of public opinion and a perceived need for technical expertise. Ultimately, foundation staff imagined the creation of a transnational elite of social-science experts who would mediate between governments and publics, and forge an international consensus on the major problems affecting world politics. Experts and expertise One of the basic assumptions of foundation staff concerned the role of experts and expertise in the international order. The Great War had, on the one hand, furthered democratic hopes and ambitions but on the other had propelled a new elite of unelected ‘experts’ to prominence, many of whom shaped the post-1919 international order and became international-relations professionals.17 To cite two examples: both the Council on Foreign Relations and the Royal Institute of International Affairs were formed in the context of the expert discussions of the American and British delegations at the Paris Peace Conference.18 Some of these experts reflected on the tension between the triumph of democracy and the ascendancy of a politics of expertise in the post-war world. Alfred Zimmern, who had been a deputy director of the League of Nations’ International Institute of Intellectual Cooperation during the 1920s, and later became the Montague Burton Professor of International Relations at Oxford University, regarded the control of experts by a court of public opinion as a key problem of contemporary democratic theory. Writing in 1930, Zimmern concluded that the quality of public opinion had indeed improved since the war, due to the efforts of professional and voluntary organisations, and that this opened up opportunities for the intelligent framing of foreign policies by ‘the common man’.19 At the same time, he praised the achievements of international expert committees which were independent of political constraints imposed by the nation-state: ‘The “glorious invention” here consists in the discovery that Committees of

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Experts function more satisfactorily on an international than on a national basis.’ At the League in particular, a real esprit de corps and a commitment to impartial inquiry had developed, unencumbered by national electoral politics.20 For Zimmern, politics and populist politicians were the enemy – if experts could educate and convince the public, a truly democratic and scientifically sound international order was possible. Zimmern was not the only one to highlight the supposedly innovative free thinking that went on in the sections of the League of Nations. The figure of the international expert was a popular one in the interwar years, and League officials often praised their own work ethic and impartiality. Frank Boudreau, a member of the League’s Health Organisation, portrayed the League of Nations as an ideal working environment for any expert committed to such noble goals: ‘Many thought that a Secretariat made up of the nationals of forty or fifty governments would become a veritable Tower of Babel, with national differences and prejudices arousing strife which would end in the destruction of all efficiency. Nothing could have been further from the truth.’21 League historians today conclude that some of the expert personnel of the technical organisations did indeed develop a distinct identity, and that nationality played a subordinate role when it came to choosing certain policies.22 Unsurprisingly, Raymond Fosdick also rated the technical work of the League highly. He described it as ‘a method of continuous international conference … It provides not only for the centralization and coordination of international machinery, but for its orderly and systematic development.’23 Like Zimmern, Fosdick preferred the impartial work of experts to ‘political maneuvering’ [sic] and regarded the League as an ideal forum where expert cooperation could result in the successful formulation of policies for an increasingly complex international system.24 To some extent, the belief on the part of foundation staff in the importance of expertise was an outcome of their involvement in domestic reform during the Progressive era. In the domestic arena, American philanthropic foundations were already involved in determining how knowledge-creating elites should be constituted, which approaches were most relevant to policymaking and what the relationship between experts and non-experts would be.25 The formulation of policy on an international level presented a new but related challenge. Fosdick took many tropes from his experience in municipal reform and transferred them onto the international level, for example a ‘cult of the fact’ and a belief in the promotion of policy-relevant

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research. Outlining his plans for what would later become the Graduate Institute of International Studies in Geneva, he proclaimed: ‘The basis of any intellectual judgment and action in the science of government is facts’, and ‘the necessity for impartial research in the field of international relations [was] far more urgent than in local and national government.’26 Even foundation officers with a more academic background were prone to such an instrumental view on the purposes of research. James T. Shotwell, a historian at Columbia University and from 1923 the head of one of the Carnegie Endowment’s divisions, had been a proponent of the ‘New History’ in the United States, and promoted the use of research grounded in the social sciences as a tool for social reform.27 Although originally trained as a medievalist, Shotwell very much regarded himself as a social scientist. In 1932, he urged the Intellectual Cooperation Organisation of the League to pay more attention to the social sciences, pointing to the role these disciplines had played in the creation and consolidation of the nation-state. Now, he concluded, it was time for them to ‘achieve for the community of nations what they have already achieved for the nation-state’.28 It is important to underline the special role assigned to the social sciences in the project to promote international expertise, especially in the Rockefeller programmes. Although the natural and medical sciences swallowed up a larger proportion of philanthropic grants, the social sciences were liberally supported.29 Beardsley Ruml, the director of the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial, insisted that social scientists produce knowledge that was based on empirical research and practically useful.30 In the United States, his approach led to the formation of the Social Science Research Council, the establishment of a fellowship programme and institutional support for universities.31 Ruml’s aim to support a stable social order by funding the social sciences not only applied to the United States but had a global reach: The advancement of the social sciences, economics, political science, sociology, history, – on an international basis, – with aid to the outstanding research institutions of all countries and international fellowships in these subjects – has as a principal motive the providing of the intellectual underpinnings necessary for a peaceful international society; and it is believed that the advancement of international goodwill is substantially and fundamentally affected by the cultivation of the social science field.32

Thus the creation of the Graduate Institute at Geneva held important

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implications for Ruml because it linked the promotion of the social sciences with the bolstering of the post-1919 international organisations. He felt that the new institution could use League resources to provide a unique and practical educational experience to advanced students of international questions. Likewise, the League would benefit from a first-class educational institution nearby, something that Geneva did not offer in the mid-1920s.33 National interests and the mechanics of transnational expert exchange How did the foundations contribute to an international politics of expertise? First of all, American foundations supported the post-war institutional structures of the international order, namely the League of Nations, as well as League-related activities. This of course begs the question to what extent philanthropic programmes were designed in accordance with official US foreign policy and American national interests.34 As is well known, the US Senate rejected membership of the League in 1920, and the American government maintained a cautious, if not always consistent, distance from Geneva throughout the first post-war decade. Nevertheless, American nationals participated extensively in the League’s technical work in the interwar years, often underpinned by foundation money.35 The large contributions of the Rockefeller Foundation to the League’s health work, and its Financial Section, complemented numerous personal gifts by the Rockefeller family.36 The Rockefeller Foundation also supported the League’s intellectual cooperation work, in particular the International Studies Conference, which was in operation between 1928 and 1940.37 The Carnegie Endowment’s leaders had originally criticised Wilsonian plans for a League of Nations, and were reluctant to endorse the new international organisation.38 However, they changed their stance from the mid-1920s, and the Endowment started to finance League-affiliated projects, for example an English-speaking summer school on international relations in Geneva. Warren Kuehl and Lynne Dunn have hinted that a switch in the Endowment’s leadership was responsible for this move.39 However, the fact that the new world organisation had not effected as radical a shift from traditional diplomacy as many Endowment leaders had feared in 1919 and 1920 may have contributed to this reorientation. Moreover, in the course of the 1920s, American public opinion became less hostile to the League’s work and to international technical cooperation.40 This mattered to an organisation such as the Endowment, which had carefully to balance its ambitions at home with its activities abroad.41 The USA’s philanthropic

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elite belonged to that dissenting minority of Americans who promoted international political cooperation in organisations such as the Council on Foreign Relations or the League of Nations Association, but who remained at odds with mainstream isolationist sentiment throughout the interwar years.42 It is against this background that the foundations’ support for ‘expertise’ has to be understood, as, in some ways, technical cooperation acted as a substitute for political cooperation, which was ruled out by domestic opposition. As has already been mentioned, the foundations supported a number of institutions dedicated to the production of expertise, on both sides of the Atlantic. After all, the expansion of transnational expert work meant that experts had to be trained in the first place. Some of these institutions, for example the Academy of International Law at The Hague, had international constituencies. The Academy made conscious attempts to include as many participants from the United States as possible, despite the State Department’s avowed lack of interest in sending its diplomats to The Hague for training.43 Thus, the institutions and networks put in place by the foundations sought to undermine barriers imposed by the nation-state. Another philanthropic contribution to the international politics of expertise related to the transmission of expert knowledge and to the institutional frameworks within which this transmission was to take place. American foundations, in particular the Carnegie Endowment, sought to facilitate a rapprochement between experts and the public. The Endowment’s European branch office, the Dotation Carnegie in Paris, was particularly active in this regard. In 1925 it established the Chaire Carnegie, effectively a regular public lecture on international affairs. Most of the lectures were given by André Tibal, a former director of the Institut Français in Prague, who endeavoured ‘to extricate from a chaos of contradictory information the true factors, the legitimate interests and the most appropriate measures to ensure harmony and prosperity among the peoples’ for the benefit of his audience.44 Tibal would have vigorously refuted any accusations of indoctrination or propaganda. At the 1938 International Studies Conference on the teaching of international relations, he maintained that the Chaire Carnegie merely provided unbiased information, and that the audience was encouraged to draw their own conclusions: It is left to the public, with some help from the professor in the form of comments introduced in his own lectures, to choose between the

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Internationalism Reconfigured opinions expressed and to distinguish between the true and the false elements contained in them.45

Tibal’s approach, however, remained top-down, and cemented rather than questioned the expert’s privileged position in international life. The problem of how experts were to be controlled by a court of public opinion remained. Another Carnegie Chair was established at the Deutsche Hochschule für Politik in Berlin in 1926, an institution which also received substantial Rockefeller grants.46 The lectures at both chairs were aimed at an educated lay audience and occasionally given by guest speakers. These tended to be academics or high-ranking officials of international organisations, for example Albert Thomas, the Director General of the International Labour Office.47 The Dotation Carnegie also published its own journal, L’Esprit International, and, in collaboration with the Endowment’s American headquarters, ran so-called International Relations Clubs at universities in the Americas, Asia and Europe. The Endowment supplied these student discussion-clubs with reading material on international questions, even though it retained the final say on the books provided. In Britain, the International Relations Clubs were run in cooperation with the British Universities League of Nations Society, an example of the foundations’ cooperation with pro-League NGOs.48 Finally, the Carnegie Endowment supported ventures which were designed to have an impact on American public opinion; one of these was the Geneva Research Center, which was run by American expatriates and purported to keep Americans informed about the League of Nations via a monthly newsletter and a series of longer studies. It also completed special assignments for the Council on Foreign Relations. A personal gift from John D. Rockefeller, Jr. helped fund the Center, while from 1931 the Carnegie Endowment provided the salary for its director.49 Foundations and intellectual cooperation under the League of Nations The final part of this chapter will analyse more closely the foundations’ relationship with the League, focusing on the field of intellectual cooperation.50 The foundations became involved in this aspect of League activity through the semi-official National Committees for Intellectual Cooperation, which formed, from 1931, part of the League’s Organisation for Intellectual Cooperation.51 The American National Committee for Intellectual Cooperation had been created in 1925 with the Carnegie Corporation’s financial support.52 The American philanthropic elite was

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heavily represented on the committee, by Raymond Fosdick, Elihu Root and Henry Pritchett, president of the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, and with John D. Rockefeller, Jr. contributing to the budget. Compared to other National Committees for Intellectual Cooperation, the American committee was remarkably well organised and well funded, administering a number of subcommittees and conducting large-scale, nation-wide surveys.53 To those involved in the committee, American non-membership in the League was an incentive to become doubly active. Robert Millikan, the American member of the International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation (ICIC), regarded it as ‘very important that we are as well represented within the [intellectual cooperation] organization as is possible’ and hoped the committee ‘may be able to exert an important influence’.54 This sentiment was echoed by James T. Shotwell, who took over from Millikan in 1931 and remained on the committee until 1939: ‘With the United States out of the League, Intellectual Cooperation is an open door to the kind of helpful cooperation with the League itself which must be included in the picture of the National Committee.’55 In a personal letter to Harold Butler, Director General of the International Labour Office, Shotwell made a similar point: ‘The fact that we are not in the League makes this quasi-official connection with the League organization perfectly possible without raising any of the political questions that would bother an administration at Washington.’56 Foundation officers thus saw the expansion of the League’s technical work as a probate way of increasing American influence in international affairs. American philanthropy was indirectly connected even to the first attempts to institutionalise international intellectual cooperation in a League context, as the issue was pushed onto the international agenda from 1920 by recent beneficiaries of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Paul Otlet and Henri La Fontaine, leaders of the Brussels-based Union des Associations Internationales, lobbied the League Council and Assembly with a proposal to turn their own organisation into the League’s technical body for intellectual work, before these non-governmental initiatives became harnessed by French government officials.57 After the ICIC was created in September 1921, with its seat in Geneva, the French government offered to fund a permanent executive organ of the ICIC, which became the International Institute of Intellectual Cooperation (IIIC), established in Paris in January 1926.58 The Dotation Carnegie established relations with the IIIC in Paris even before the institute officially opened its doors. Along with several

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international non-governmental organisations, such as the International Federation of League of Nations Societies, the Girl Guides and the International Organisation of Secondary School Teachers, the Dotation was invited to form the Comité d’Entente des Grandes Associations Internationales, under the auspices of the IIIC, in December 1925.59 The inclusion of the Dotation, which was after all neither a professional association nor a grassroots-based non-governmental organisation, indicated that the Carnegie Endowment was regarded by the IIIC as an important player in the field of intellectual cooperation. In the following years, the two organisations frequently collaborated on various projects, for example an investigation into school history-textbooks.60 By 1929, Earle Babcock, the American director of the Dotation was able to praise the ‘bonne collaboration’ with the IIIC.61 Relations between the IIIC and the Paris branch office of the Rockefeller Foundation were less close. An offer of collaboration from the IIIC to the president of the Foundation was rebuffed, with the note that the Foundation had a narrow interest in public health and medicine and was unable to offer any assistance to the Institute.62 Even after the Foundation turned its attention to the social sciences, in 1929, its view on the IIIC remained negative. A Rockefeller staff member at the Paris Office observed: It is well to keep [the IIIC] under observation, owing to the fact that it occupies, inadequately but blockingly, the position of that central clearing-house or ‘exchange’ between European countries which should be of the utmost value to our sort of work: – and which, but for this preexistence, it might have been our first aim to create in more respectable form.63

The underlying rivalry between the Rockefeller Foundation and the IIIC can be explained by the latter’s peculiar legal status. The IIIC, as an organisation largely funded by the French government, was a hybrid between an intergovernmental and a state-sponsored quasi-non-governmental organisation. This allowed it to collaborate with non-governmental organisations, for instance in the form of the Comité d’Entente.64 The ICIC in Geneva, a fullyfledged League body, faced more limitations in this regard, as Article 24 of the Covenant (which regulated the attachment of international bureaux to the League) only opened League affiliation to organisations created by inter-governmental agreements.65 The IIIC, however, could become active

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within both the inter-governmental and the private, non-governmental sphere of intellectual cooperation, just like private organisations such as the foundations. From 1932, the Rockefeller Foundation revised its stance on the IIIC, as a consequence of its interest in a particular programme run by the Institute, the International Studies Conference. Organised in 1928, this was the first supra-national organisation which institutionalised academic cooperation in the field of international relations.66 To the Rockefeller Foundation, it also represented an opportunity to coordinate its support of various institutions in Europe and the United States, and, in an increasingly tense international climate, the Foundation’s best hope of promoting the aims of its internationalrelations programme. Between 1932 and 1938 the Foundation allocated a total of $180,000 to the International Studies Conference, with the last grant running out in 1940. Although this was a paltry sum compared to other Rockefeller contributions to the League’s work, it remained the second largest item in the Foundation’s international-relations programme in Europe.67 Somewhat predictably, however, the collaboration between the IIIC and the Foundation did not turn out to be a happy one: Rockefeller officers found the organisational structures of the IIIC too cumbersome, and moreover the practical outcomes which had been hoped for, chiefly an impact on the political level, did not materialise. This was not the fault of the IIIC, and the resentment which was aimed at it by Foundation officials represented rather a sign of the growing disenchantment they felt over their international-relations work in the mid- and late 1930s.68 Furthermore, the underlying rivalry between the IIIC and the Foundation remained, and the attempts of the latter’s staff to control the programme and organisation of the International Studies Conference elicited the protests of the IIIC’s director.69 The Foundation was only partially able to harness the structures put in place by the League’s Intellectual Cooperation Organisation and, in this particular instance, the cooperation between an American foundation and an international organisation remained far from harmonious, or beneficial to the wider cause of international understanding. Conclusion Philanthropic internationalism in the interwar years was marked by a commitment to the creation of expert knowledge, especially in the social sciences, with a view to the practical application of this knowledge. American foundations displayed a generally positive attitude towards the League of

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Nations, but their support for the League’s technical work was extended in order to ensure American involvement in international organisations. Philanthropic programmes helped to construct a narrative emphasising the United States’ positive role in international non-governmental cooperation and portraying the American nation as a disinterested, modern and rational force in the world. Here, however, it is important to note that what philanthropic leaders perceived to be in the national interest of the United States differed from the prevailing majority opinion in their home country, and indeed from official foreign policy, even if some diplomats were sympathetic to the foundations’ projects. Just as the foundations were trying to promote a certain image of America in Europe, and indeed in the world, they also sold their version of the world to Americans back home. The publications emanating from, for example, the Geneva Research Center were designed to portray the League and its work in a positive light, and to encourage Americans to participate in international ‘technical’ cooperation, even if they rejected political cooperation with the new international organisations of the post-1919 era. The Carnegie Endowment’s International Relations Clubs fulfilled a similar purpose, stimulating the interest of ordinary Americans in international affairs. By cooperating with non-state actors and international organisations, the foundations did manage to put into place frameworks for the discussion of international problems by academic and social elites. They also succeeded in establishing the figure of the international-relations expert, a person ostensibly above politics. Given the nature of their project – resolving those conflicts started by nation-states which threatened world peace – state and nation were never absent from their calculations, and in particular the waxing and waning of isolationist sentiment in the United States put some restrictions on their actions, as did structures put in place by international organisations. The ultimate aim, a world free of conflict, of course remained unattainable. However, philanthropic internationalism can yield explanations for the way debates on international relations were framed, institutionalised and internationalised in the interwar years and beyond.

Notes Financial support for research on this article from the German Historical Institute, Washington, D.C., the Gilder Lehrman Institute for American History and the Rockefeller Archive Center is gratefully acknowledged.

Experts for Peace 1. 2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

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Raymond B. Fosdick, The Story of the Rockefeller Foundation (New York, 1952), p. 219. Soma Hewa and Darwin H. Stapleton, ‘Structure and process of global integration’, in Hewa and Stapleton (eds.), Globalization, Philanthropy and Civil Society: Toward a New Political Culture in the Twenty-First Century (New York, 2005), p. 5. Warren Kuehl and Lynne Dunn, Keeping the Covenant: American Internationalists and the League of Nations, 1920–1939 (Kent, OH, 1997), passim. In this chapter, the term ‘internationalism’ is used to cover a broad phenomenon which includes both advocacy and scholarly activity in the field of international relations – in practice, these two areas frequently overlapped during the interwar years; see David Long and Peter Wilson, ‘Introduction: the Twenty Years’ Crisis and the category of “idealism” in international relations’, in idem (eds.), Thinkers of the Twenty Years’ Crisis: Inter-war Idealism Reassessed (Oxford, 1995), pp. 1–24. Recent publications on internationalism in the United States include Cecelia Lynch, Beyond Appeasement: Interpreting Interwar Peace Movements in World Politics (Ithaca, NY, 1999); Andrew E. Johnstone, Dilemmas of Internationalism: The American Association for the United Nations and US Foreign Policy, 1941–1948 (Aldershot, 2009). For an overview, see Waldemar A. Nielsen, The Big Foundations (New York, 1972); on foundation philanthropy and public policy, see Judith Sealander, Private Wealth and Public Life: Foundation Philanthropy and the Reshaping of American Social Policy from the Progressive Era to the New Deal (Baltimore, MD, 1997). Note that the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial was amalgamated with the Rockefeller Foundation in 1929. Michael A. Lutzker, ‘The formation of the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace: a study of the establishment-centered peace movement, 1910–14’, in Jerry Israel (ed.), Building the Organizational Society: Essays on Associational Activities in Modern America (New York, 1972), pp. 143–62; C. Roland Marchand, The American Peace Movement and Social Reform, 1898– 1918 (Princeton, NJ, 1972), chs. 4–5. Raymond B. Fosdick, Chronicle of a Generation: An Autobiography (New York, 1958), pp. 90–125, 215–20, 224–8; John Enson Harr and Peter J. Johnson, The Rockefeller Century (New York, 1988), pp. 113–14, 160–3; on the Bureau of Social Hygiene see Sealander, Private Wealth and Public Life, pp.163–88. See for instance memo ‘Institute of Pacific Relations’, doc. no. 213, n.d., Rockefeller Family Archives, Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow (hereafter RFA), RG 2, World Affairs series, box 10, folder 68. Personal gifts from John D. Rockefeller, Jr. are listed alongside contributions made by the Rockefeller Foundation and the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial. See also Advisory Committee Resolution ‘Foreign Policy Association’, 15 June 1933, RFA, RG 2, World Affairs series, box 1, folder 8. Robert D. Schulzinger, The Wise Men of Foreign Affairs: The History of the Council on Foreign Relations (New York, 1984); Michael Wala, The Council on

60

9.

10.

11.

12.

13.

14. 15.

16.

Internationalism Reconfigured Foreign Relations and American Foreign Policy in the Early Cold War (Providence, RI, 1994); Tomoko Akami, Internationalizing the Pacific: The United States, Japan and the Institute of Pacific Relations in War and Peace, 1919–1945 (London, 2002); so far, there is no satisfactory monograph on the Foreign Policy Association. For an overview, see Alan Raucher, ‘The first foreign affairs think tanks’, American Quarterly, vol. xxx, no. 4 (1978), pp. 493–513. Thomas B. Appleget, memorandum of conversation with John D. Rockefeller, Jr. ‘Foreign Policy Association’, 12 June 1929, RFA, RG 2, World Affairs series, box 1, folder 6. The Bureau’s receipts totalled $629,399.59. ‘Report of the Bureau of International Research of Harvard and Radcliffe College, July 1, 1929 to June 30, 1938’, Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial Archives, Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow (hereafter LSRM), series III.6, box 54, folder 574. ‘To the Trustees of the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial’, included in Ada Comstock, president of Radcliffe College, to Beardsley Ruml, 10 November 1923, LSRM, series III.6, box 54, folder 573. On the history of international relations as a discipline, see David Long and Peter Wilson (eds.), Thinkers of the Twenty Years’ Crisis: Inter-war Idealism Reassessed (Oxford, 1995); Brian Schmidt, The Political Discourse of Anarchy: A Disciplinary History of International Relations (Albany, NY, 1998); David Long and Brian Schmidt (eds.), Imperialism and Internationalism in the Discipline of International Relations (Albany, NY, 2005). For the relationship between these institutions and American foundations, see Katharina Rietzler, ‘American Foundations and the ‘Scientific Study’ of International Relations in Europe, 1910–1940’ (unpublished PhD thesis, University College London, 2009). Alfred H. Fried, ‘Was geschieht mit den Carnegie Millionen?’, Neues Wiener Journal, 25 December 1910, p. 15. On the Carnegie Endowment’s move from supporting peace activism to research into international affairs in the course of the Great War, see Katharina Rietzler, ‘From peace advocacy to international relations research: the transformation of transatlantic philanthropic networks, 1900–1930’. Paper presented at a workshop on ‘Transnational Networks of Experts and Organizations (1850– 1930)’, Graduate Institute of International and Development Studies, Geneva, 31 August 2009. The Carlsberg Foundation gave financial support to the Conference of Institutes for the Scientific Study of International Relations, an organisation which was made up largely of recipients of Rockefeller and Carnegie grants, and later became the International Studies Conference. Carlsberg paid for some of the costs associated with the Conference’s fourth meeting in Copenhagen in 1931. League of Nations Communiqué no. 218 ‘Une Conférence des Institutions de hautes études internationales’; Picht to Babcock, 18 May 1931, both in Carnegie Endowment for International Peace Centre Européen Records, Rare

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17.

18.

19.

20. 21.

22.

23. 24. 25. 26.

27. 28.

61

Book & Manuscript Library, Columbia University, New York (hereafter CEIP CE), box 29, folder 3. On the tension between a ‘democratic’ and a ‘scientific’ peace after the Great War, see Glenda Sluga, The Nation, Psychology, and International Politics, 1870–1919 (Basingstoke, 2006), esp. p. 32. Michael L. Dockrill, ‘The Foreign Office and the creation of Chatham House’, in Andrea Bosco and Cornelia Navari (eds.), Chatham House and British Foreign Policy, 1919–1945: The Royal Institute of International Affairs during the Inter-war Years (London, 1994), pp. 73–86. Alfred Zimmern, ‘Democracy and the expert’, Political Quarterly, vol. I, no. 1 (1930), pp. 7–25, here pp. 18–21. On Zimmern and his faith in the transformative power of education, see Paul Rich, ‘Alfred Zimmern’s cautious idealism: the League of Nations, international education, and the Commonwealth’, in Long and Wilson, Thinkers of the Twenty Years’ Crisis, pp. 79–99; Mark Mazower, No Enchanted Palace: The End of Empire and the Ideological Origins of the United Nations (Princeton, NJ, 2009), ch. 2. Zimmern, ‘Democracy and the expert’, p. 15. Frank Boudreau, ‘International civil service: the Secretariat of the League of Nations’, in Harriet Eager Davis (ed.), Pioneers in World Order, with a foreword by Raymond Fosdick (New York, 1944), pp. 76–86, here p. 83. Patricia Clavin and Jens-Wilhelm Wessels, ‘Transnationalism and the League of Nations: understanding the work of its Economic and Financial Organisation’, Contemporary European History, vol. xiv, no. 4 (2005), pp. 465–92, here p. 491; William Glenn Gray, ‘What did the League do, exactly?’, International History Spotlight, no. 1 (2007), at http://www.h-net.org/~diplo/IHS/PDF/ IHS2007-1-Gray.pdf, accessed 15 February 2010, esp. pp. 9–11. Gray is more ambivalent in his conclusions: apparently, the ‘Geneva spirit’ was by no means shared by all experts at the League. Raymond B. Fosdick, An Expert Approach to International Relations: The League of Nations as an International Clearing House (New York, 1924), p. 5. Ibid, p. 7. Ellen Condliffe Lagemann, The Politics of Knowledge: The Carnegie Corporation, Philanthropy, and Public Policy (Middletown, CT, 1989), esp. pp. 3–6. ‘A proposal to establish an Institute of International Research’, n.d. (c. spring 1926), Paul Mantoux Papers, Archives of the League of Nations, United Nations Library, Geneva, box 154, folder 11. On the ‘New History’, see Peter Novick, That Noble Dream: The ‘Objectivity Question’ and the American Historical Profession (Cambridge, 1988), ch. 4. ‘… les sciences politiques et sociales doivent être encouragées à achever pour la communauté des nations ce qu’ils ont déjà achevé pour l’état national’. Cited in International Institute of Intellectual Cooperation, L’Institut International de Coopération Intellectuelle, 1925–1946 (Paris, 1946), p. 317.

62 29.

30.

31.

32. 33. 34.

35. 36.

37. 38.

39. 40. 41.

Internationalism Reconfigured Between 1924 and 1941 European research institutions in the social sciences received about $10 million (equivalent to $100 million in 2005) from Rockefeller funds. Christian Fleck, Transatlantische Bereicherungen: zur Erfindung der empirischen Sozialforschung (Frankfurt a.M., 2007), p. 124. The Carnegie Endowment’s support of the social sciences was less substantial, simply because of the Endowment’s budgetary restrictions. However, by financing such large projects as the 132-volume Economic and Social History of the World War, the Endowment implicitly acknowledged the centrality of the social sciences to its overall mission. On the Carnegie History, see Jay Winter and Antoine Prost, The Great War in History: Debates and Controversies, 1914 to the Present (Cambridge, 2005), pp. 110–13. Martin Bulmer and Joan Bulmer, ‘Philanthropy and social science in the 1920s: Beardsley Ruml and the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial, 1922– 1929’, Minerva, vol. ixx, no. 3 (1981), pp. 347–407. Donald Fisher, Fundamental Development of the Social Sciences: Rockefeller Philanthropy and the United States Social Science Research Council (Ann Arbor, MI, 1993), chs. 2–3. ‘Memorial Policy in Social Science: extracts from various memoranda and dockets’, LSRM, series III.6, box 63, folder 677. Ruml to Abraham Flexner, 23 December 1925, LSRM, series III.9, box 105, folder 1061. On the relationship between foundation philanthropy and American cultural diplomacy in the interwar years, see Katharina Rietzler, ‘Before the cultural Cold Wars: American philanthropy and cultural diplomacy in the inter-war years’, Historical Research (forthcoming). Gary B. Ostrower, Collective Insecurity: The United States and the League of Nations during the Early Thirties (London, 1979), ch. 2. Kuehl and Dunn, Keeping the Covenant, pp. 144–5, 158; RFA, RG 2, World Affairs series, box 24, folders 200–3, passim. Another example is a grant from the Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial to the League’s library (though channelled through the American Library Association). Beardsley Ruml to Carl H. Milam, 26 May 1926, LSRM, series III.6, box 48, folder 503. See next section. Martin David Dubin, ‘The Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and the advocacy of a League of Nations, 1914–1918’, Proceedings of the American Philosophical Society, vol. cxxii, no. 6 (1979), pp. 344–68. Kuehl and Dunn, Keeping the Covenant, pp. 59–60. Ostrower, Collective Insecurity, p. 54. In their negotiations with European collaborators, Endowment leaders stressed their own vulnerability to accusations of undermining American foreign policy at home. See for instance minutes, general meeting, 9 July 1923, morning session, 26 bis, CEIP CE, box 114, folder 1; see also Nicholas Murray Butler’s assertion that the Endowment had to respect the prevalence of isolationism

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42. 43.

44.

45.

46.

47. 48.

49.

50.

51. 52.

63

in the USA: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Year Book 1924 (Washington, DC, 1924), p. 49. Warren Cohen, Empire Without Tears: America’s Foreign Relations, 1921–1933 (Philadelphia, PA, 1987), ch. 1. Eelco van Kleffens to James Brown Scott, 20 June 1924; Scott to van Kleffens, 3 July 1924, both Carnegie Endowment for International Peace Records, Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Columbia University, New York (hereafter CEIP), vol. 297, pp. 2554, 2562. ‘… de dégager d’un chaos d’informations contradictoires les véritables facteurs, les intérêts légitimes et les mesures les plus propres à assurer la concorde et la prospérité des peuples’. Tibal to ‘Monsieur le Ministre’, on ‘Quai d’Orsay, service d’information et de presse’ letterhead, n.d., CEIP CE, box 177, folder 6. Cited in International Studies Conference, University Teaching of International Relations. A Record of the Eleventh Session of the International Studies Conference, Prague, 1938 (Paris, 1939), p. 158. The establishment of more Carnegie Chairs, for example in Geneva, was also discussed. ‘Comte-rendu des Séances tenues par MM. les Membres du Comité d’Administration du Centre Européen’, 22 March 1926, CEIP CE, box 116, folder 2. See press clippings in CEIP CE, box 183, folder 1. Carnegie Endowment for International Peace, Year Book 1921 (Washington, DC, 1921), p. 62. ‘College international relations clubs – a survey’, n.d., CEIP, box 306, folder 6; Amy Jones to Earle Babcock, 9 April 1931, CEIP CE, box 38, folder 2; Jones to Norman H. Poole, 8 January 1934, CEIP CE, box 39, folder 2. RF Resolution 33027, 12 April 1933; memorandum ‘The growth of the Geneva Research Center’, 1932; John Van Sickle, memorandum ‘Geneva Research Center’, 23 January 1933, all three Rockefeller Foundation Archives, Rockefeller Archive Center, Sleepy Hollow (hereafter RF), RG 1.1, series 100, box 5, folder 45. Intellectual cooperation under the League is covered by Jean-Jacques Renoliet, L’Unesco oubliée: la Société des Nations et la coopération intellectuelle (1919– 1946) (Paris, 1999); Pham Thi Tu, La coopération intellectuelle sous la Société des Nations (Geneva, 1964); Jan Kolasa, International Intellectual Cooperation: The League Experience and the Beginnings of UNESCO (Wrocław, 1962); still worth consulting is F.S. Northedge, ‘International Intellectual Co-operation within the League of Nations: Its Conceptual Basis and Lessons for the Present’ (unpublished PhD thesis, University of London, 1953). Ibid, pp. 401–15. American National Committee on International Intellectual Cooperation (ed.), The Study of International Relations in the United States: Survey for 1937 (New York, 1937), p. 477.

64 53.

54.

55.

56. 57.

58. 59.

60. 61.

62. 63. 64. 65.

Internationalism Reconfigured Memorandum, 6 November 1928, James T. Shotwell Papers, Rare Book & Manuscript Library, Columbia University, New York (hereafter Shotwell Papers), box 134/5, folder ‘Membership American National Committee’; report on first meeting of the American National Committee on Intellectual Cooperation, 5 January 1925, CEIP CE, box 28, folder 2. Note, however, that the committee’s annual budget of some $10,000 fluctuated over time, with John D. Rockefeller, Jr. pledging a total of $6,000 between 1932 and 1934. See Minutes of Meeting, 27 October 1932, CEIP CE, box 29, folder 4, and Financial Statement, 30 September 1935, CEIP CE, box 31, folder 3. Millikan to Wickliffe Rose (International Education Board), 26 February 1926, Shotwell Papers, box 134/5, folder ‘Membership American National Committee’. American National Committee on Intellectual Cooperation, minutes of meeting, 27 October 1932, CEIP CE, box 29, folder 4 (emphasis added). For ICIC membership and its duration in the interwar years, see Renoliet, Unesco oubliée, p. 185. Shotwell to Harold Butler, 14 November 1932, CEIP CE, box 29, folder 4. Werner Scholz, ‘Frankreichs Rolle bei der Schaffung der Völkerbundskommission für internationale intellektuelle Zusammenarbeit 1919–1922’, Francia, vol. xxi, no. 3 (1994), pp. 145–58; on the pre-1914 origins of the Union des Associations Internationales, see Daniel Laqua, ‘Transnational endeavours and the totality of knowledge: Paul Otlet and Henri La Fontaine as “integral internationalists” in fin-de-siècle Europe’, in Grace Brockington (ed.), Internationalism and the Arts in Britain and Europe at the Fin de Siècle (Oxford, 2009), pp. 247–71. Renoliet, Unesco oubliée, pp. 22–7, 44–70. Julien Luchaire to Babcock, 5 December 1925, CEIP CE, box 28, folder 3; on the Comité d’Entente, see Eckhardt Fuchs, ‘Der Völkerbund und die Institutionalisierung transnationaler Bildungsbeziehungen’, Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft, vol. liv, no. 10 (2006), pp. 888–99, here pp. 896–8. Many of its minutes and reports can be found in the CEIP CE records, boxes 28–32. Babcock to Luchaire, 26 July 1928, CEIP CE, box 28, folder 2. Babcock to M. Coste, 26 January 1929, Archives of the International Institute of Intellectual Cooperation, UNESCO Archives, Paris (hereafter IIIC), B.IV.5. George Vincent to Luchaire, 12 May 1926, IIIC, B.IV.23. G. Winthrop Young (RF Paris Office), confidential report ‘Intellectual Cooperation’, June 1929, RF, RG 1.1, series 100, box 105, folder 952. Renoliet, Unesco oubliée, pp. 60, 84. Anna-Katharina Wöbse, ‘“To cultivate the international mind”: Der Völkerbund und die Förderung der globalen Zivilgesellschaft’, Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft, vol. liv, no. 10 (2006), pp. 852–63, here p. 857.

Experts for Peace 66. 67.

68. 69.

65

David Long, ‘Who killed the International Studies Conference?’, Review of International Studies, vol. xxxii, no. 4 (2006), pp. 603–22, here p. 603. Resolution RF 37117, 1 December 1937; postscript dated 16 April 1930 [probably 1939], both RF, RG1.1, series 100, box 105, folder 952. For other items in the Foundation’s international-relations programme, see Rockefeller Foundation, Annual Reports (New York, 1929–39), passim. Katharina Rietzler, ‘The Rockefeller Foundation and the search for international order’, Rockefeller Archive Center Newsletter, 2008, pp. 4, 5, 27. Tracy B. Kittredge to Sydnor Walker, 28 October 1937 (‘letter II’), RF, RG 1.1, series 100, box 105, folder 955.

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IN BETWEEN ‘VAGUE THEORY’ AND ‘SOUND PRACTICAL LINES’ Transnational Municipalism in Interwar Europe

Stefan Couperus

The municipalisation of urban utilities and welfare provisions occurred in many urban contexts in Europe and elsewhere during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. This process provoked a variety of transnational interchanges of municipal knowledge between urban administrators, officials, reformers and professionals. ‘Gas-and-water socialism’ (later ‘municipal socialism’) generated a cross-border exchange of technologies, know-how, human capital, administrative techniques and practical experience with regard to the public exploitation of urban provisions. The municipality was increasingly seen as a crucial institution for the promotion of social progress and reform, thereby rendering ‘the social’ an amenable category of urban administration.1 Within the context of rationalising public-administration routines and extending urban provisions, transnational networking became inextricably bound up with urban-reform agendas in the interwar period. Several new sociological and economic realities in the city had to be couched in a language of techno-administrative government. This process of equipping local administration with new tools and routines for municipal intervention and ownership was increasingly regarded as essential to the urban question. In the words of a contemporary American observer: ‘municipal ownership

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will create a public sense, a social conscience, a belief in the city and an interest in it.’2 Many (urban) historians have pointed to the presence and significance of inter-municipal contacts and conversations as part of more general reform agendas. This process gathered momentum from the second half of the nineteenth century onwards. In this context, historians have examined the territorial (e.g. Scandinavian-German exchanges, transAtlantic interchange, Japanese-German connections) and functional (e.g. urban utilities, infrastructure, municipal housing) scope of collaborative endeavours initiated by local authorities.3 Furthermore, several publications have hinted at gradual transformations in inter-municipal networking in the twentieth century.4 Several heuristic terms are being used to describe the different aspects of the transnational infrastructure of municipal reform. Pierre-Yves Saunier has introduced the term ‘Urban Internationale’, thereby insisting on ‘the international sphere of the urban, … a place of struggle for definition of the most appropriate objects, methods, tools and competent people to think about and act on the city’.5 Saunier also speaks of la toile municipale (‘the municipal web’), which can be perceived as a social space transcending national, regional and linguistic boundaries. The scope of this social space is determined by the circulation of information, ideas, procedures, services, personal experience, methods, principles and values relating to municipal administration.6 Shane Ewen has taken up Jeffrey Seller’s argument that the study of the local is crucial to our understanding of ‘the effective character of policy, the dynamics of markets and class formation, the opportunities for political and civic participation, and the everyday constitution of identities’. To this, Ewen adds the plea to historicise the ‘transnational municipal moment’.7 Consequently, Saunier and Ewen have identified three ‘waves of municipalization’, ‘which have ordered the world of municipalities for more than 150 years, [and] are still more or less in operation today’.8 The first wave dates from the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, entailing peer-to-peer exchanges ‘through the travelling of technologies, regulations, and designs’ between ‘two geographically defined points’.9 The second regime is characterised by an increasingly thicker fabric of institutionalised transnational exchange by scientists, administrators, officials and professionals. The third regime, finally, stems from the 1980s and has been labelled ‘the global and regional competition maze’. The

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origins and completion of the second regime were particularly manifest during the interwar period, thus serving as the historical framework for this contribution. Preceding the outbreak of the Great War, the mostly ad-hoc, single-issue, bilateral connections and contacts were subsumed in the more permanent fabric of those international and non-governmental organisations which matured and expanded after the Versailles Treaty – the world of international and transnational thought and practice central to many chapters of this volume. After the involuntary inertia of 1914–18, a number of organisations provided an infrastructure for discussion, exchange and display. In this chapter I will mainly focus on the Union Internationale des Villes – known in English as the International Union of Local Authorities (IULA) – an organisation which perceived municipal administration as, par excellence, a transnational project. The organisation, aims and intentions of the IULA formed a permanent realm of contestation among its members during the interwar years. These contested conceptions of transnational municipalism, coming from within the IULA as well as from outsiders, are central to this chapter. As will become clear, various ideologies, ideals and pragmatic outlooks concerning transnational municipalism intermingled and resulted in a series of rivalries and cleavages – nationalist, political, personal, scientific or functionalist – which further complicate the analysis of transnational municipalism, institutionalised in this instance under the guise of the IULA. More generally, this chapter aims to present municipal administration and its transnational avenues as a special lens through which many intersecting liaisons and loyalties (local, national, international, political, scientific) become visible and which, subsequently, elucidates transnational undertakings as essentially contested ones. To do this, I will first outline the process of conceptualisation and institutionalisation of transnational municipalism during the interwar period by introducing the history and historiography of the IULA. I will then present two juxtaposed notions on transnational organisation by cities and their administrations. Thirdly, I will use the case of British involvement in transnational municipalism – almost entirely neglected in historiography – to explain another set of rivalries concerning traditions of inter-municipal purviews and information dissemination. Finally, I will elaborate on the relation of the IULA with other transnational organisations and the League

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of Nations, shedding light on the delicacies which accompanied cities or municipalities as transnational actors in the interwar period. The International Union of Local Authorities as a contested platform The town is now the place where all the activities of modern man are performed and combined: where he goes to seek education, work, leisure and help. This is where co-operation among people takes place in all its forms, and finds its fullest and most complete expression in a series of institutions and services organised by the community for the benefit of all its members. The general progress of civilisation, the advances made by the most backward nations, mean that the same questions are being faced today by the governing authorities of towns the world over. The solutions found by some of them may be used by others, if not in exactly the same way, then after some necessary adaptation. It follows that all those interested in the improvement of towns and their municipal services, and of municipal life, are more and more likely to benefit from pooling their experience and discussing possible solutions in the light of extensive comparisons.10

This passage is quoted from the first conference proceedings of the IULA, which was founded at the Ghent Universal Exhibition of 1913. The IULA would become the main institutionalised platform for interchange of and debates about the alleged essence of local government in interwar Europe. Several other international organisations put municipal administration on their agendas as a sideline of their core business. These organisations included the International Institute of Administrative Sciences (founded in 1910 as the Congrès International des Sciences Administratives), a scientific organisation which sought to collect and disseminate knowledge on administrative theory, techniques and methods; the International Federation for Housing and Town Planning (founded in 1913), a prominent organisation in the field of spatial (urban) planning; and the Congrès International de l’Organisation Scientifique (first congress in 1925), which promoted various applications of ‘scientific management’ to private and public institutions. Such bodies did not, however, spearhead the administration of cities as the main locus of, or main actors, in their field of activity in the same way that the IULA did. Furthermore, the IULA at first accepted single municipalities as its members, but from 1924 onwards insisted on national unions of municipalities as its constituents.

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The IULA congresses of 1924 (Amsterdam), 1925 (Paris), 1929 (Seville and Barcelona), 1932 (London) and 1936 (Munich) resulted in an avalanche of reports and correspondence, as well as face-to-face interaction between administrators, professionals and experts. Topics ranged from municipal finance, taxes and salaries to the supervision of dairy production, health policies and waste management. The showcase congress in Nazi Germany of 1936, however, ran counter to the idea of an equal interchange of municipal knowledge. The event was a unilateral display of German municipal management achievements, rather than a vivid dialogue between peers. From the mid-1920s onwards, one can discern a shift from a politicalutopian conception of municipal administration to a techno-administrative interest in the practice of municipal administration. Thus, a language of activism was gradually superimposed by a variety of scientific specialisations in one or more sub-domains of urban administration. This requires further elaboration. From the quotation featured above, one can discern two motivations for transnational municipalism which proved to be simultaneously symbiotic and contradictory. The first motivation amounted to an implicit political discourse which, to borrow the words of Saunier and Payre, appealed to ‘a world in which home-ruled cities would be the basic cells of a democratic order more amenable to peace, mutual understanding, and the resolution of social problems across national borders’.11 The second, more overt motivation was the promotion of the border-crossing circulation of knowledge, know-how, experience and data for the benefit of ameliorating municipal provisions and routines. Generally speaking, these are the two main IULA ‘trajectories’ which can be discerned for the purpose of analysis in the interwar period. This does not imply, however, that forms of political or internationalist activism and rhetoric were strictly separated from, or alien to, the goals of knowledge exchange and vice-versa. The history and development of the IULA has been treated rather extensively in recent literature on the history of interwar urban governance and transnational municipalism. With regard to the IULA’s formative years, roughly the first two decades of the twentieth century, several scholars have stressed the socialist impetus to found a ‘League of Municipalities’. Patrizia Dogliani, for instance, sees the inception of the IULA partly as the outcome of a failed endeavour by the Second International to establish a ‘League of Socialist Municipalities’. A resolution at the Second International’s 1900

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congress in Paris defined municipal action and organisation as a steppingstone for a socialist society, describing municipal services as ‘embryos for a collectivist society’.12 This resolution was the fruit of a Franco-Belgian co-operation, which aimed to create an international congress of socialist city administrators and a central documentation bureau.13 Another infusion of this ‘transnationalised’ approach to municipal socialism arrived with the first Congrès International des Sciences Administratives in 1910, where an international association of municipalities was portrayed as being analogous to the unification of workers. The creation of an international ‘League of Socialist Municipalities’, however, was never achieved. One reason for this was that municipal activism was not part of the socialist movement in all European countries.14 In some, national attempts to organise socialists involved in municipal administration had limited success. In Italy, for instance, a national League of Socialist Communes was established in 1906, dissociating itself from the National Union of Italian Municipalities (founded in 1901), until both associations ceased to exist in the 1920s.15 In other European countries, for instance France, Belgium and the Netherlands, regional and national associations of socialist councillors and mayors to some extent considered themselves as representatives of the municipalities they dominated, but could not compete with the allegedly neutral and apolitical national unions of municipalities which emerged throughout Europe from 1900 onwards. Prior notions of ‘municipal socialism’ – the ‘socialisation’ of society by means of municipal intervention in all domains of socio-economic life – were reflected in the IULA’s earliest narratives of unification and of collectivist municipalities. The IULA’s earliest protagonists all had firm roots in the international socialist movements. They included the Belgian senator Emile Vinck, who was the IULA’s director throughout the interwar period and who had close connections with the famous internationalists Henri La Fontaine and Paul Otlet and with the industrialist Ernest Solvay; the French socialist mayor of the Parisian suburb of Suresnes, Henri Sellier; and the Dutch socialist alderman from Amsterdam, Floor Wibaut. Furthermore, they can be considered as convinced promoters of home-ruled cities, of municipal autonomy, which, due to the ongoing encroachment of the state in local affairs, was allegedly under threat. Oscar Gaspari has shown the relevance of the IULA for the proclamation of the home-rule principle – i.e. the stipulation that municipalities have their own indivisible realm of political and administrative action – during the first half of the twentieth century.16

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Another scholarly analysis brings to the fore the IULA’s indebtedness to the universalist ideals of Paul Otlet’s documentation movement during the 1910s and early 1920s. Closely related to this association of the IULA with Otlet’s ideals is an interpretation which places emphasis on the IULA as a contested space of information, and of the gathering and dissemination of knowledge. Wouter Van Acker interprets the IULA as a transnational ‘information network’ in which two competing conceptions of organising knowledge interacted dialectically, and eventually merged. These two types of knowledge-gathering were the survey or ‘regionalistic’ model of the Scottish planning authority Patrick Geddes, aiming at mapping specific issues, and Otlet’s global ‘encyclopaedic’ model, entailing universalist claims about assembling and interconnecting all available knowledge.17 Renaud Payre expands/elaborates the argument of the second trajectory, the IULA as a hub for the accumulation and dissemination of (municipal) knowledge, even further. He convincingly argues that the existence of the IULA was more or less defined by the rhythm of its congresses and preliminary meetings, yet he also shows that the increasingly overt manifestation of different beliefs of a science communale, a municipal science, formed another domain of contestation.18 I have argued elsewhere that contrasting national scholarly traditions in public-administration studies complicated and politicised the pursuit of a universal municipal science.19 All these scholarly interpretations illustrate the understanding of transnational municipalism and its institutional outcomes. Nevertheless, what is generally lacking in these accounts is a further analysis of how internal and external tensions affected conceptualisations of the transnational organisation of municipalities in general, and how the IULA as an organisation was reflected upon in particular. Such an approach will allow for the study of the IULA’s impact on individuals, cities, nations, competitors and peer organisations, and vice-versa. An interesting case, in this respect, is the renaissance of the IULA in the early 1920s, after its involuntary inertia during the Great War. The buildup to the actual re-establishment of the IULA in 1924 provoked critical reflection on competing conceptions of city–state relations, municipal socialism, and transnational collaboration between cities. ‘The Boston Idea’ and the re-establishment of the IULA In the early 1920s, the complete rebirth of IULA seemed a difficult project. The main achievement of its secretariat in Brussels was the publication of

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the Tablettes Documentaires in 1921, which served IULA members as the bibliographical bulletin of municipal affairs and research in the interwar period. However, under the active guidance of the paid director of the Brussels-based bureau, Emile Vinck, the IULA was initially unable to reunite the participants of the 1913 congress. The most obvious reasons for this were the delicate relationship between the German and French representatives as a result of the war and the hesitation of British authorities at being involved in the IULA’s reconstitution. A laboriously organised meeting at the Brussels secretariat in 1920 revealed much discord among the European delegates, centring on the question of German and British participation. Vinck and the IULA’s president, an honorary position held by the Dutchman Wibaut, were much in favour of a weighty German and British contribution in the near future, whereas French, Italian, Danish and Spanish delegates expressed their reluctance, especially with regard to German membership.20 It would take until the summer of 1924 before a second IULA congress took place in Amsterdam. Before briefly elaborating on the importance of the 1924 convention, which is largely neglected in historiography, it is important to say something about the increased propensity for reestablishing a transnational organisation of cities in the early 1920s. This idea gained momentum within different milieux of supporters of transnational organisation. Although these milieux overlapped and merged to a certain extent, the main controversy between them revolved around two competing conceptions of transnational collaboration between cities and their administrations. The first conception found its expression in a plea for a global ‘League of Cities’ as opposed to or even as a substitute for the League of Nations. This reading of transnationalism amounted to an appreciation of cities as (literally and par excellence) trans-national actors for peace and democracy – on a more explicit and less permissive note than the IULA’s aforementioned lurking aspiration of a global democratic order of cities. Cities, thus, were preferred over states as promoters of world peace and trans-border collaboration. The second conception derived from the way in which the aims of the IULA had been formulated in 1913. It stressed the primacy of expertise and the gathering, accumulation and circulation of material on urban affairs. This conception amounted to an understanding of transnational organisation as the quintessential fulcrum for the circulation of particular

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strands of urban knowledge and expertise across national borders. In the build-up to the re-establishment of the IULA at the Amsterdam congress in the summer of 1924, propagandists of both conceptions were confronted with each other’s convictions. This first of the two conceptions of transnationalism was publicised by the influential journal The Sociological Review and the German Illustrierte Weltvereins-Zeitung in 1923. Under the heading ‘A World League of Cities’, The Sociological Review presented a translation of a German leaflet which promoted the foundation of a global union of cities.21 Whereas, in the words of the pamphleteer, ‘national governments are in deadlock’ and would, despite the conciliatory character of the League of Nations, inevitably head again and again towards ‘mutual collision’, a vast body of united cities would, by contrast, ‘preserve civilization’ and ‘pursue an active policy of peace and goodwill as a religious duty’.22 The message was laced with rhetoric referring to the successful history of autonomous cities (the Greek city-states, medieval Italian cities, and the Hanseatic League), a narrative which would recur on many occasions.23 The author claimed to write on behalf of buoyant centres of activism (Boston, Leipzig and Paris) which acted in the vein of a World League of Cities.24 In the same breath, however, other cities were incited to host a ‘world conference of cities’. Apparently, supporters in Boston, Leipzig and Paris had not yet been able to gain enough solid ground for such an undertaking. The leaflet had been written by the American clergyman and Christian socialist Charles Bouck White (1874–1951). During his troublesome career as a pastor and publicist in Boston and New York, Bouck White resorted to a loose and heavily politicised rhetoric in which Christianity was equated with class struggle, and the nation-state was conceived in terms of being inherently destructive, a-historical, and oppressive.25 His opinions did not go unnoticed: he was sentenced to imprisonment twice (once for disorderly conduct in 1914, once for including the rather odd element of flag desecration into one of his sermons in 1916) and he was expelled from the Socialist Party of America as a result of his unremitting propagation of revolutionary Christianity within its ranks.26 After his initiative for a ‘world conference of cities’ in Boston foundered at the hands of local authorities in 1923, he moved to Europe to promote the ‘Boston Idea’– first in Paris, then in Leipzig, and ultimately in Amsterdam.27 In early 1924, Bouck White crossed paths with Wibaut. Following the small-scale meeting in Brussels in 1920, the correspondence between

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Vinck and Wibaut hardly mentions the prospect of a successor congress to the Ghent meeting of 1913;28 thus the IULA’s rebirth was far from being realised. The Dutch efforts to host the second conference of the International Federation for Housing and Town Planning, however, triggered Wibaut, who became an active and prominent member within the international housing movement during the 1920s, into reconsidering the possibilities of the IULA’s renaissance. Nonetheless, it was his introduction to Bouck White which prompted Wibaut to take concrete action – albeit not for the reasons the American activist had in mind. Being announced in the Dutch press by the renowned journalist and banker E. Heldring, Bouck White was able to penetrate the Rotary movement, freemasonry and entrepreneurial networks in the Netherlands in a short period of time, thereby rapidly finding his way to Wibaut.29 The evocative correspondence which unfolded between them from January 1924 onwards, initially revealed a seeming congruence, but ultimately the clear irreconcilability, of their convictions. Whereas Wibaut, in essence, promoted transnational municipalism as a means of elevating the level of municipal services and administrative routines, and thereby the quality of urban life, Bouck White stressed the fundamental shift in geopolitics the ‘World Leauge of Cities’ could bring about. Moreover, it turned out that both promoters of transnational action employed two fundamentally different vocabularies to connect the local to the transnational sphere. Bouck White immediately hailed Wibaut – and implicitly himself as well – as the ‘world leader’ who was destined to guide the new movement: ‘Sir, it is nothing less than Providential that a man of your size is in a municipal office, in this moment in history.’30 Both men then more or less agreed on the value of pacifism, feminism and elements of Marxism as the ideological stratum of transnational activity. Yet, when Bouck White had seemed to win Wibaut’s trust, he revealed his hidden agenda; his revolutionary Christianity, his aversion to the League of Nations, and his rapid entry into Amsterdam’s circle of dignitaries alarmed Wibaut, moving him to dissociate himself from the ‘Boston Idea’ as soon as possible. When Bouck White named Wibaut, without his consent, as a member of the Dutch working committee, Wibaut responded: ‘I cannot agree to have my name mentioned in connection with the League of Cities Association.’31 In his memoirs Wibaut declared that he was unable to endorse an initiative aimed at the destruction of other internationalist movements, in this case the League of Nations.32 Bouck

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White, for his part, considered Wibaut’s slogan ‘World Friendship through Municipal Rapprochement’ too moderate and passive.33 In the meantime, however, Wibaut had contacted Amsterdam’s mayor Willem de Vlugt to urge the Minister of Foreign Affairs, and the former president of the League of Nations’ second Assembly, Herman van Karnebeek, to investigate the possibility of hosting the IULA’s second congress under the aegis of the League.34 Thus, in March 1924, two initiatives briefly converged, but then resolutely rejected each other’s course and intentions. Whereas Bouck White withdrew from the Dutch (and European) initiatives in June 1924, leaving the Dutch committee rather isolated from the already languishing groups in Paris and Leipzig, Wibaut found a new way of reinvigorating the IULA: he established a collaboration with the organisers of the second conference of the International Federation for Housing and Town Planning, obtained funding from the Amsterdam municipality, and asked his old friend Vinck to prepare the congress. On 30 June 1924 some 75 delegates, from France, Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, Britain, Poland, Italy, Austria, Romania, Bulgaria, Lithuania, Yugoslavia, Czechoslovakia, Sweden, Finland and Switzerland, representing either individual cities or national unions of municipalities, gathered in Amsterdam on the occasion of the IULA’s second official congress. The existing literature on the IULA generally emphasises the organisation’s increasingly scientific and technical agenda during the interwar years, reflected in congress discussions as well as voluminous reports and proceedings. The Amsterdam congress is rarely mentioned in this respect. Indeed, when looking at the substance of the agenda of 1924 in comparison to those of the 1925, 1929, 1932 and 1936 congresses, and taking into account the limited number of attendees in Amsterdam, the second congress had little to say about the circulation of municipal knowledge and expertise as such. However, decisions were also taken about the continuation of the bibliographical bulletin, and the Dutch documentation system was adopted as the IULA’s standard. Nonetheless the Amsterdam congress was in many respects a sine qua non for the perpetuation and expansion of the IULA’s activity, organisation and membership in the interwar period. At this event the demons of the recent past were seemingly exorcised, and the dormant spirit of (in the words of van Karnebeek), ‘la coopération internationale’ was invoked as ‘l’impératif catégorique de notre époque’.35 Mayor De Vlugt of Amsterdam stated that ‘it is not the congress’s agenda, but the vis-à-vis

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contact between former antagonists which is of the greatest importance’.36 Antagonism was clearly evident amongst the French and German delegates at the start of the congress. In a French account of the event, the attitude of the German delegation was perceived as one ‘avec une froideur sinon malveillante, du moins dépourvue de tout aménité’.37 On the same day, however, Dutch photographers were able to capture Franco-German conversations and laughter.38 Wibaut continually stressed the importance of peaceful international co-operation. ‘It was not an appropriate workshop or study conference. It was a conference about thoughts and initiatives,’ Wibaut concluded in his peroration.39 The 1924 congress cleared the way for the official IULA membership of the German Städtetag in 1926. Yet the 1924 congress also broached other points of discussion that would occasionally surface at IULA events in the interwar period. One of them was the Union’s attitude towards the League of Nations and transnational organisations concerned with urban affairs, which will be discussed below. Another issue was the somewhat uneasy collaboration between the continental and the British protagonists within the IULA when taking concerted action. The British inclusion along ‘sound practical lines’ The British representatives of local government, especially the senior Ministry of Health officials responsible for local government affairs, were reluctant to participate in the IULA, despite Vinck’s efforts to encourage a British delegation to the Brussels meeting in September 1920. British reluctance was linked to differences of opinion regarding the purpose of transnational municipalism. In the early 1920s the British authorities considered the IULA’s director Vinck – and to a lesser extent the board members Sellier and Wibaut – as representative of ‘the old intentions which were so utterly Utopian’. This ‘utter utopianism’ implicitly referred to Vinck’s involvement in the Second International and his connection to the universalist initiatives of Otlet and La Fontaine in 1913.40 Even after the significant conference of 1925 in Paris, which had addressed numerous techno-administrative issues, the most senior British official in local government affairs, Gwilym Gibbon, still wondered ‘whether the Union is not partly at any rate a body for socialist propaganda’.41 Official British membership of the IULA, Gibbon stated, was only to be expected if the organisation ‘developed on sound practical lines’.42 Although the scepticism of the British would never entirely disappear

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in the late 1920s and 1930s, their involvement heavily influenced the IULA’s course of action, and even they did not fail to notice that the IULA’s congresses dealt with an enormous diversity of practical issues relating to municipal administration. Many national unions of municipalities contributed to the voluminous reports, which were published in French, German and English. In terms of publications and conference agendas, the IULA’s alleged political-utopian motivation was subordinated, from 1924 onwards, to techno-administrative interests in the practice of municipal administration. The IULA’s techno-administrative agenda was stimulated by the work of the most important British delegate, George Montagu Harris, who quickly rose to prominence within the IULA in the interwar period. Harris was a civil servant and jurist who had established a reputation as a pioneering scholar in the field of comparative local government studies. At first he considered local government within the Commonwealth, but later also European, Asian and American systems of local government.43 In 1936 Harris became the new IULA president on the death of Wibaut, who had held the office since 1925. Harris had very clear ideas about what the IULA’s main focus should be: the comparison of administrative techniques and financial policies, and debate about the education of municipal officials. His approach relied heavily on Patrick Geddes’s well-known aphorism ‘survey before action’, and as such Harris personified what elsewhere has been dubbed the ‘regionalistic’ conception of how to model knowledgegathering.44 This implied a scheme for collecting all manner of empirical material dealing with municipal administration from as many nations as possible, a practice increasingly facilitated by the burgeoning national unions of municipalities, which collected and published all kinds of municipal data. Subsequently, the material was presented nation by nation, and concluded with a comparative epilogue. This work did not, however, as in other studies, promote a universalist blueprint for urban administrative practice. There was another important factor which explains the ponderous British affiliation in the 1920s. The delegates of, among others, France, Belgium, the Netherlands, Switzerland and some Scandinavian countries all represented their national association of municipalities, thereby meeting the criteria of membership provisionally decided upon in 1924 and confirmed in 1927. The British delegates, however, only acted on behalf of a single locality – Brighton’s town clerk was a loyal attendant at congresses – or on behalf of the supervisory institution of British local government, the Ministry of

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Health, represented by Harris. As in other cases, the IULA insisted on a permanent and stable representation of municipal interests from Britain. Britain had at least five associations eligible to represent British municipal interests within an international league committed to local government.45 Furthermore, the IULA’s request for permanent membership fed into an ongoing domestic debate in Britain about the centralisation of advisory and statistical bodies with regard to local government. Only in 1927, having previously delegated persons rather randomly to events in Amsterdam, Basel, Dusseldorf and Paris, were the British able to form a Standing Committee. This Committee formalised British delegations to the IULA, and increasingly coordinated domestic municipal interests. The Standing Committee delegated two of its members to the IULA’s executive, and from 1928 onwards published its own journal, entitled Local Government Abroad, which to a large extent relied on translations or paraphrases of the IULA’s Francophone organ l’Administration Locale, published since 1927. From 1935 onwards, Local Government Administration was additionally issued to a wider Anglophone audience, partly due to increased interest in the IULA by American administrators and scholars. In short, initial British aloofness from the IULA gradually faded, and reciprocal benefits resulted. British municipal interests were organised and represented domestically, partly due to the IULA’s insistence on a representative delegation, and the British outlook with regard to municipal affairs shifted from a mere framework of reference within the British Empire to a wider and permanent interaction with mainland Europe. Conversely, the IULA benefited directly from, for instance, the scholarly input of Harris, whose ideas about knowledge exchange and international comparison differed profoundly from the holistic views of the Franco-Belgian promoters. Indirectly, the discussion between the bureau in Brussels and the Ministry of Health in London about the IULA’s goals spurred regular critical reflection, by Vinck and Wibaut in particular, on the feasibility and pragmatism of the organisation’s activities. Nevertheless, even a pronounced supporter of the IULA such as Harris remained reticent about the yields for British local government: Until recent years our local authorities have been inclined to stand aloof from international organisations, in the belief that our local government, with its own special character and development, had little to learn from

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other countries, and it is beyond question true that the crude adoption of institutions and practices which have proved successful in other countries with different conditions and traditions is not likely to be useful.46

The IULA’s international outlook The IULA congress of 1924 was the first meeting to ask how local authorities could ‘contribute to the work of the League of Nations and of the large international organizations in the municipal sphere’.47 The IULA’s president, Wibaut, as well as Vinck, had always preferred a post-Versailles rebirth under the League’s aegis. The fierce resentment that Bouck White’s movement expressed against the League of Nations convinced Wibaut that to become embedded within the League framework should remain an important organisational aim of the IULA.48 This would, according to Wibaut, ensure the representation and articulation of municipal interests at the highest level of international politics, as well as refuting any speculation about the IULA being a subversive force in international relations. Wibaut stressed that the IULA should not be regarded as a counterweight to the League of Nations, but rather as subservient to it. With regard to other non-governmental organisations, the IULA in general expressed a wish to contribute to the centres of transnational activity in Brussels and Geneva. Ad-hoc or committee collaborations with the International Institute of Administrative Sciences49 and the International Federation for Housing and Town Planning in the 1920s and 1930s ultimately led to the merger, in the course of 1937–38, between the three secretariats in Brussels, following the Chicago clearing-house model propagated by the American reformer Louis Brownlow.50 A resolution submitted during the fourth Assembly of the League of Nations by the Cuban delegation, acting on behalf of the Pan-American Union, incited debate in 1923 about the IULA’s formal connection to the League. The resolution recommended the recognition of inter-municipal collaboration within an international framework.51 The resolution was accepted and rephrased by the Assembly as follows: Recognizing that the establishment of direct relations between major local authorities of the different countries, within the strict limits of the sovereignty of the States, constitutes a new form of co-operation between the peoples which will contribute to the dissemination of ideals that have led to the creation of the League of Nations and has inspired its activity.52

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After brief reference to the Pan-American initiative at the IULA congress of 1924 in Amsterdam, the IULA’s executive board made great efforts to formalise the relationship with the League of Nations. The pursuit of official recognition, whether as an auxiliary or as a befriended organisation, was almost a one-man campaign by Wibaut, the IULA’s president – though he was actively supported by Vinck. As soon as discussions started over the composition of the League’s Economic Committee, one of the permanent committees derived from the Joint Provisional Economic and Financial Committee abolished in 1923, Wibaut initiated a long-term lobbying campaign to have the IULA represented on it. The Economic Committee was established as an inter-governmental body ‘that had an exclusive mandate to examine economic and monetary questions and to publish policy recommendations’.53 In the build-up to the 1927 World Economic Conference, which decided on the statutes and composition of the Economic Committee, and on its members’ tenure, Wibaut exerted all his international authority to secure a seat for the IULA. A speech in the Dutch Senate revealed why Wibaut found this representation so important for municipal administration in general and the IULA in particular. During a debate on the nature of the Dutch input to the Economic Committee, Wibaut explained how the municipal sphere was inevitably connected to that of global trade and economics – and thus politics: I am thinking of a collectivity of municipalities, for municipalities are immensely influential in the economic life of the world. Not only as executive organs, but also by the way in which they influence the economy, the division of labour, and the conditions of labour. Those who render account of the significance of municipal conduct, which expresses itself in an ever increasing amount of municipal enterprises, see the immense importance of regular and consistent contact between the Economic Committee and an union of municipalities.54

Thus, Wibaut outlined a vision of municipalities as the political-economic cells of a global economy. This was the emphatic discourse which, to British officials, was too reminiscent of the socialist and universalist motivations of the pre-war era. It was also the political narrative which Wibaut brought to Geneva to infuse his lobbying activities.

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As a member of the Dutch delegation, Wibaut attended the World Economic Conference for three weeks. In the corridors of the League Wibaut tested the odds on a future seat for the IULA. He inundated the Dutch League of Nations official Adriaan Pelt with propaganda on the IULA, primarily stressing its unprecedented representative asset (12,792 municipalities representing 190 million inhabitants).55 Despite Wibaut’s commitment to the League as the epitome of internationalist organisation, his definition of cities or city unions as entities entitled to political representation within international bodies allowed critics to engage in speculation about the undermining effect the IULA might have on the League. Eventually Pelt promised to forward the IULA’s information to Arthur Salter, the head of the Economic and Financial Section of the League of Nations secretariat. After the conference Wibaut met Salter in person, and also visited the Secretary-General, Eric Drummond, in October 1927 to insist on municipal representation on the Economic Committee.56 Back in Amsterdam Wibaut’s conclusions were discouraging. ‘Our position is highly unfavourable in Geneva,’ he wrote to the president of the German Municipal Union Oscar Mulert.57 Wibaut now sought to secure the IULA’s involvement in the temporary Economic Consultative Committee, which was designed to bring about the recommendations of the World Economic Conference, particularly with regard to the Economic Committee. After a whole series of letters and of circumventions of diplomatic protocol, Wibaut gained the support of the German Minister of Foreign Affairs, Gustav Stresemann, and of the Dutch Prime Minister, Hendrik Colijn.58 Yet, as pointed out by Clavin and Wessels, the composition and agenda-setting of the Economic Committee depended almost entirely on the caprices of those who represented the most powerful trade interests;59 and the IULA was not considered a powerhouse of global trade. Ultimately, Wibaut was not even included in the Dutch delegation to the first convention of the Economic Consultative Committee in 1928.60 In general, the IULA regularly expressed its wish to be incorporated into the world of international co-operation and transnational organisations in Brussels and Geneva. With regard to the League of Nations, the IULA stressed its discontent with alternative initiatives, which proposed a ‘League of Cities’ as an almost militant counterweight. Vinck and Wibaut regarded the IULA as an outstanding vehicle for securing the articulation of municipal interests by participating in the League’s Economic Committee. Given its unsuccessful lobbying efforts to obtain a permanent position in

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Geneva, the IULA, partly perforce, resorted to scientific and activist nongovernmental transnationalism in Brussels in the 1930s. The perpetuation of its relations with peer organisations such as the International Institute of Administrative Sciences and the International Federation for Housing and Town Planning superseded the wish to be connected to the League of Nations. The increasingly techno-administrative and scientific content of the IULA’s meetings and publications from the late 1920s onwards relegated to the margins its ambition to become an actor on the stage of international economic politics. In a way, this also reflected the cleavage between the political activists and those who favoured mere exchange of municipal knowledge. Conclusion: the municipal as the transnational in interwar Europe In 1924 the Dutch painter Martin Monnickendam completed a painting commissioned by the Dutch committee of the World League of Cities. It depicts the globe of the world pulled out, by two horses, from an inferno of war onto a calm, illuminated and fertile lawn of peace. An angel drives the two horses; one is white, and is clearly determined to use all its power to pull the globe out of the fire – it does not need the angel’s guidance. The other horse is black and prances, and needs all the angel’s attention to keep to its task: guarding the world from war. As indicated by the horses’ name tags, the painting is an evocative representation of the colliding conceptions of transnational organisation by cities in the early 1920s. The white horse represents the ‘World League of Cities’, whereas the black goes under the name of ‘League of Nations’. At the same time that Monnickendam was finalising the painting expressing the different attitudes with which the World League of Cities and the League of Nations strove for world peace, Wibaut was seeking League of Nations’ support for the re-establishment of the IULA. This is but one further illustration of the contested motivations, aims and ideals which underpinned and propelled the development of transnational municipalism in the interwar period. Besides different conceptions of cities (or city unions) as transnational actors – as substitutive for or supplementary to states – we have seen cleavages revolving around many other issues. The case of British membership of the IULA uncovers a dynamic which both hampered and boosted the development of the IULA. Political scepticism (the alleged socialist signature of the IULA), domestic disagreement (the troublesome British delegation), and differing opinions about the exchange

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of knowledge (Harris’s comparative approach versus the holistic tradition within the IULA) all contributed to this dynamic. As a maturing transnational organisation, the IULA attempted to associate itself with the League of Nations and other transnational organisations. Again, the IULA’s overture to the League cannot be interpreted unambiguously. Wibaut’s claim to a seat in the Economic Committee also disclosed his veiled view that local authorities were entirely justified in embarking on the project of regulating global economy and trade. In other words, for Wibaut as much as for Bouck White, cities were in the final analysis the true bearers of the internationalist spirit. More relevant to the IULA’s second trajectory (knowledge exchange), and also less ambitious in terms of geopolitics, was the IULA’s rapprochement with peer organisations, to share expertise and enhance organisational strength. In short, the articulation of relationships with other organisations stemmed from both trajectories, and consequently had different outcomes: rejection by the League of Nations and a merger with the International Institute of Administrative Sciences and the International Federation for Housing and Town Planning. In the case of the IULA – the institutionalised manifestation of transnational municipalism during the interwar period – all these competing ideologies, ideals and pragmatic outlooks show the ambiguity of transnational conceptions and practices. They sometimes confirm accepted divisions – between international and local, pragmatic and utopian, idiosyncrasy and universalism, politics and administration – as the cause of antagonism and rivalry, but they also offer a kaleidoscope where other connections between the municipal and the transnational appear.

Notes 1.

2. 3.

See for instance Schäfer’s account of the interconnected discourse on the larger implications of municipal administration and ownership for the quality of urban life in Germany and the United States: Axel R. Schäfer, American Progressives and German Social Reform, 1875–1920 (Stuttgart, 2000), pp. 79– 108. Frederic C. Howe, The City: The Hope of Democracy (Seattle, WA, and London, 1967), p. 123. Among thought-provoking and pioneering studies in this respect are Marjatta Hietala, Services and Urbanization at the Turn of the Century: The Diffusion of Innovations (Helsinki, 1987); Marjatta Hietala, ‘Transfer of German and Scandinavian administrative knowledge: examples from Helsinki and the

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4.

5.

6.

7.

8. 9. 10.

11. 12.

13. 14.

Internationalism Reconfigured Association of Finnish Cities’, Jahrbuch für Europaïsche Verwaltungsgeschichte, vol. 15 (2003) pp. 109–30; Daniel T. Rodgers, Atlantic Crossings: Social Politics in a Progressive Age (Cambridge, MA, 1998), ch. 4; Jeffrey E. Hanes, The City as Subject: Seki Hajime and the Reinvention of Modern Osaka (Berkeley, CA, 2002); Shane Ewen, ‘The internationalization of fire protection: in pursuit of municipal networks in Edwardian Birmingham’, Urban History, vol. 32, no. 2 (2005), pp. 288–307; Pierre-Yves Saunier, ‘Changing the city: urban international information and the Lyon municipality, 1900–1940’, Planning Perspectives, vol. 14, no. 1 (1999), pp. 19–48. See for instance Shane Ewen and Michael Hebbert, ‘European cities in a networked world during the long twentieth century’, Environment and Planning, Part C, Government & Policy, vol. 25, no. 3 (2007), pp. 327–40; Shane Ewen, ‘Lost in translation? Mapping, molding, and managing the transnational municipal moment’, in Pierre-Yves Saunier and Ewen (eds.), Another Global City: Historical Explorations into the Transnational Municipal Moment, 1850–2000 (New York, 2008), pp. 173–84. Pierre-Yves Saunier, ‘Sketches from the Urban Internationale, 1910–50: voluntary associations, international institutions and US philanthropic foundations’, International Journal of Urban & Regional Research, vol. 25, no. 2 (2001), pp. 380–404. Idem, ‘La toile municipale aux XIX° et XX° siècles: un panorama transnational vu d’Europe’, Urban History Review/Revue d’Histoire Urbaine, vol. 34, no.2 (2006), pp. 163–76. Ewen, ‘Lost in Translation?’, p. 174; Jeffrey Sellers, ‘Re-placing the nation: an agenda for comparative urban politics’, Urban Affairs Review, vol. 40, no. 4 (2005), pp. 419–46. Pierre-Yves Saunier, ‘Introduction: global city, take 2: a view from urban history’, in Saunier and Ewen (eds.), Another Global City, pp. 1–18, here p. 15. Ibid, p. 16. n.n., Premier Congrès International et Exposition comparée des villes. I Construction des villes. II Organisation de la vie communale (Brussels, 1914), p. viii. Renaud Payre and Pierre-Yves Saunier, ‘A city in the world of cities’, in Another Global City, pp. 69-85, here p. 78. Cited in Patrizia Dogliani, ‘European municipalism in the first half of the twentieth century: the socialist network’, Contemporary European History, vol. 11, no. 4 (2002), pp. 573–96, here p. 578. Renaud Payre, Une science communale? Réseaux réformateurs et municipalité providence (Paris, 2007), p. 37. Joan-Anton Sánchez de Juan, Civitas et Urbs: The Idea of the City and the Historical Imagination of Urban Governance in Spain, 19th–20th Centuries (Florence, 2001) pp. 176–7; Uwe Kühl (ed.), Der Municipalsozialismus in Europa (Munich, 2001).

In Between ‘Vague Theory’ and ‘Sound Practical Lines’ 15. 16.

17.

18.

19. 20.

21. 22. 23.

24.

25.

26. 27.

28.

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Axel Körner, Politics of Culture in Liberal Italy: From Unification to Fascism (New York, 2009), p. 124. Oscar Gaspari, ‘Cities against states? Hopes, dreams and shortcomings of the European municipal movement, 1900–1960’, Contemporary European History, vol. 11, no. 4 (2002), pp. 597–621. Wouter Van Acker, ‘Een geografie van de informatienetwerken in de stedelijke beweging. Het informatiemodel van Paul Otlet (1868–1944) voor de Union Internationale des Villes’, Stadsgeschiedenis, vol. 3, no. 2 (2008), pp. 122–42. Renaud Payre, ‘The science that never was: “Communal Science” in France, 1913–1949’, Contemporary European History, vol. 11, no. 4 (2002), pp. 529–48; ibid, ‘A l’école du gouvernment municipal: les congrès de l’Union Internationale des Villes de Gand (1913) à Genève (1949)’, in Bruno Dumons and Gilles Pollet (eds.), Administrer la ville en Europe (XIXe–XXe siècles) (Paris, 2003), pp. 109–42; idem, ‘Une science communale?’, pp. 35–113. Stefan Couperus, De machinerie van de stad: Stadsbestuur als idee en praktijk, Nederland en Amsterdam 1900–1940 (Amsterdam, 2009), pp. 124–42. Public Record Office (PRO), Ministry of Housing and Local Government (HLG), 52/1000 IULA, report on Brussels meeting September 1920. The Germans were absent at the first congress in 1913, mainly because they distrusted the socialist triumvirate (Vinck, Wibaut and Sellier) who were organising it. See Ingo Bautz, ‘Die Auslandsbeziehungen deutscher Kommunen bis 1945’, Interregiones, vol. 8 (1999), pp. 19–58. n.n., ‘A World League of Cities’, Sociological Review, vol. 15 (1923), pp. 329– 30. Ibid, 329. For a historical and discursive analysis of cities as competitors of nation-states, see Hendrik Spruyt, The Sovereign State and Its Competitors: An Analysis of Systems Change (Princeton, NJ, 1994). Taylor wrongly labels the initiative to create a Welt-Städtebund as merely German. See Peter J. Taylor, World City Network: A Global Urban Analysis (London, 2004), p. 21. For the bewildering life story of Bouck White and his riotous behaviour among various religious and socialist communities, see Mary E. Kenton, ‘Christianity, democracy, and socialism: Bouck White’s kingdom of self-respect’, in Jacob H. Dorn (ed.), Socialism and Christianity in Early 20th-Century America (Westport, CT, 1998), pp. 165–98. David A. Shannon, The Socialist Party of America: A History (New York, 1955), p. 60. Ingo Bautz, Die Auslandsbeziehungen der deutschen Kommunen im Rahmen der europäischen Kommunalbewegung in den 1950er und 60er Jahren (Siegen, 2002), p. 37. See International Institute of Social History, Wibaut papers, inventory 313 (hereafter ‘IISH, Wibaut 313’), correspondence between Wibaut and Vinck, 1920–24.

88 29.

30. 31. 32. 33. 34. 35.

36. 37.

38. 39. 40. 41. 42. 43.

44. 45.

46. 47. 48. 49.

Internationalism Reconfigured Bouck White and his World League of Cities were first mentioned by Heldring in Algemeen Handelsblad, 11 January 1924. Bouck White, as in Paris and Leipzig, succeeded in founding a Dutch working committee, consisting of 13 dignitaries from Rotary, freemasonry and entrepreneurial circles, which was committed to the ‘Boston Idea’. See IISH, Wibaut 313, letter Oudegeest to Wibaut, 14 March 1924. Ibid, letter Bouck White to Wibaut, 20 February 1924. Ibid, letter Wibaut to Bouck White, 14 March 1924. F.M. Wibaut, Levensbouw: Memoires door dr. F.M. Wibaut (Amsterdam, 1936), p. 278. IISH, Wibaut 313, letter Bouck White to Wibaut, 20 February 1924. Ibid, letter De Vlugt and Wibaut to Van Karnebeek, 1 March 1924. n.n., IIème Congrès International des Villes organisé par l’Union Internationale des Villes sous le Patronage de la Municipalité d’Amsterdam: Amsterdam, 30 juin et 1er juillet 1924. Documents Préliminaires, Rapports, Délibérations, Voeux, Annexes (Brussels, 1924), p. 121. Algemeen Handelsblad, 1 July 1924. Antoine Sallès, Une Délégation Municipale Lyonnaise en Hollande (30 Juin–9 Juillet 1924). Congrès de l’Union Internationale des Villes, Conférence Internationale de l’Amènagement des Villes (Lyon 1924), p. 13. ‘A reservedness, if not hostility at any rate deprived of all amiability.’ See the photo report in Algemeen Handelsblad, 1 July 1924. Algemeen Handelsblad, 2 July 1924. PRO, HLG, 52/1000 IULA, several notes and letters, 1920–26. Ibid, letter Gibbon to Pritchard, 22 January 1926. Ibid, 20 May 1924. See for instance G. Montagu Harris, Problems of Local Government (London, 1911); idem, Local Government in Many Lands (London, 1925 and 1932); idem, Comparative Local Government (New York, 1948). Van Acker, ‘Een geografie’, pp. 136–8. The County Councils’ Association, the Association of Municipal Corporations, the Urban Districts Councils’ Association, the Rural District Councils’ Association and London County Council. Local Government Administration, June 1935. H.J.D. Revers, IULA 1913–1963: The Story of Fifty Years of International Municipal Co-operation (The Hague, 1963), p. 31. IISH, Wibaut 313, letter Wibaut to Oudegeest, 20 March 1924. For a historical analysis, and some reference to the IIAS’s dedication to municipal administration, see Denis Moschopoulos, ‘The International Institute of Administrative Sciences: main stages of its history’, International Review of Administrative Sciences, vol. 71, no. 2 (2005), pp. 197–216; Stephan Fisch, ‘Origins and history of the International Institute of Administrative Sciences: from its beginnings to its reconstruction after World War II

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50.

51. 52. 53.

54. 55. 56. 57. 58. 59. 60.

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(1910–1944/47)’, in Fabio Rugge and Michael Duggett (eds.), IIAS/IISA Administration & Service 1930–2005 (Amsterdam 2005), pp. 35–60. Pierre-Yves Saunier, ‘Reshaping the Urban Internationale: the US foundations and international organization in municipal government, planning and housing 1920s–1960s’. Paper presented at a conference on ‘Philanthropy and the City: An Historical Overview’, New York 2000, pp. 11–12. Revers, IULA 1913–1963, p. 32. Cited in ibid, p. 32. Patricia Clavin and Jens-Wilhelm Wessels, ‘Transnationalism and the League of Nations: understanding the work of its Economic and Financial Organisation’, Contemporary European History, vol. 14, no. 4 (2005), pp. 465–92, here p. 472. Minutes Dutch First Chamber, 20 April 1928, p. 648. IISH, Wibaut 312, letters Wibaut to Pelt, 9 and 16 November 1927. Payre, Une science communale?, pp. 58–9. IISH, Wibaut 312, letter Wibaut to Mulert, 12 November 1927. Ibid, letter Mulert to Wibaut, 21 February 1928. Clavin and Wessels, ‘Transnationalism’, p. 473. IISH, Wibaut 312, letter Colijn to Wibaut, 14 December 1927.

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‘THE BREATH OF A NEW LIFE’? British Anti-Slavery Activism and the League of Nations

Amalia Ribi

In 1919, John Harris, a former Baptist missionary and Secretary of the renowned British Anti-Slavery and Aborigines Protection Society (hereafter Anti-Slavery Society) expressed his great hopes for a new international order and for an unprecedented period of humanitarianism in post-war relations between Europe and Africa.1 A professed ‘lover of Africa’, ‘enthralled’ and ‘captured’ by the continent, Harris evoked the ‘beneficent and healing influences’ of the newly established League of Nations’ Covenant.2 ‘The momentous event in the history of Africa,’ Harris claimed, ‘is the League of Nations – momentous because it heralds a break in hoary political institutions and breathes into the continent the breath of a new life.’3 This chapter examines how in 1919 the League of Nations became a new platform for international campaigns against slavery in Africa, an issue which had gained prominence at the end of the nineteenth century. It argues that British anti-slavery activists, due to efficient networking and lobbying, gained sufficient influence on the international stage to limit the participation of other humanitarian campaigning groups. At the same time, this chapter suggests that the British activists’ commitment to international anti-slavery action was informed by an equal belief in the internationalisation of colonial issues and the benefits of a liberal empire. It is only in the past few years, after decades of emphasis on the League’s failings, that a new generation of transnational historians has begun to

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uncover the League’s achievements in promoting economic, cultural and social cooperation. International systems for supporting refugees and for combating epidemic disease, drug trafficking and prostitution are now increasingly attributed to the League’s groundbreaking work, mostly theoretical though it was.4 A case in point is the League’s campaign against White Slavery, which has been hailed as a major stepping-stone towards an international human-rights regime.5 One of the areas that has seen consistent interest is the League’s Mandates System. Created in 1919, this was an outcome of the Paris Peace Conference. It stipulated that all Ottoman and German territories seized by the Allied Powers during the war should be held ‘in trust’, as ‘mandates’ under the supervision of the League of Nations. Scholarly debate has mainly focused on whether this meant a reform of or a return to pre-war imperialism. While some historians have argued that the Mandates System was merely ‘imperialism’s new clothes’,6 others have challenged this view by reviewing the theoretical framework of international accountability as a serious reconsideration of long-standing conceptions of colonial relationships.7 One defining aspect of the humanitarian credentials of the Mandates System was the question of the protection of indigenous people from slavery and labour exploitation, an issue studied extensively by Suzanne Miers.8 Along with Miers, scholars such as Kevin Grant have highlighted the role of British anti-slavery campaigners as catalysts for debates over European imperial labour policies and for international humanitarian political protest.9 There is, no doubt, much validity to the view that Britain played an essential role in internationalising humanitarian issues with respect to nonEuropean territories. But, as this chapter argues, it would be a simplification to equate the resulting anti-slavery policies in Geneva with an increase in international cooperation and humanitarianism. Rather, the campaigning of humanitarian lobbies such as the Anti-Slavery Society provides a valuable filter through which to view the entanglement of internationalist humanitarian and imperial ideas in the 1920s. While British activists embraced internationalist ideals and pursued their lobbying campaigns on an international stage, they consistently referred to Britain’s superior national and imperial identity, thereby failing to cooperate with other groups such as the Switzerland-based Bureau International pour la Défense des Indigènes. In fact, anti-slavery activists had an ambiguous relationship with nationalist endeavours and internationalist ideals, and their advocacy of human rights did not necessarily mean an anti-imperial or anti-colonial attitude. British

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commitment to international action against slavery and the slave trade was thus primarily based on an essentially national tradition of humanitarian interventionism, moral power and superiority. ‘The Breath of a New Life’ At the outset of the First World War, the Anti-Slavery Society was arguably the leading humanitarian lobby with respect to colonial and African affairs. Founded in 1839 by Quakers, the small abolitionist society had survived into the twentieth century, financed by the modest annual contributions of its members and larger donations from a few rich Quaker or non-conformist business and professional men.10 After the parliamentary successes which led in 1807 to the abolition of the transatlantic slave trade and in 1834 to emancipation, the Anti-Slavery Society shifted its campaign’s focus to the African continent, maintaining that although slavery had been abolished in many areas, it continued to exist in Africa in various forms. Parliamentary lobbying, the circulation of petitions and information leaflets, the hiring of itinerant speakers and the organisation of mass meetings continued to be the most successful features of its campaigning in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. International contacts and networks had already been a characteristic of anti-slavery activism in previous centuries, even if they were mainly limited to an Anglo-American context.11 In the late nineteenth century, the 1885 Berlin Conference – and more importantly, the Brussels Conference in 1889–90 – had both established the importance of intergovernmental cooperation against the African slave trade, at least on paper.12 By signing the Brussels Act of 2 July 1890, the conference members declared their ‘firm intention of putting an end to the crimes and devastations created by the traffic in African slaves, of efficiently protecting the aboriginal population of Africa, and of securing for that vast continent the benefits of peace and civilisation’.13 Only two years earlier, Cardinal Lavigerie had toured the larger cities of Europe calling for concerted anti-slavery action. A range of antislavery organisations was created in Europe, amongst them the Catholic Société Antiesclavagiste de France and the Società Antischiavista d’Italia. Both corresponded regularly with their British sister organisation, the Anti-Slavery Society.14 Reflecting the tenor of an ever-growing number of governmental and non-governmental internationalist meetings and conferences – economic, scientific and artistic – these small national

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societies professed their belief in international cooperation and regularly convened anti-slavery congresses. They maintained that slavery was an international issue which cut across national boundaries and required cooperative international efforts. Lacking an institutional framework, however, their cooperation remained informal and limited to the exchange of information, only rarely leading to joint campaigning.15 The continental societies’ international outlook weakened in the early twentieth century, as they gradually developed into colonial lobbying groups.16 When the French and Italian organisations failed to join the campaign against labour abuses in King Leopold’s Congo, the already weak international bonds between the European organisations broke up.17 Confronted since the early 1890s with reports of atrocities in the Congo, British activists had raised considerable popular awareness of the issue in both Britain and the United States.18 Mostly due to the involvement of the aspiring radical journalist Edmund Dene Morel, and mostly to John and Alice Harris’s missionary propaganda and lantern lectures, the Congo campaign gained momentum after 1904.19 The use of photographs and lantern lectures fuelled the organisation’s popularity, and decidedly shaped public knowledge about humanitarian issues in Africa. It successfully transformed popular awareness of African slavery in Europe and the United States by shifting attention to the abusive practices existing within colonial regimes. Having taken over the leadership of the Anti-Slavery Society in 1910, John Harris set out to elaborate a new focus on international relations and politics to prevent violent colonial excesses created by the demand for cheap and coerced African labour.20 He propounded a central idea – the internationalisation of imperial trusteeship – in a range of publications supporting Wilson’s plans for a supranational institution for peace and security.21 After a highly critical book, Dawn in Darkest Africa (1914), which was influenced by labour abuses in the Congo, Harris moved on to envisage a better future for Africa in his post-war book Africa: Slave or Free (1919).22 Centring his argumentation on the problem of indigenous African labour, and more specifically on slavery, Harris advocated gradual development under responsible trusteeship and the application of liberal principles of free trade and free labour.23 Evoking a new form of ‘international trusteeship’, Harris, who was a member of the Executive Committee of the League of Nations Union, referred his audience to the Covenant’s declaration that ‘the well-being and development of (native) people formed a sacred trust of

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civilisation’.24 As he maintained, one of the biggest challenges faced by the League was to ‘secure in the mandated areas’ the abolition of slave-owning, slave-trading and forced labour.25 In reality, the provisions made by the League of Nations for labour and colonial reform were quite vague. Article 23 of the League of Nations Covenant bound members to ‘secure fair and humane conditions of labour’ for men, women and children, not only in their own countries but in all countries with which they had commercial and industrial relations, as well as to secure the ‘just treatment’ of natives under their rule.26 In order to fulfil these pledges, a special division of the League’s Secretariat, the Mandates Section, was created in 1920. It was to prepare the work of the Council and the Assembly on mandates questions, to collect data and correspond with the mandatory powers, and to serve as the secretariat of a supervisory body, the Permanent Mandates Commission (hereafter Mandates Commission).27 This system of international accountability was the ‘breath of new life’ that Harris was so confident about. With a great flair for publicity and an appetite for political influence, he set out to devote a great part of his society’s time and finances to securing its position as a pressure group in Geneva. Viewed by contemporary observers as a ‘machinery of experiment’, the League of Nations was an unprecedented institution, and the practicalities of its design were left open to interpretation.28 Dominated by Western European staff, the League’s Secretariat was intended as an international civil service, with permanent officials divided into different sections and primarily charged with collecting and administering information.29 The League was the first international organisation with global interests, concerning itself not just with security matters but also with labour, health, cultural and other issues throughout the world. In order to function and to find international solutions to the wide range of issues it was dealing with, the League was supposed to cooperate, at least technically, with a number of international organisations. The rules and particularities of this cooperation remained fuzzy during the initial years, and the League’s ‘layers of formal and informal power’, as described by Callahan, created formal and informal possibilities for influencing its bureaucracy.30 The Anti-Slavery Society exploited this initial openness by establishing contacts with the Secretariat’s Mandates Section, and more particularly with its influential Director, William Rappard.31

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Born in New York in 1883, Rappard was a prominent academic who had taught economic history in Geneva and at Harvard before embarking on a career as a diplomat. A member of various Swiss diplomatic missions, including the delegation to the Peace Conference in Paris in 1919, he had been highly influential in the selection of Geneva as the headquarters of the League of Nations.32 It was also Rappard’s wish that the members of the Mandates Commission should not be nationals of mandatory powers, nor directly dependent on their own government. This theoretically ruled out the appointment of military officials or civil servants, and should have encouraged the participation of academics and representatives of nongovernmental organisations. In practice, however, the majority of the ‘permanent experts’ of the Commission were former colonial officials who had intricate connections with their respective governments. The Mandates Commission’s very first task was to discuss the drafts of the different categories of A, B and C Mandates adopted by the Allied Powers. Distinctions between the Mandates were to be based on the ‘stage of development’, and hence capacity for self-government, of the populations concerned. Thus the A Mandates were to comprise the allegedly more advanced areas formerly controlled by the Ottoman Empire, such as Mesopotamia, Syria and Palestine. The more ‘backward’ former German territories in West and Central Africa, which needed a greater level of control, were defined as B Mandates; while the C Mandates included territories – South-West Africa and certain islands in the South Pacific – which were to be treated as integral parts of the mandatory powers. However, the Commission was treading on uncharted ground in trying to assess what the international community should regard as the minimal requirements for each of the Mandates. As it battled with the details of the provisions for the protection of indigenous peoples and the abolition of slavery in the B Mandates, the League’s general lack of data on the subject became evident to Harris, who was eager to bring in his society’s outstanding wealth of material and experience. During 1920 and 1921, Harris provided Rappard with a plethora of pamphlets, articles and memos on postwar Africa, trusteeship and slavery, which, in Harris’s own words, came close to an ‘inundation’.33 Rappard welcomed the Anti-Slavery Society’s initiative, maintaining that his ‘ignorance, [was] equal only to his earnest desire to dispel it’.34 Harris was keen ‘to render assistance’, particularly, as he put it to his correspondent, ‘in view of the fact that those who really care for the questions in which you and I are interested are very limited in number’.35 Rappard, on the

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other hand, openly acknowledged that cooperating with the Anti-Slavery Society was ‘absolutely essential for the League of Nations generally, and for the welfare of the inhabitants of mandated areas in particular’.36 In fact, a confidential cooperation ensued in which Harris succeeded in making the abolition of slavery a crucial precondition of native welfare.37 Had it not been for Harris’s forceful lobbying, the problem of slavery might not even have been considered by the League of Nations and, most likely, would have quickly disappeared from its priority list. The limits of international cooperation The Anti-Slavery Society was by no means the only organisation to aspire to cooperate with the League. Indeed, Geneva had already emerged before the First World War as a home to humanitarian endeavours and evangelical philanthropy.38 A Swiss League for the Protection of Indigenous Peoples, founded in 1908, had organised a series of popular lecture tours by British activist Alice Harris to raise awareness of the Congo scandal. In 1913, under the leadership of its committed internationalist Secretary René Claparède, the Swiss League went on to create an international office for the protection of indigenous peoples, the Bureau International pour la Défense des Indigènes (hereafter Bureau International). Its objective was to develop among civilised peoples the realisation of their responsibility towards others, to obtain justice for the coloured nations without distinction of country or race; to co-ordinate the efforts of national organisations for the protection of native races; to establish permanent ties between them and to create new leagues.39

Claparède enthusiastically described the new office as the ‘Black Cross’, by analogy with the Red Cross.40 Initially, the British anti-slavery activists were keen to interact with their Swiss colleagues. Harris and his committee needed to get a firm position in Geneva, and the Swiss wanted administrative advice and financial support to run the Bureau International, whose existence at this stage did not go beyond some organisational drafts.41 When travelling to Geneva to observe the progress made in setting up the League’s machinery and to start his lobbying activities, Harris repeatedly stayed with his ‘friends’, the Claparèdes. He evoked their hospitality, ‘coupled with the beauty of Geneva’, as ‘one of the compensations of a very hard fight for subject

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peoples’.42 Equally enthusiastic about their interaction, Claparède admired the historical prestige of the British organisation and warmly praised Harris’s leadership.43 Yet the mutual esteem and self-satisfaction of these evangelical humanitarians was soon to be shaken by power struggles and differing views on African participation in Geneva. Called by W.E.B. Du Bois, Secretary of the National Association for the Advancement of Colored Peoples, the second Pan-African Congress met in Paris in 1919 to establish a permanent organisation that could foster selfgovernment and self-determination for Africans in Africa and America.44 In August and September 1921, 26 groups of delegates from the Americas, the Caribbean, Europe and Africa gathered in London and Brussels for the third Pan-African Congress. They discussed three resolutions to be put before the League of Nations. First, they requested that the International Labour Organisation (hereafter ILO), which had been established in Geneva in 1919, set up a section to deal with ‘the conditions and needs of native Negro labour, especially in Africa ...’.45 Secondly, they asked for ‘a man of Negro descent’ to be appointed as a member of the Mandates Commission.46 And thirdly, addressing the League’s ‘vast moral power of public world opinion and of a body conceived to promote Peace and Justice among men’, they asked it to pay ‘careful attention to the condition of civilized persons of Negro descent throughout the world’.47 Harris could hardly conceal his personal irritation with Du Bois’s activities.48 The congress’s condemnation of imperialism and racism and its adoption of resolutions advocating gradual self-government for Africans, and the use of the League of Nations to supervise native rights, went far beyond Harris’s ideas of ‘imperial trusteeship’. His complaint to the Bureau International that Du Bois had ‘complicated things badly’, however, was not shared by his Swiss friends.49 Thus, while the Bureau International was prepared to embrace the Pan-African resolutions, it became equally evident that the Anti-Slavery Society would find it difficult to tolerate any organisation which did not act as a ‘sub-organisation’ to its London headquarters. Soon, their early cooperative enthusiasm cooled down. The Bureau International did not wish simply to adopt the British model and to act as a ‘sister organisation’, as had been the case with pre-war antislavery societies. Rather, despite its very insecure finances, its ambition had always been to create an international non-governmental organisation in Geneva, which would hold periodic international conferences there.50 Yet, when the Swiss humanitarians suggested a scheme to reorganise the bureau’s

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machinery and to expand its competences, the response amongst British anti-slavery ranks was uncompromising.51 Outlining the project to a British colleague, Harris foresaw that the reorganisation, ‘would doubtless lead on to a common policy, a common bulletin, and a common purse’.52 The AntiSlavery Society did not intend to ‘hand over its international work’, and therefore ‘saw no possibility’ of agreeing to such a scheme.53 This debate on influence and interests ultimately put an end to effective co-operation. The Anti-Slavery Society’s predominance and its lack of cooperation with other campaigning groups, however, also meant that organisations such as the Bureau International had to scale down their aspirations. While the Bureau International continued to lobby desperately for an international body, British anti-slavery activists prided themselves on not needing ‘the Bureau as a medium’ between their society and the League of Nations to solve ‘questions of an international character’.54 The recrudescence of slavery in Africa: the case of Ethiopia The Anti-Slavery Society’s lobbying activities were soon to focus on one selective question: the alleged ‘revival’ of slavery in Africa, and particularly in Ethiopia. On 4 January 1922 the Society sent Rappard a pamphlet which would determine the discourse on slavery throughout the interwar period.55 Entitled ‘Slave Trading and Slave Owning in Abyssinia’ and written by British Major Henry Darley and Dr Dyce Sharp, a former physician of the British legation in Ethiopia, the pamphlet claimed to be a ‘detailed and authoritative account ... of present day conditions’ in Ethiopia, ‘the last great home of slavery in Africa and therefore in the World’.56 Embracing Darley and Sharp’s harrowing images of slave caravans and slave raids, the Anti-Slavery Society referred the pamphlet to the Mandates Section as a cause for ‘serious concern and apprehension that should be addressed by the British Government … and the other European Governments which have territorial responsibilities in that quarter of Africa’.57 The fact that Ethiopia’s status as a sovereign African country placed it outside the terms of the Mandates Commission did not deter the Society from pursuing a vigorous campaign for intervention. In September 1922 Harris travelled to Geneva, hoping to persuade the League to confront the matter and take steps towards the abolition of slavery in Africa. Without an official mandate or backing by the Foreign Office for this purpose, he had to find a British representative willing to second his cause in the League’s General Assembly. Having gained the support of Sir Arthur Steel-Maitland, a British delegate

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from New Zealand, Harris managed to get the Assembly of the League ‘to refer the question of the recrudescence of slavery in Africa to an appropriate committee’.58 The League’s Council instructed the Secretary-General, Eric Drummond, to compile a report on slavery to be discussed at the next General Assembly. Drummond, who admittedly had ‘never read the debates in the Assembly [on that subject]’, proceeded to collect information from the member states of the League on slavery within their territories.59 While the general response remained unsatisfactory, the most detailed report came unsurprisingly from a British retired colonial governor, and a member of the Mandates Commission since 1922, Lord Lugard.60 Incited by the AntiSlavery Society and eager to gain a leading role in the debates on slavery in Geneva, Lugard presented a confidential memorandum on ‘Slavery in Abyssinia’ to the Secretary-General.61 Drawing on the accounts provided by Darley and Sharp, Lugard’s report offered a scathing critique of the Ethiopian political system and of its socio-economic problems. In order to address the situation, Lugard suggested setting up a ‘fact-finding mission’ and sending a European observer to Ethiopia. Although well aware that the League could not possibly offer any legitimacy for an international intervention in Ethiopian affairs, he put forward a scheme for administering the country that was ‘little different in principle from the B-class of Mandates’.62 Thus indicating his conception of international control, he did not leave much room for doubt that his professed abolitionist intentions and humanitarian ideals went hand in hand with more material concerns and strategic interests.63 Lugard’s report generated such controversy amongst French and Italian representatives within the League that its publication was decided against. For decades Italy, France and Britain had struggled to gain commercial concessions in Ethiopia and access to natural resources there, such as the waters of the Blue Nile, but they were played off against each other by the Ethiopian government.64 Lugard’s report was interpreted as Britain seeking opportunities for intervention and control.65 Unabashed, the Anti-Slavery Society petitioned the Secretary-General on the question of slavery in Ethiopia as one of the most urgent ‘international problems’, with considerable support from members of both Houses of Parliament.66 By placing Ethiopia under international control, the Anti-Slavery Society claimed, the League of Nations could ‘confer upon Africa the greatest blessing which has yet visited the Dark Continent’.67

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The dramatic construction of slavery in Ethiopia as an international emergency was to have quite adverse effects on the Anti-Slavery Society’s influence. Faced with the dilemma of circulating the Society’s allegations, Rappard informed Harris that the Council had ‘unfortunately’ taken a resolution that prohibited the circulation of unofficial documentation.68 The Director of the Mandates Section ‘quite privately’ suggested to Harris that he should from now on use Foreign Office channels to transmit his society’s appeals.69 Shortly after, on 12 August 1923, the government of Ethiopia, which was aware of the increasing international pressure, and anxious to avoid any further moves from colonial powers, successfully applied with French support and against British opposition for membership of the League of Nations.70 For the anti-slavery campaign, this meant that information on Ethiopian slavery could only be sent to the League by the Ethiopian government itself. In the same year, the Society also lost its most valuable ally within the League of Nations when in July 1924 Rappard resigned his post as Director of the Mandates Section.71 Eager to maintain the contact and international connection with Rappard, British anti-slavery activists offered him the honorary position of Vice-President of their Society.72 Professing his great admiration and sympathy for their work, Rappard tellingly refused the ‘most flattering invitation’ on the grounds that he was a foreigner and that his continuing diplomatic role in Geneva would make ‘such a position untenable’. 73 Towards a slavery convention Despite the unfavourable reception of Lugard’s report, and the curtailment of the Anti-Slavery Society’s informal influence in Geneva, British activists’ lobbying at the League at least had one major effect: following the limited collection of information on slavery in 1923, the League decided to appoint a temporary body of international experts to investigate the matter further.74 In 1924, the Temporary Slavery Commission (hereafter Temporary Commission) was formed as a sub-commission within the Mandates Section. Theoretically conceived as an independent body to collect, assess and circulate evidence on slavery in the world, in reality the Temporary Commission worked somewhat differently. It had no competence with regard to long-term policies, and it was composed of eight members, all but one – the British representative of the ILO, Harold Grimshaw – former colonial officials.75 No representative of any anti-slavery body had been appointed, although Rappard had supported the representation of

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international organisations on the Temporary Commission as ‘extremely useful’.76 Still, after long deliberation, the Foreign Office had reluctantly designated the Anti-Slavery Society a ‘reliable’ source of unofficial information, which meant the Society could use Foreign Office channels to provide the Temporary Commission, and particularly the British expert Lugard, with evidence on slavery.77 In fact, this resulted in Lugard becoming one of the most active members of the Temporary Commission, and the only one determined to pull the question of slavery ‘out of the morass in which the lack of interest evinced by the States concerned has so far left it’.78 The resulting predominance of British reports and drafts, however, led Grimshaw to criticise the Anti-Slavery Society for supplying ‘their delegate’, Lugard, and not the commission as a whole, with information on slavery.79 Grimshaw had previously campaigned for the Temporary Commission to be set up under the ILO to avoid the politicisation of the question,80 and he now particularly deplored the fact that the members of the commission were acting as national representatives rather than as ‘independent’ international experts. Such criticism met with little understanding from the Society’s London headquarters, which saw no contradiction between furthering British leadership and its professed national tradition of abolition when solving an international cause.81 Rather, much to Harris’s satisfaction, Britain took the lead in both of the Temporary Commission’s sessions. In May 1925, the Society addressed a memorial to the Commission, asking ‘for a definition of modern slavery, and suggesting an international convention to lay down the principles governing the employment of coloured labour’.82 Based on a draft proposition by Lord Robert Cecil (later Viscount Cecil of Chelwood) the delegates examined the notion of abolishing slavery in ‘all its forms’, thereby including related forms of coercive labour and of trafficking, such as domestic slavery, debt slavery, the enslaving of persons disguised as the adoption of children, and the acquisition of girls purchased as payment of dowry.83 During heated discussions, this inclusive definition was drastically rephrased to accommodate the colonial powers.84 Still a seminal document, the final draft of the Slavery Convention defined ‘slavery’ for the first time as ‘the status or condition of a person over whom any or all of the powers attaching to the right of ownership are exercised’, while ‘slave trading’ included ‘all acts involved in the capture, acquisition or disposal of a person with intent to reduce him [sic!] to slavery’.85 Although the Slavery Convention contained no geographical specifications, its predominant focus on the African continent was implicit, as it referred back to the Brussels

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Act’s ‘firm intention of putting an end to the traffic in African slaves’.86 Treatment of the question of forced labour was deferred, and handed to the ILO for further study. The ILO’s investigation into the possible steps of preventing ‘compulsory labour or forced labour from developing into conditions analogous to slavery’ led to the formulation of a Forced Labour Convention in 1930.87 British anti-slavery activists viewed the Convention as a major achievement. Undeterred by contemporary domestic-labour issues in Britain and the repercussions of a general strike, the Anti-Slavery Society proceeded to organise a series of celebrations of this abolitionist success in Britain. Harris invited Steel-Maitland to attend a celebratory luncheon as a relief ‘from the strain’ of domestic political troubles.88 Activists involved in the ‘great work’ were asked to give speeches and attend celebratory lunches.89 At these, Harris enthusiastically evoked the success of his ‘mental vision’ for the previous six years.90 He even lobbied Lord Robert Cecil to provide the League with a document acknowledging Britain’s anti-slavery efforts on the grounds that it had ‘really done an enormous amount of work in clearing up slavery conditions’, and that a document testifying to this ‘would make extraordinarily good reading for the Assembly, and should enormously enhance British prestige in this respect’.91 The focus on national rather than international achievement was symptomatic of the deepening ideological tensions in Europe and the growth of nationalist tendencies and international conflicts.92 Initially a symbol of a new international space, the decline of the Bureau International, which until 1926 had managed to survive as Claparède’s ‘one-man show’, points to a low point in the internationalist anti-slavery spirit at Geneva. In 1926, the threat of the Bureau’s dissolution became imminent with Claparède’s abdication and subsequent death.93 Jeopardised by staffing and financial problems, the Bureau International contemplated being forced ‘to renounce [its] existence’ and to ask the League of Nations for a grant of ‘several square yards of ground in its garden’ where it might ‘dig a grave [to] bury its archives’.94 Just before its disintegration, the organisation was saved by a private donation. Although it subsequently continued its campaign in Geneva for the protection of indigenous peoples, its own verdict on the League’s potential to host an international network of humanitarian organisations was that it would never succeed.

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Epilogue Although the 1926 Slavery Convention was an impressive achievement in that it made the League’s anti-slavery commitment explicit, there was no permanent body in Geneva to implement it. In fact, while the Convention had established that the signatories would ‘take the necessary steps’ to bring about the complete abolition of slavery ‘in all its forms’ in the dependent territories, it neither identified these ‘forms’, nor did it establish any timeframe for emancipation, or for machinery to implement its articles and to monitor its effects on the ground.95 Before long, British anti-slavery activists began to view the League’s anti-slavery commitment with increasing disillusionment. Although Harris continued to travel to the Swiss city, he hardly concealed his disappointment with the ‘slow progress’ made on slavery in Geneva. Overall, he observed with some bitterness, the League had lost its initial drive.96 In contrast to the constructive cooperation with William Rappard and the Mandates Section in the early 1920s, lobbying work in Geneva had become ‘arduous’ and ‘difficult’.97 Reports failed to be submitted and negotiations for the ILO Convention on Forced Labour were considerably delayed. Harris concluded that the ‘time, energy and money’ involved in lobbying the League to set up a permanent Slavery Commission to supervise the implementation of the Convention could hardly be justified by the results obtained.98 It was not until the mid-1930s that the question of slavery fully reemerged on the international platform, again with a specific focus on Ethiopia. In an ironic twist, the Italian government adopted the issue by increasingly disseminating propaganda on its anti-slavery achievements in Eritrea and Somalia and on the remaining traffic in Ethiopia.99 It went so far as to use the anti-slavery argument to legitimise its invasion of the sovereign African country in 1935.100 The Italian campaign came as a watershed in international humanitarian activism on Africa. The invasion’s close association with anti-slavery publicity, and the Anti-Slavery Society’s omission in not explicitly opposing the Italo-Ethiopian war, put ideas of ‘international organisation’, ‘Western expertise’ and ‘humanitarian motives’ to the test. The limited economic and financial sanctions imposed on Italy by the League failed to put sufficient pressure on the Italian government to end the war against Ethiopia, and disillusioned those who believed in collective security.101 Italy’s propagation of a ‘civilising mission’, which in fact was accomplished by gas attacks and mass executions, discredited claims of Western ‘superiority’ and reversed the idea of trusteeship imperialism. While

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the League was unable to counter the Italian moves, radical organisations mounted massive protests. Beyond the League of Nations’ meetings, the Italian invasion and annexation of Ethiopia caused waves of anti-imperialist sentiment in Africa and amongst the West Indian and African American population in the Americas. For British abolitionists, this created an image problem, undermining their role as the patrons of ‘indigenous peoples’.102 As the acutely observant contemporary historian W.M. Macmillan argued, in an unpublished article, ‘everywhere in Africa feeling [was] hardening into a definite revolt against the leadership of the West’.103 The breath of new life which had swept through Geneva in the early 1920s had died down, and much more powerful winds of change were on their way. Harris, however, did not get another chance to revise his views on international trusteeship before his death in 1940. In spite of the Ethiopian fiasco, he was remembered as a tireless philanthropist and a powerful lobbyist for Africa.104 While abolitionist colleagues in London praised Harris’s enthusiasm, rhetorical skills and networking talents, League of Nations’ staff remembered his persistence and his achievements in Geneva.105 The influence of British anti-slavery lobbying on policy-making in Geneva certainly owed its success to Harris’s skillful combination of non-governmental humanitarian campaigning with international political interests. The resulting significant role of abolitionism in the international relations and power politics of the interwar years might best be illustrated by a note allegedly scribbled by a Foreign Office clerk in the margins of a file on the mandates: ‘Who is this Mr. Harris? He seems to be a sixth Great Power.’106 Ultimately, however, Harris’ careerist aspirations also stood in the way of larger transnational humanitarian cooperation. His society’s overpowering sense of continuing a British anti-slavery tradition left little space for those who sought a more technical rather than political approach to the abolition of slavery in the interwar years.

Notes The author wishes to thank Suzanne Miers, Jan-Georg Deutsch, Patricia Clavin and Daniel Laqua for commenting on earlier drafts of this paper. 1.

Formerly known as the British and Foreign Anti-Slavery Society (BFASS), the Society merged with the Aborigines Protection Society (APS) and changed its name to ‘Anti-Slavery and Aborigines Protection Society’ (ASAPS) in 1909. It

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2. 3. 4.

5.

6. 7.

8.

9. 10. 11. 12. 13. 14.

15.

Internationalism Reconfigured lives on today as ‘Anti-Slavery International’ (ASI). See The Anti-Slavery and Aborigines Protection Society (pamphlet). LON archives, BPC, Box 81, f. 1\5. John Harris, Africa: Slave or Free? (London, 1919), pp. 229–42, esp. p. 230. Ibid, p. 230. For a complete English-language overview of recent studies of the League’s work on social issues, see Susan Pedersen, ‘Back to the League of Nations’, American Historical Review, vol. 112, no. 4, pp. 1091-1117. Barbara Metzger, ‘Towards an international human rights regime during the interwar years: the League of Nations’ combat of traffic in women and children’, in Kevin Grant, Philippa Levine and Frank Trentmann (eds.), Beyond Sovereignty: Britain, Empire and Transnationalism, c. 1880–1950 (Basingstoke and New York, 2007), pp. 54–79; Carol Miller, ‘The Social Section of the League of Nations’, in Paul Weindling (ed.), International Health Organisations and Movements, 1918–1939 (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 154–75. Brian Digre, Imperialism’s New Clothes: The Repartition of Tropical Africa, 1914–1919 (New York, 1990). See Michael D. Callahan, Mandates and Empire: The League of Nations and Africa, 1914–1931 (Portland, OR, 1999); and more recently idem, A Sacred Trust: The League of Nations and Africa, 1929–1946 (Brighton, 2004); Susan Pedersen, ‘The meaning of the Mandates System: an argument’, Geschichte und Gesellschaft, vol. 32, no. 4 (2006), pp. 560–82, p. 568. Susan Miers, Britain and the Ending of the Slave Trade (New York, 1975); idem, ‘Slavery and the slave trade as international issues, 1890–1939’, in Miers and M.A. Klein (eds.), Slavery and Colonial Rule in Africa (Portland, OR, 1999), pp. 16–37. Also, idem, Slavery in the Twentieth Century: The Evolution of a Global Problem (Lanham, MD, 2003). Kevin Grant, A Civilised Savagery: Britain and the New Slaveries in Africa, 1884–1926 (New York and London, 2005). Anti-Slavery and Aborigines Protection Society, The Anti-Slavery and Aborigines Protection Society (London, 1931). Seymour Drescher, ‘Trends in der Historiographie des Abolitionismus’, Geschichte und Gesellschaft, vol. 16, no. 2 (1990), pp. 187–211. The Brussels Act came into force on 2 April 1892. See Miers, Ending of the Slave Trade, pp. 346–63. See introduction of the General Act for the Repression of the African Slave Trade, in ibid, p. 346. For the correspondence between the French Société Anti-Esclavagiste and the British Anti-Slavery Society, see Rhodes House Oxford, Anti-Slavery Papers (hereafter RHO, ASP), Mss. Brit. Emp., S. 22 G 103. For the correspondence between the Società Antischiavista d’Italia and the Society, see RHO, ASP, Mss. Brit. Emp., S. 22, G 105. Amalia Ribi, ‘Humanitarian Imperialism: The Politics of Anti-Slavery Activism in the Interwar Years’ (unpublished PhD thesis, Oxford, 2008), pp. 143–89.

‘The Breath of a New Life’? 16.

17. 18.

19. 20.

21.

22. 23.

24. 25. 26. 27. 28.

29. 30. 31. 32.

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As Laqua has shown in his study on Belgian internationalism, this was also true for the Belgian anti-slavery society. Daniel Laqua, ‘European Internationalism(s), 1880–1930: Brussels as a Centre for Transnational Cooperation’ (unpublished PhD thesis, London, 2009). Ribi, ‘Humanitarian Imperialism’, pp. 71–5. For the Congo campaign, usually defined as one of the largest sustained human-rights campaigns of the twentieth century, see Adam Hochschild, King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror, and Heroism in Colonial Africa (London, 1999); see also Grant, A Civilised Savagery, esp. pp. 39–78; idem, ‘Christian critics of Empire: missionaries, lantern lectures, and the Congo Reform Campaign in Britain’, Journal of Imperial and Commonwealth History, vol. 29, no. 2 (2001), pp. 27–58. For the importance of missionary involvement in the campaign, see ibid, p. 31. William R. Louis, ‘Sir John Harris and “colonial trusteeship”’, Bulletin des Séances de l’Académie Royale des Sciences d’Outre-Mer, vol. 14 (1968), pp. 832– 56. Amid Harris’s impressive output, a range of pamphlets dealt with fundamental aspects of post-war colonial order: J.H. Harris, The Challenge of the Mandates (London, 1914); Native Races and Peace Terms (London, 1916); Germany’s Lost Colonial Empire and the Essentials of Reconstruction (London, 1917); Peace and Colonial Reconstruction (London, 1918); A New Era for Colonial Dependencies: Possession or Trusteeship? (London, 1918). Idem, Dawn in Darkest Africa (London, 1914), p. xxxvi. Idem, Africa: Slave or Free? (London, 1919), esp. the second part of the book, which centres on ‘indigenous African labour’ and ‘modern slavery’, pp. 59– 94. Ibid, p. 231 Ibid, p. 236 Miers, Slavery in the Twentieth Century, p. 59. League of Nations (ed.), The Mandates System: Origin – Principles – Application (Geneva, 1945). For contemporary perspectives on the importance of the League of Nations, see C.W. Pipkin, ‘The machinery of experiment at Geneva’, Political Science Quarterly, vol. 47, no. 2 (1932), pp. 274–81; W.E. Rappard, The Geneva Experiment (London, 1931). M.D. Dubin, ‘Transgovernmental processes and the League of Nations’, International Organization, vol. 37, no. 3 (1983), pp. 469–93, p. 471. Callahan, Mandates and Empire, p. 69. Miers, Slavery in the Twentieth Century, pp. 59–60. For a study of his life, see Ania Peter, Rappard und der Völkerbund: Ein Schweizer Pionier der internationalen Verständigung (Bern, 1973); V. Monnier, William E. Rappard: Défenseur des libertés, serviteur de son pays et de la communauté internationale (Geneva, 1995).

110 33. 34. 35. 36. 37. 38.

39. 40. 41. 42. 43. 44.

45. 46. 47. 48. 49. 50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55.

Internationalism Reconfigured Harris to Rappard, 21 December 1920. League of Nations Archives, Geneva, (hereafter LoN), S 265, 1. Harris to Rappard, 20 December 1920. LoN, S 265, 1. Harris to Rappard, 6 January 1920. Ibid. Rappard to Harris, 11 January 1921. Ibid. Rappard to Harris, 2 January 1920. Ibid. For nineteenth-century anti-slavery activism in Switzerland, see Janick M. Schaufelbühl, ‘L’Antiesclavagisme en Suisse’, in T. David, B. Etemad and J.M. Schaufelbühl (eds.), La Suisse et l’esclavage des noirs (Lausanne, 2005), pp. 108–54. League of Nations (ed.), Handbook of International Organisations (Geneva, 1923), p. 75. René Claparède and Edouard Mercier-Glardon, Un bureau international pour la défense des indigènes (Geneva, 1917), p. 6. Bureau International pour la Défense des Indigènes to Harris, 28 March 1920. RHO, ASP, Mss. Brit. Emp., S22, G 471. Harris to Claparède, 20 September 1920. Ibid. Claparède to Harris, 1 April 1920. Ibid. The general accomplishments of the congress, which was only partially attended by Africans and was still led by the moderate middle class, are described by C.G. Contee, ‘Du Bois, the NAACP, and the Pan-African Congress of 1919’, Journal of Negro History, vol. 57, no. 1 (1972), pp. 13–28. For the history and evolution of the pan-African movement, see the classic study edited by George Padmore, Colonial and Coloured Unity: A Programme of Action. History of the Pan African Congress (London, 1963, first published 1947). See also Saheed Adejumobi, ‘The Pan-African Congress’, in Nina Mjagkij (ed.), Organizing Black America: An Encyclopedia of African American Associations (New York, 2001), pp. 549–51. As quoted in Peter Fryer, Staying Power: The History of Black People in Britain (London, 1984), p. 322. Ibid. Ibid. Bureau International to E. Drummond, LoN, R 39. Harris to E. Junod (Bureau International), 29 July 1921. RHO, ASP, Mss. Brit. Emp., S 22, G 432. Harris to the Bureau International, 7 April 1920. Ibid, G 471. Junod to Harris, 30 July 1922. Ibid. Harris to Roberts, 1 August 1922. Ibid, (emphasis as in original). Harris to Roberts, 1 August 1922. Ibid. Roberts to Harris, 5 September 1922. LoN, S22, G. 471. H. Darley and N.A. Dyce-Sharp, Slave Trading and Slave Owning in Abyssinia (London, 1922), enclosed in Baker to Rappard (confidential), 4 January 1922. LoN, R 60.

‘The Breath of a New Life’? 56. 57. 58.

59. 60.

61. 62. 63. 64. 65.

66.

67. 68. 69. 70.

71. 72. 73. 74.

75.

76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81.

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Darley and Dyce-Sharp, Slave Trading, p. 9. See the Anti-Slavery Society’s introductory comments in ibid, p. 2. Harris described the outcome of his encounter with Steel-Maitland a few years later as ‘a landmark in the history of slavery’: J.H. Harris, Freeing the Slave (London, 1925), p. 1. Drummond to Rappard (confidential), 2 December 1922. LoN, S 1669, 5. Anthony H.M. Kirk-Greene, ‘Lugard, Frederick John Dealtry, Baron Lugard (1858–1945)’, Oxford Dictionary of National Biography (Oxford, 2004). At http://www.oxforddnb.com/view/article/34628, accessed 18 December 2007. Lugard to Drummond, 10 November 1922, enclosing ‘Memorandum on Slavery in Abyssinia’. LoN, R 61. Henceforth Lugard, Slavery in Abyssinia. Lugard, Slavery in Abyssinia, LoN, R 61, p. 10. Ibid, p. 7. Miers, Slavery in the Twentieth Century, p. 69. This was observed by the Italian director of communications and transit in the Secretariat of the League, Bernardo Attolico, in a confidential note to Drummond and Rappard, 2 December 1922. LoN, S 1669, 5. Anti-Slavery and Aborigines Protection Society, Slavery and the League of Nations: The Appeal (London, 1923), enclosed in Anti-Slavery Society to Drummond, 9 August 1923. LoN, R 64. Ibid. Rappard to Harris (confidential), 18 August 1923. LoN, S 1669, 3. Ibid, p. 3. Antoinette Ladarola, ‘Ethiopia’s admission into the League of Nations: an assessment of motives’, International Journal of African Historical Studies, vol. 8, no. 4 (1975), pp. 601–22. Roberts to Claparède, 8 July 1924, RHO, ASP, Mss. Brit. Emp., S22, G 471. Harris to Rappard, 6 November 1924. LoN, R 70. Rappard to Harris, 14 November 1924. Ibid. For an examination of the answers to the questionnaire, in which the Council of the League of Nations asked all countries to list the measures they had taken to eradicate slavery, see Miers, Slavery in the Twentieth Century, p. 101. For the appointment of the Commission’s members and for Lugard’s role in it, see LoN, R 70. For more details on the individual members see Miers, Slavery in the Twentieth Century, pp. 102–6. Anti-Slavery Society to Claparède, 2 July 1924, RHO, ASP, Mss. Brit. Emp., S22, G 471. Miers, Slavery in the Twentieth Century, p. 108 Rappard to Drummond, 26 April1924. LoN, R 70. Grimshaw to Harris, 9 February 1925. RHO, ASP, Mss. Brit. Emp., S 22 G 446. Ibid. Harris to Grimshaw, 12 February 1925. Ibid.

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Anti-Slavery and Aborigines Protection Society, The Abolition of Slavery: Appeal to the League of Nations (London, 1925). 83. The animated debates about the particulars of the Convention are covered in Miers, Slavery in the Twentieth Century, p. 123. 84. For the debates preceding the convention, see League of Nations, Report of the Temporary Slavery Commission (Geneva, 1924); idem, Report of the Temporary Slavery Commission (Geneva, 1925). For the full text of the Slavery Convention, which was signed on 25 September 1926, see Franz Knipping, Hans V. Mangoldt and Volker Rittberger (eds.), The United Nations System and its Predecessors. Vol. 2, Statuses and Legal Acts (Oxford, 1997), pp. 906–19. 85. Ibid, p. 908. 86. See the introductory statement to the Slavery Convention in ibid, p. 906. 87. Daniel Roger Maul, ‘The International Labour Organisation and the struggle against forced labour from 1919 to the present’. Labour History, vol. 48, no. 4 (2007), pp. 477–500, p. 480. This is not the place to discuss the wide-reaching debates, which led to the Forced Labour Convention; for an analysis of its importance, see Miers, Slavery in the Twentieth Century, pp. 134–52. 88. Anti-Slavery Society to Arthur Steel-Maitland, 12 October 1926. RHO, ASP, Mss. Brit. Emp., S 22, G 448. 89. See, for instance, J. St. Leo Strachey, ‘Slavery and the League of Nations: Speech delivered at the Annual Meeting of the Anti-Slavery and Aborigines Protection Society’, 29 June 1926. RHO, ASP, Mss. Brit. Emp., S. 25, K 30. 90. Harris to Lord Cecil, 18 February 1927. Ibid, S 22, G 448. 91. Ibid. 92. Zara Steiner, The Lights that Failed: European International History, 1919–1933 (Oxford, 2005), pp. 394–501. 93. Harris to Junod, 22 December 1926. RHO, ASP, Mss. Brit. Emp., S22, G 471. 94. Circulaire du Bureau International, no. 3, Geneva, 1927, p. 2 95. Ibid, p. 908. 96. J.H. Harris, Draft Report on Work Done at the League of Nations Assembly in Geneva in 1928. RHO, ASP, Mss. Brit. Emp., S22, G 451, p. 4. 97. Ibid. 98. Ibid. 99. For a study of Italian anti-slavery propaganda, see Ribi, ‘Humanitarian Imperialism’, pp. 143–89. 100. Ibid, pp. 190–207. 101. For details on the sanctions see the classic account by George W. Baer, Test Case: Italy, Ethiopia, and the League of Nations (Stanford, CA, 1976). A more recent interpretation can be found in G. Bruce Strang, ‘“The Worst of all Worlds”: Oil Sanctions and Italy’s Invasion of Abyssinia, 1935–1936’, Diplomacy and Statecraft, vol. 19, no. 2 (2008), pp. 210–35. 102. Ibid, pp. 207–24. 82.

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103. W.M. Macmillan, ‘The tragedy of Abyssinia, and the future of Africa’, undated manuscript (ca. June 1936), W.M. Macmillan Private Papers, p. 4. (Courtesy of Hugh Macmillan, Dorchester on Thames, Oxon.) Almost 50 years later, historians have confirmed Macmillan’s interpretation. See the epilogue in Alberto Sbacchi, Ethiopia under Mussolini: Fascism and the Colonial Experience (London, 1985), pp. 235–6. 104. Anti-Slavery Reporter, July 1940, pp. 43–53. 105. Ibid, p. 45. 106. Ibid, p. 51.

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Internationalism in the League of Nations

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INTERNATIONALISM IN THE ECONOMIC AND FINANCIAL ORGANISATION OF THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS Yann Decorzant

In November 1920 the League of Nations organised the first meeting of its Economic and Financial Organisation (EFO) in Geneva. Comprising two committees and a section of the League secretariat, the EFO was staffed by international and national civil servants, together with financial and economic experts. Created after the Brussels Financial Conference of September 1920, the EFO worked as a centre for economic and financial information as well as a research body. It was the first international organisation fully dedicated to international economic and financial management. Although officially subordinate to the Council and Assembly of the League, it was quite independent in its functioning: its Financial and Economic Committees were both staffed by experts who had been selected by their national governments, but who nevertheless acted on their own responsibility. The two committees of the EFO served as platforms where national perspectives were discussed and analysed in an international framework. The same international logic applied in the Permanent Section of the Secretariat. Studies of experts’ roles in the interwar period have been developing for a decade.1 Building on Richard Kuisel’s work, scholars increasingly regard the First World War as an incentive to a ‘technocratisation’ of the economy.2 What is beginning to be highlighted now is that this global trend, associated with the development of the international multilateral organisations of

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the interwar period, also implied the emergence of a new class of actors in international relations: the experts. In this chapter, the term ‘experts’ is used to describe individuals, whether or not selected by their governments, who were working for, or around, the League of Nations on a private legal basis. They interacted with the institution because of their knowledge and/ or know-how in a particular domain that the League wanted to explore, rather than because they were diplomats formally representing their national governments. This chapter analyses how and up to what point the EFO fitted in with the broad phenomenon of interwar internationalism. Looking not only at the organisation itself but also the process of its creation, I stress the role played by different transnational networks. From the immediate origins of the EFO during the First World War to its initial years of operations in the 1920s, one can find several examples of the impact of such networks. The object of this study is to show that the construction of the EFO was largely based on the combined efforts of these different networks, and also that individual actors played a key role in its development. The chapter thus highlights the different factors and processes that help the creation of international organisations or agencies. The war and its consequences In addition to civil and military destruction, the Great War resulted in a major breakdown of economic and financial exchanges in Europe, and this had long-lasting consequences. The war also led to a change in nationstates’ perceptions of international cooperation, particularly with regard to economic and financial questions. There had already been examples of interstate cooperation before 1914, with different bodies being established in the second half of the nineteenth century.3 Among them, the International Telegraph Union was set up in 18654 and the Universal Postal Union in 1877.5 However, none of these primary organisations were designed to integrate economic and financial decision-making. Their respective functions consisted mainly of the co-ordination of clearly defined sectors, whose development required a minimum of inter-state collaboration.6 However, because of the scope and the circumstances of the war, matters evolved during the conflict. Wartime coordination On the Allied side, the first international coordination structures were created in 1914 and expanded gradually. After the creation of a Joint

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Purchasing Commission in August 1914, the next important step was the establishment in 1916 of an inter-allied committee for the common purchase of wheat, commonly called the ‘Wheat Executive’. 7 This body rapidly became the model for other inter-allied co-ordination organs. Generally speaking, these different bodies seemed relatively effective. The Maritime Transport Executive (MTE), set up in December 1917, was certainly the most efficient and advanced of them all.8 Consisting of national experts who had been delegated by their governments to coordinate shipping, the MTE soon became the central control body for the Allies’ economic efforts. Directed by the Frenchman Jean Monnet, the Italian Bernardo Attolico, the American Georges Rublee and the Briton Arthur Salter, it was conceived as an integrated international administration.9 For these four national civil servants and their staff, the MTE also served as a war-coordinating body, and as an experiment for future international organisation.10 Moreover, these four protagonists and the people who worked with them created a new network of national experts – civil servants – which had not existed before the war. As they became conscious of the benefits of collaboration during the final war years, they tried to convince their governments and national administrations that this kind of cooperation should continue to be pursued in peacetime. Consequently, given their international experience, Jean Monnet, Arthur Salter and Bernardo Attolico subsequently acceded to important positions in the League of Nations.11 After the armistice, economic cooperation was centred on the Supreme Economic Council (SEC). Founded in February 1919 by France, Italy, Belgium, Great Britain and the United States, the SEC was mostly made up of cabinet ministers. Its main function was to co-ordinate the distribution of resources necessary for the rebuilding of devastated zones and to ensure access to raw materials and to goods needed for reconstruction. The SEC was a direct follow-up to the efforts in strategic collaboration made during the war. Nevertheless, not all the member states interpreted their role in the same way. During the war there had been clear differences of perspective concerning the continuation of wartime cooperation; on the one hand, for the United States and Great Britain the control of goods and capital movements – accepted as a necessary evil during the war – was supposed to stop as soon as peace had been achieved. On the other hand, France (driven particularly by its minister for trade, Étienne Clémentel, and by his representative in London, Jean Monnet)12 and Italy (represented by Attolico) wanted to see cooperation and co-ordination continue afterwards.

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At the end of the war, the British progressively changed their view; although they still sought to re-establish a free market in goods and capital as soon as possible, they began to consider a continuation of international collaboration as a possibility. From this perspective, Lloyd George proposed on 28 June 1919 that the SEC work on the possible creation of an international organisation dedicated to economic and financial cooperation. The French, Belgian and Italian delegates were already convinced of the possible benefits of such extended collaboration, and they thus accepted the idea. The American representative, Herbert Hoover, said that he could not commit his government, even though he personally agreed with the idea.13 A few weeks later, the US representatives stopped attending the SEC, thus depriving the organism of an important part of its power. Whilst the USA did not formally announce their withdrawal, they de facto abandoned it. Without their participation and support, international economic collaboration looked less significant, given the USA’s role as an economic power and creditor state. Post-war economic and financial turmoil – a new incentive to collaborate However, unexpected developments provided a new stimulus for international cooperation. In 1919 and early 1920, a severe economic and financial crisis hit the European economy. Inflation, lack of credit and exchange-rate volatility created major disorder in almost all countries. Financial experts were aware of this phenomenon and some tackled it in scholarly journals.14 Meanwhile, however, Western governments took fright at a wave of communist movements in central and eastern European countries. Because of the situation and the accompanying passivity of governments, two conferences of private and central bankers were convened in Amsterdam in autumn 1919.15 Together with some leading economists, such as John Maynard Keynes and Gustav Cassel, the bankers who attended these meetings agreed on the writing of a short memorandum to summarise their analysis of the situation. The memorandum agreed on the necessity of rapidly organising an international financial conference to cope with the crisis. To give their initiative a maximum of publicity, the bankers in Amsterdam presented the memorandum as a petition signed by over 150 individuals.16 Among the well-known signatories were the American bankers John Pierpont Morgan and Paul M. Warburg, the American delegate to the SEC, Herbert Hoover, the Swiss President of the International Red Cross Committee, Gustave Ador, the President of the Bank of the Netherlands,

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Gerard Vissering, the British former Chairman of the Supreme Economic Council, Lord Robert Cecil, the Swedish economist Gustav Cassel, the President of Yale University, Arthur Hadley, and the British President of Lloyds Bank, Sir Richard Vassar Vassar-Smith. Eventually, the petition was sent to the different governments of the signatories, but also to major newspapers such as The New York Times and London Times.17 Thus, a few months after the end of the practical work of the Allied cooperative bodies, a second transnational network was stressing the importance of maintaining a form of co-ordination in the economy. Constituted mainly by private and central bankers, this group reactivated the message emanating from London, urging governments to intervene in a concerted manner. Underlining their standpoint, the initiators ended their memorandum on a dramatic note: ‘The outlook at present is dark. No greater task is before us now, than to devise means by which some measures of hopefulness will re-enter the minds of the masses.’18 The Brussels Conference: the new practice of financial diplomacy Because of the signatories’ importance, the financial situation and the proposal’s resonance in the press, governments accepted the need for further collaboration – a refusal to do so would have been perceived as a lack of attention to professional and public concerns, and moreover governments needed the bankers’ support for reconstruction. Consequently, following the recommendation of the British government, the League of Nations was charged with convening an international financial conference. The British government’s leading part in this initiative was perhaps linked to its view of the UK as a leading financial power: Wall Street hegemony over the City was not yet widely perceived.19 The International Financial Conference eventually met in September 1920, in Brussels. Almost 200 delegates, advisers and secretaries attended, representing 39 different countries – including nearly all the major powers, even the USA. After negotiations with the French, Germany had been invited, as the League’s experts considered it futile to discuss Europe’s financial situation without including representatives of one of the continent’s major economic powers. Notable absences from the conference, meanwhile, included Turkey, Russia and Mexico. The management of diplomatic issues and financial realities The setting-up of the conference had taken eight months – not because of the

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ineffectiveness of the League, but because of a political dispute among the victorious powers. On the question of German indemnities, no agreement had been reached. The advisory committee therefore had to negotiate closely with the countries involved in these discussions to determine whether this central issue could be addressed in Brussels. The government of France was one of the most reluctant on this particular point: there was a fear among the French leaders that the German delegates would use the conference to rally a majority of governments to their side, with a view to minimising the sum of the indemnities. At the same time, the French were conscious of the need to find financial support among neutral countries,20 and also among their former allies, particularly the USA and Britain.21 During the months preceding the conference, to gain time, the French insisted particularly on the fact that the only body that had the authority to settle this question was the Reparations Commission.22 Until the latter had reached a formal decision, German indemnities were not supposed to be a matter of public discussions. As the months went by, the League’s advisory committee became increasingly aware that the reparations problem would not be settled quickly. A meeting was held in San Remo in April 1920, but its only conclusion was to call for a new meeting in Spa a few months later. The League’s advisory committee became more and more impatient, but the French government, and particularly the representatives of its Ministère des Affaires Étrangères, continued to veto any possibility of discussing the reparations question.23 The Spa meeting finally took place in July, but again no solution emerged and the League was once more asked to postpone the conference.24 Eventually, the Council of the League decided, at its eighth session, held in San Sebastian on 5 August, that the Brussels Conference would be scheduled for mid-September even if the indemnities negotiations had not been concluded;25 and as no solutions had emerged at the date of the opening of the conference, the reparations problem was taken off its agenda and the Brussels Conference could begin. A very heterogeneous audience The League officials had probably anticipated the complexity of the provisional committee’s tasks, covering sensible questions such as German indemnities and trade regulation. This partly explains why they had chosen to set up a committee that mixed senior League officials, including the then Under-Secretary-General Jean Monnet, with influential private bankers such as the Swedish Marcus Wallenberg (Vice-President of the Stockholm

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Enskilda Bank), with official government representatives such as the Belgian Minister of Economic Affairs, Fernand Wouters d’Oplinter, and with central bankers such as the Dutchman Gerard Vissering.26 This mix reflected a willingness to strike a balance on the representation of member states and other interested parties, whilst also reflecting the spirit of openness that the League sought to foster at the conference itself. The status of the delegates attending the event had been conceived in a similarly open-minded and proactive fashion. While all had been chosen by their governments, their interventions were to be on a private basis – governments were not responsible for their nationals’ individual positions. The organising committee of the Brussels Conference had adopted this position to limit diplomatic control over the debates.27 The delegates were experts in their fields, and expected to advance a professional point of view rather than acting as national representatives. Based on their status, they could be partly released from a requirement to respect their nations’ official positions in their entirety, and were hence able to speak more freely. The constituency represented in Brussels was rather heterogeneous. A quantitative treatment of the professional distribution of the participants provides us with a good idea of the people attending the meeting. As shown in the table overleaf (Figure 1), the proportions of the participants were as follows: government officials, 59 per cent;28 private bankers or representatives of their corporate institutions, 15 per cent; officials of international organisations, 8 per cent;29 representatives of different central banks, 5 per cent; academics and manufacturers, 3 per cent each; and those who, due to a lack of specific information, cannot be categorised, 9 per cent. A focus on the principal actors of the debates, the delegates (Figure 2), leaves solely three professional categories: government officials (74%), private bankers (19%) and central bank representatives (7%). Although general attendance was heterogeneous, government officials were the most significant among people who could publicly express themselves. Stakes were so important that even though delegates acted in their own names, national governments wanted to maintain a certain control over the debates. Nonetheless, the technical nature of discussions and the will to reach constructive solutions also required governments to dispatch financial experts working in ministries rather than diplomats who lacked specific expertise in this field. The challenge for the states in the setting-up of their delegations was hence to strike a balance between cooperation and diplomacy.

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In a report to their Foreign Affairs Ministry, two of the French advisers, André Siegfried and Paul West, noticed that the heterogeneity among the delegates created an atmosphere less solemn than was usual in such meetings, the general ambiance being nearer to that experienced at a congress of economists.30 This helped to create an ‘unprecedented spirit of solidarity’.31 Several commentators and actors at the event – for instance the American representative Roland Boyden, in an interview with The New York Times on 9 October 1920 – described the so-called ‘Brussels spirit’ as a new way of managing financial diplomacy.32 Rather than attempting to defend their national interests, the experts proposed global solutions to global problems. For this reason, the few diplomats that attended, such as the Frenchman Aimé de Fleuriau, were completely disoriented by this new kind of conference.33 This means that, by and large, the organisers’ objective of favouring an effective and consensual way of working was met. The conference concluded with the drafting of a report containing different general recommendations.34 Transmitted to the Council of the League of Nations, the report was conceived as a general guideline to help member states in coping with the crisis. One of the recommendations was, however, more specific and innovative: participants enjoined the League of Nations to set up a permanent body dedicated to the study of economic and financial questions.35 By acting in this way, the transnational network that emerged in Brussels sought to safeguard the continuation of its work within the newly created Geneva-based institution. The efforts made by the organisers of the Brussels Conference thus seemingly succeeded – they had been able to inaugurate a new cooperative dynamic. It is interesting to note that at the Brussels Conference, connections between the ‘London group’ network and the network of the ‘Amsterdam bankers’ were established: members of the ‘London group’ and several of the petition’s signatories were involved together at different stages. Jean Monnet, Arthur Salter, Marcus Wallenberg and the Swiss Gustave Ador were involved in preparing the conference. Others – including Robert Henry Brand,36 who signed the memorandum and then chaired the Conference’s financial commission – participated in the meeting itself. However, the two different networks clearly worked together at various stages, first to make the meeting possible and then to ensure its efficiency. They succeeded in achieving what they set out to do: less than two months after the end of the Brussels Conference, in November 1920, the League organised the first meeting of its Provisional Economic and Financial Commission.

1 16 5 0 0 0 22 15

Conference Chairman's office

Delegates

Advisers

Delegates from consulting states

Advisers from consulting states

Consulting staff

Total

Total (%)

Officials from financial institutions (private-sector experts)

59

87

0

4

3

13

64

3

Government officials, finance ministers and civil servants

5

8

0

0

0

1

6

1

Representatives from central banks

5

8

7

0

0

0

0

1

Civil servants working in international organisations

3

4

0

0

0

4

0

0

Manufacturers

Figure 1: Professional distribution of delegates at the Brussels Conference (1920)

3

5

0

0

0

5

0

0

Academics

9

13

0

2

0

11

0

0

Uncategorised

100

147

7

6

3

39

86

6

Total

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Figure 2: Proportion of delegates by profession at the Brussels Conference (1920)

7%

19%

Officials from financial institutions (private-sector experts) Government officials, finance ministers and civil servants

Representatives from central banks

74%

The EFO: internationalism in the Secretariat and the Committees The Provisional Economic and Financial Commission – generally referred to as the Economic and Financial Organisation, or EFO – comprised the Economic and Financial Section of the League Secretariat and two committees. Institutionally, the EFO was part of the general structure of the League, as a technical organisation. The Economic and Financial Section of the Secretariat The Economic and Financial Section of the Secretariat already existed in an embryonic form before the conference. Based in London, it had been in charge of administrative support for the Brussels Conference. After the creation of the Provisional Commission in November 1920, the section had to be expanded and transferred to Geneva. The section’s first Director, Arthur Salter, was one of the British former members of the inter-allied agencies. As he was nominated to chair the Reparations Commission in 1920, he was rapidly replaced by another British expert, the economist Walter Layton.37 To help the Director in his work, the League also hired various former national civil servants, such as the British ex-War Office official Alexander Loveday, as well as scholars like the young Swedish economist Per Jacobson.

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In certain aspects, the Secretariat of the League built on the experience gained from inter-allied cooperation. There were some obvious differences: for example, the League was now the official employer of these experts, who no longer officially represented their own state. But generally speaking, the collaborative practices which civil servants and experts from different nationalities had experienced in London were now being continued. Moreover, it is interesting to note here that three of the former senior members of the ‘London group’ had been hired to fill very strategic positions inside the League apparatus: Jean Monnet as Under-Secretary-General, Arthur Salter as Director of the Economic and Financial Section and the Italian Bernardo Attolico as Director of the Communication and Transit Section. From one perspective, the inter-allied agencies can be considered to have functioned as a kind of training and selection process for the League’s organs. The expert committees Even though the Secretariat’s Economic and Financial Section was permanently based in Geneva, the Financial and the Economic Committees met at regular intervals either in Geneva or in other European cities. The functioning of the Economic and Financial Organisation was to some extent directly inspired by the experience of the Brussels Conference. Thus, while the Secretariat’s civil servants were full-time employees of the League, the experts on the committees were selected by their national governments, but acted in their own names. This meant that they were relatively free in their decision-making. For this reason, when they met within the framework of the League they acted mainly as League officials rather than national representatives. Exemplifying this partial independence, the two British representatives held divergent views on continuing the work of the Provisional Economic and Financial Commission in 1921. Whereas the expert from the Financial Committee, Basil Blackett, was adamant that its continuation should be ensured through the decision of an international conference, his colleague from the Economic Committee, Hubert Llewellyn Smith, saw no need for formal governmental approval on this sensitive question.38 If the two British representatives had had no leeway and been bound to follow directives from Whitehall or Downing Street, they would have in all probability have put forward a single joint view. The challenge for them was thus to balance their personal views with their League involvement and the guidelines they received from their government.

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As in Brussels, the composition of the committees included governmental officials, private bankers and central bank representatives. It is noteworthy that several of them were already national delegates during the Brussels Conference, and some, moreover, had already had experience in one of the inter-allied cooperative bodies during the war. Thus, there was undoubtedly some intellectual and functional continuity between these bodies, the organising committees of the Brussels Conference, the conference itself and the Economic and Financial Organisation.39 The original composition of the two committees in 1920 showed important differences in their professional origins. The Economic Committee was almost exclusively composed of civil servants who normally worked in trade ministries, for instance the Chief Economic Advisor to the British government, Hubert Llewellyn Smith. Among the ten elected members of the this Committee, all except one, the Swiss Henri Heer, were government officials.40 The initial composition of the Financial Committee was radically different, as it included five private bankers, three civil servants from finance ministries, one central bank representative and one expert combining both a public and a private function.41 Among them, for example, Henry Strakosch, a South African private banker based in London, worked hand in hand with the French finance inspector Joseph Avenol. How can we explain this difference? Two hypotheses can be put forward. Clearly, in 1920 there were acute exchange-rate fluctuation and inflation problems across Europe. Equally clearly, the people who seemed most capable of managing these problems were professionals working directly in the financial sphere. This may be the reason why in Brussels, as well as in the Financial Committee, a mix of different skills and professional backgrounds was chosen, as the best option for finding an effective empirical approach. The second possibility is that in the 1920s trade policies were considered as very sensitive matters, highly relevant to states’ national sovereignty. For this reason, governments did not wish to risk being involved in conventions or studies without having any control over them. Moreover, if the most competent experts on financial questions were often bankers, the most informed and influential experts in trade and economic policies mostly worked in trade ministries. When the provisional became permanent It is certain that both committees were designed to be as efficient as possible. Apart from bringing together well-known specialists in finance and economics, they could count on the fact that the national civil

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servants chosen by their governments were usually senior officials in their respective countries. Even if their opinions did not formally engage their own government, there was a strong probability that they would be readily endorsed; and this indeed seems to have happened. In fact, after three years of functioning, the Provisional Economic and Financial Commission became permanent in 1923, and its members were automatically re-elected. The aim of this chapter is not to focus on the subsequent work and development of the EFO. What is important here is the role played by the ‘London group’, the bankers from Amsterdam and the participants in the Brussels Conference who came together to create it. They thus spurred on a process of multilateral cooperation that continued beyond World War Two: the EFO is now recognised as the first step towards the creation of the international system that developed after 1945.42 In the late 1920s and the 1930s several scholars studied the EFO, in an attempt to stress its relevance in the context of a global economic crisis.43 Some of these scholars were academics and others – such as Wallace McClure and Elémer Hantos – were people who had worked for the League or had collaborated with it. Most of them tended to defend the institution’s work, not only with regard to commercial, financial and economic questions, but more generally by stressing its role in maintaining peaceful relations among nations. In the wake of the Great Depression, they tried to convince their readers that the EFO could help maintain stable and friendlier commercial relations. Like the experts of the ‘London group’ and the delegates at the Brussels Conference, the scholars who wrote on the EFO were persuaded that it was necessary to develop a collaborative system in international economic relations. Their studies suggest that internationalism in economic and financial relations went beyond the experts directly involved in the EFO. Such efforts to promote the work of the EFO reveal a movement that embraced bankers, financial experts, economic experts, diplomats, academics and international civil servants. Conclusion The Economic and Financial Organisation of the League of Nations was the fruit of its wider international context. The completely disorganised state of the world economy at the end of the war encouraged governments to question the traditional management of the international economic affairs. In the face of this complex economic and social situation, they became more aware of the links of interdependence which bound them together. They

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began to perceive interests that could be realised through cooperation at an international level, and the League of Nations offered them the functional opportunities they needed. Social and political changes during the war, the introduction of universal suffrage and the Bolshevik Revolution all played a role in increasing their sensitivity to public opinion. Yet by the early 1920s both working and middle classes, and professionals in the financial sector, wanted the economic turmoil to end as soon as possible, and expected appropriate measures from their governments. Interestingly, the establishment of new tools for international economic regulation was linked to the halting (rather than the advance) of a globalising process that had begun during the second part of the nineteenth century. This wider context, however, should not obscure the fundamental role played by several national and transnational actors who pushed for a body to promote economic cooperation. As economists, bankers, industrialists, ministers of finance, governors of central banks, journalists or simple diplomats, they advocated the creation of the Economic and Financial Organisation. Through public activity or work within their administrations, they made the foundation of this body possible; they were aware that the disorganisation induced by the war made it possible to ‘sell’ to governments the concept of multilateral management of finance and the economy. Although they came from different sectors and did not act with the same ultimate interests in mind, these actors understood that the world’s economic and financial problems could no longer be resolved by purely national policies or institutions. Directly inspired by the Brussels Conference, the Economic and Financial Organisation of the League built upon earlier transnational developments. The EFO continued the efforts towards international economic management launched by Monnet, Salter and their colleagues in London, and also responded to the request of the group of bankers that had met in Amsterdam. At the same time, the EFO constituted a new transnational network that began to grow and develop during the interwar period: the members of the committees and the Secretariat were well-connected with experts outside the League. The EFO thus emerged as a nerve centre for economic and financial analysis. It symbolised a new way of managing and analysing the international economy. This chapter has deliberately spoken of ‘transnational networks’ because on several occasions, the ‘international’ perspective – understood as interstate relations – does not fully explain the processes and outcomes at work. Taking into account expert networks, social as well as professional, a transnational perspective is necessary for a

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full understanding of the creation and the development of the EFO in the 1920s. It is also important to understand that the establishment of the EFO is more than a simple institutional story. Its development offers an inside view of a new conception of international economic relations, and also illustrates the complex links that connected actors, national interests and functional needs in international organisations. The emergence of a transnational community of experts whose economic and financial perception transcended national interests is fundamental. The role of private businesses was also significant: without the lobbying of senior professionals such as J.P. Morgan, Sir R. Vassar Vassar-Smith or senior economists such as Arthur Pigou, it is not obvious that the Brussels Conference and then the EFO would even have existed. Crossing back and forth between different levels (national, international, transnational) and different sectors is necessary for understanding the complex historical processes that led to the creation of international institutions.

Notes 1.

On this question, see for example Patricia Clavin, ‘Money talks: competition and co-operation with the League of Nations, 1929–1940’, in Marc Flandreau (ed.), Money Doctors: The Experience of International Financial Advising, 1850– 2000 (London, 2003); idem, ‘Defining transnationalism: transnational elites in European history, 1920–1970’, Contemporary European History, vol. 14, no. 4 (2005), pp. 421–39; idem and Jens-Wilhelm Wessels, ‘Another gold idol? The League of Nations’ gold delegation and the Great Depression, 1929–1932’, International History Review, vol. 26, no. 4 (2004), pp. 765– 95; idem, ‘Transnationalism and the League of Nations: understanding the work of its Economic and Financial Organisation’, Contemporary European History, vol. 14, no. 4 (2005), pp. 465–92; Yann Decorzant, ‘La Société des Nations et la naissance d’une conception de la régulation économique internationale’ (unpublished PhD thesis, University of Geneva, 2008); idem, ‘Répondre à la demande sociale et à la demande du marché: les prémisses de la régulation économique dans les années vingt’, in Alya Aglan, Olivier Feiertag, and Dzovinar Kevonian (eds.), Actes des ‘Journées d’étude des 19 et 20 janvier 2007 à l’Université Paris-I Panthéon-Sorbonne: Albert Thomas, société mondiale et internationalisme: réseaux et institutions internationales des années 1890 aux années 1930’. Cahiers Irice, no. 2 (2008), pp. 106–26; Sandrine Kott, ‘Une “communauté épistémique” du social? Experts de l’OIT et internationalisation des politiques sociales dans l’entre-deux-guerres’, Genèses,

130

2.

3.

4. 5. 6.

7.

8.

9. 10. 11.

12.

Internationalism Reconfigured no. 71 (2008), pp. 26–46; Pierre-Yves Saunier, ‘Circulations, connexions et espaces transnationaux’, Genèses, no. 57 (2004), pp. 110–26; idem, ‘Les régimes circulatoires du domaine social 1800–1940: projets et ingénierie de la convergence et de la différence’, Genèses, no. 71 (2008), pp. 4–25. Richard Kuisel, Le capitalisme et l’Etat en France: modernisation et dirigisme au XXe siècle, trans. André Charpentier (Paris, 1984); François Denord and Odile Henry, ‘La “modernisation” avant la lettre: le patronat français et la rationalisation (1925–1940)’, Sociétés contemporaines, no. 68 (2007), pp. 83– 104; Jean-Pierre Bouchez, ‘De quelques tentatives de modernisations socioéconomiques en France (1910-1980)’, Management et Avenir, vol. 1, no. 11 (2001), pp. 93–111. On this question, see for example Charles Henry Alexandrowicz, World Economic Agencies (London, 1962); Decorzant, La Société des Nations; P. Gerbet, M.-R. Mouton and V.-Y. Ghebali, Le rêve d’un ordre mondial, de la SDN à L’ONU (Paris, 1996); Wallace McClure, World Prosperity as Sought Through the Economic Work of the League of Nations (New York, 1933), pp. 39–65. Marie-Claude Smouts, Les Organisations Internationales (Paris, 1995), p. 12; McClure, World Prosperity, p. 53. M.E. Garbani-Nerini, Les bases, l’organisation et le développement de l’Union Postale Universelle (Zurich and Leipzig, 1935). Smouts, Les Organisations Internationales, p. 11; Manuela Tortora, Institution spécialisée et organisation mondiale: étude des relations de l’OIT avec la SDN et l’ONU (Brussels, 1980), pp. 8–9. Martin Hill, The Economic and Financial Organization of the League of Nations (Washington, DC, 1946), p. 14; Étienne Clémentel, La France et la politique économique interalliée (Paris and New Haven, CT, 1931), p. 107. Anne Orde, British Policy and European Reconstruction after the First World War (Cambridge, 1990), p. 18; Arthur Salter, Memoirs of a Public Servant (London, 1961), pp. 112–13. Salter, Memoirs; Clémentel, La France et la politique; Jean Monnet, Mémoires (Paris, 1961). Monnet, Mémoires, pp. 66–7. On the role of Monnet, see also Nicola Piétri, ‘Jean Monnet et les organismes interalliés durant la Première Guerre Mondiale’, in Gérard Bossuat and Andreas Wilkens (eds.), Jean Monnet, l’Europe et les chemins de la paix (Paris, 1999), pp. 23–30. R. Fillioux, ‘Note confidentielle pour Monsieur Vilgrain, Sous-secrétaire d’Etat du Ravitaillement, 28/10/1918’. Archives de la Fondation Jean Monnet pour l’Europe, AMB 1/1/40. Lausanne; ibid, ‘Note confidentielle pour Monsieur Vilgrain, Sous-secrétaire d’Etat du Ravitaillement, 29/10/1918’. Archives de la Fondation Jean Monnet pour l’Europe, AMB 1/1/42. Lausanne; Jean Monnet and R. Fillioux, ‘Note confidentielle pour M. Clémentel:

Internationalism in the League of Nations

13. 14.

15.

16.

17.

18. 19. 20.

21.

22.

131

conséquences vraisemblables de l’armistice sur les arrangements par lesquels sont actuellement assurées les importations des Alliés, 30/10/1918’. Archives de la Fondation Jean Monnet pour l’Europe, AMB 1/1/47. Lausanne; Allied Maritime Transport Council, ‘Recommendation on maritime transport after the armistice, 29/10/1918’. Archives de la Fondation Jean Monnet pour l’Europe, AMB 1/1/43. Lausanne; Clementel, La France et la politique; Marc Trachtenberg, ‘“A new economic order”: Étienne Clémentel and French economic diplomacy during the First World War’, French Historical Studies, vol. 10, no. 2 (1977), pp. 315–41; Piétri, ‘Jean Monnet’, p. 30. Continuance of Supreme Economic Council. British Documents, Archives SDN, R293, 10/2390/2101, 1920, Geneva. Victor S. Clark, ‘Prices and currency in Japan’. Quarterly Journal of Economics, vol. 34, no. 3 (1920), p. 433; Joseph S. Davis, ‘World currency and banking: a review of recent developments’, Review of Economic Statistics¸ vol. 2, no. 8 (1920), p. 210. Denise Artaud, La question des dettes interalliées et la reconstruction de l’Europe (1917–1929), vol. 1 (Lille, 1978), pp. 204–5; Marie-Renée Mouton, La Société des Nations et les intérêts de la France (1920–1924) (Bern, 1995), p. 448; Michel Fior, Institution globale et marchés financiers: la Société des Nations face à la reconstruction de l’Europe, 1918–1931 (Bern, 2008), pp. 121–6. International financial conference, transmits [sic] copy of a memorandum signed by signatories in the principal countries of the world, relative to a proposed meeting of financial representatives to discuss the present situation, 1920. Archives SDN, R 293, 10/2845/2845, 1920, Geneva; Initiative of the 15th of January Sent to David Lloyd George. Bank of England Archives, C40/1034, London. ‘Powers to confer on world finance to save Europe: simultaneous appeal made to principal nations to call international conference’, New York Times, 15 January 1920. Initiative of the 15th of January. Youssef Cassis, Capitals of Capital: A History of International Financial Centres, 1780–2005 (Cambridge, 2006), p. 143. ‘Note de M. Gout, Représentant français à la SDN, “Conversation avec Avenol”, 16 mars 1920’. In Ministère des Affaires Etrangères, Commission de Publication des Documents Diplomatiques Français, Documents Diplomatiques Français: 1920, vol. 1 (Paris, 1997), p. 377. ‘Note du Service français de la Société des Nations: “Position de la Commission des réparations vis-à-vis de la conférence financière internationale”, 23 mars 1920’, in ibid, pp. 412–5. ‘Note du Département: “Conclusions auxquelles a abouti la conversation entre M. le Président du Conseil et M. Léon Bourgeois sur la réunion d’une commission financière internationale provoquée par le Conseil de la Société des Nations”, 9 mars 1920’. In ibid, p. 341; Trachtenberg, ‘“A New Economic Order”’; idem, ‘Reparation at the Paris Peace Conference’, Journal of Modern

132

23.

24.

25. 26.

27. 28. 29. 30.

31. 32. 33.

34.

35.

36. 37.

Internationalism Reconfigured History, vol. 51, no. 1 (1979), pp. 24–55; Mouton, La Société des Nations, pp. 452–8. ‘Télégramme de Jean Monnet à Comert, 8 avril 1920’. Archives SDN, R496, 10A/151/151. Geneva; ‘Télégramme de Jean Monnet à Walter Layton, 21 avril 1920’. Archives SDN, R293, 10/3961/2845. Geneva; Mouton, La Société des Nations, p. 454. ‘Mémorandum de M. De Fleuriau, Chargé d’Affaires français à Londres, sur les conférences de Bruxelles (2–3 juillet 1920) et de Spa (5–16 juillet 1920), 26 juillet 1920’, in Ministère des Affaires Etrangères, Documents Diplomatiques Français: 1920, vol. II (Paris, 1999), pp. 317–25. ‘Lettre de Jean Monnet au Président de la Commission des Réparations, 25 juin 1920’. Archives SDN, R496, 10A/151/151. Geneva. The Committee comprised Messrs. Monnet, Avenol, Beneduce, Brand, Dudley Ward, Gonzales, Layton, Ter Meulen, Dixon, Lloyd, Martin, Ador, Gundy, Mori, Plisnier, Tornquist, Ventimiglia, Vissering, Wallenberg and Wouters d’Oplinter. Conférence Financière Internationale, vol. 1, Rapport de la Conférence, Bruxelles 1920 (Brussels, 1920), p. 4. Archives SDN. Geneva. Among them were a prime minister, ministers of finance, ministers of the economy, embassy attachés and senior officials. All of them worked in an advisory capacity except Under-Secretary-General Jean Monnet, who was on the Chairman’s staff. André Siegfried and Paul West, Rapport sur la Conférence Financière Internationale de Bruxelles, 1920. Archives de la Banque de France, Conférence financière internationale de Bruxelles, 1060200109/33, Paris. Idem, ‘Un esprit de solidarité inconnu jusqu’ici’, p. 1. ‘Look to League for credit plan’, New York Times, 9 October 1920, p. 14. ‘Rapport de M. De Fleuriau, Chargé d’Affaires français à Londres en mission à la Conférence financière internationale de Bruxelles à M. Leygues, Ministre des Affaires étrangères, 11 octobre 1920’, in Ministère des Affaires Etrangères, Documents Diplomatiques Français: 1920, vol. III (Paris, 2002), p. 81. Conférence Financière Internationale, vol. 1, Rapport, p. 7. See also ‘Report of the Conference’, Archives SDN, R503, 443/443. Geneva; ‘Conférence financière internationale, rapport de M. Ador, Président de la Conférence’. Archives de la Banque de France, 1060200109/33, Paris. Procès-verbal de la dixième session du conseil de la Société des Nations tenue à Bruxelles du 20 au 28 octobre 1920. Annexe 120: ‘Rapport présenté par M. Léon Bourgeois représentant de la France, le 27 octobre’. Archives SDN. Geneva. Brand was at that time a partner in the bank Lazard Brothers in London. See New York Times, ‘Power to confer’. Walter Layton, an economist, was a Fellow of Gonville and Caius College, Cambridge. Before entering the EFO, he had published several research

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38.

39.

40.

41.

42.

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reports dedicated to the study of prices in the nineteenth century. He was thus very sensible of the highly important problem of inflation in the 1920s, and this, added to his British nationality, no doubt partly explained why he was chosen to succeed Arthur Salter at the head of the EFO in 1920, when the latter became head of the Reparation Commission. See Wesley Mitchell, ‘An introduction to the study of prices’ (review article), American Economic Review, vol. 2, no. 3 (1912), pp. 660–1; Walter T. Layton, An Introduction to the Study of Prices (New York, 1912); Mouton, La Société des Nations, p. 576. Formation of the Economic and Financial Organization, submits [sic] memorandum by Sir Basil Blackett. Archives SDN, R293, 10/12260/2101. Geneva; Decorzant, ‘La Société des Nations’, pp. 464–72. Martin David Dubin, ‘Transgovernmental processes in the League of Nations’, International Organization, vol. 37, no. 3 (1983), pp. 469–93; Salter, Memoirs; Monnet, Mémoires, pp. 66–7. The first Economic Committee comprised Fernand De Wouters d’Oplinter (Belgian Congressman), Julio A. Barboza-Carneiro (Commercial Attaché in the Brazilian Embassy, London), Sir George Foster (Canadian Trade Ministry), Jensen Adolphe (Danish Finance Ministry), Daniel Serruys (French Trade Ministry), Luigi Della Torre (Italian Senator), Teigi Sekiba (Japanese delegate to the Reparations Commission), Professor Neculcea (Romanian delegate to the Reparations Commission, formerly Director of the Romanian Finance Ministry), Sir Hubert Llewellyn Smith (Economic Adviser to the British government) and Henri Heer (head of the Cooperative Society for the Development of Foreign Trade, Switzerland). See Compte rendu des travaux de la Commission Economique et Financière Provisoire (première session), Genève, novembre-décembre 1920’, sessions 1–3, 20 November–21 March. Archives SDN, Comité Financier, PV et Documents, v. 1349. Geneva. The first Financial Committee comprised Henry Strakosch (Director of the Union Corporation, South Africa), Carlos A. Tornquist (Tornquist Company, Argentina), Omer Lepreux (Belgian Senator, and Vice-President of the Belgian National Bank), J. Figueras (Director of the Bank of Bilbao, Spain), Jean Avenol (Inspecteur des Finances, France), Federico Ettore Balzarotti (Administrator of the Credito Italiano, Milan, Italy), Kengo Mori (Japanese Financial Commissioner in London), Sir Basil Blackett (United Kingdom Treasury), Marcus Wallenberg, Vice-President of the Stockholm Enskilda Bank, Sweden), Dr Vilem Pospisil (Director of the Prague Savings Bank, Czechoslovakia and Vice-Chairman of the Banking Committee of the Banking Authority at the Ministry of Finance). See Compte rendu des travaux de la Commission Economique et Financière Provisoire (première session). See Clavin, ‘Money talks’; idem, ‘Defining transnationalism’; idem and Wessels, ‘Another gold idol?; idem, ‘Transnationalism and the League of Nations’; Decorzant, ‘La Société des Nations’; idem, ‘Répondre à la demande sociale’; Louis W. Pauly, ‘The League of Nations and the foreshadowing of

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Internationalism Reconfigured the International Monetary Fund’, Essays in International Finance, no. 201 (Princeton, NJ, 1996); idem, ‘International financial institutions and national economic governance: aspects of the new adjustment agenda in historical perspective’, in Marc Flandreau, Carl-Ludwig Holtfrerich and Harold James (eds.), International Financial History in the Twentieth Century: System and Anarchy (Washington, DC, 2003), pp. 239–65; Neil De Marchi, ‘League of Nations economists and the ideal of peaceful change in the decade of the Thirties’, in C.D.W. Goodwin (ed.), Economics and the National Security: A History of Their Interaction (Durham, NC, 1991), pp. 143–78. See for example François Balmelle, ‘La politique du comité économique’ (PhD thesis, Paris, 1931); R. Calomfiresco, ‘L’Organisation et l’œuvre économique de la Société des Nations’ (PhD thesis, Paris, 1929); Elémer Hantos, L’Économie mondiale et la SDN (Paris, 1931); Robert Guillain, ‘Les problèmes douaniers internationaux et la Société des Nations’ (PhD thesis, Paris, 1930); Jacques Lambert, ‘La politique économique de la Société des Nations depuis la crise’ (PhD thesis, Paris, 1935); McClure, World Prosperity; F.A. Van Woerden, La Société des Nations et le rapprochement économique international (The Hague, 1932).

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‘CREDIT OR CHAOS’? The Austrian Stabilisation Programme of 1923 and the League of Nations

Frank Beyersdorf

Established in the wake of the Paris Peace Conference, the new state of Austria inherited sky-rocketing inflation, a costly and oversized state bureaucracy, a starving population, debt, and reparations to pay to the Allies. Financial experts from Austria and the League of Nations estimated that, without outside assistance, the country’s budget would collapse by mid-June 1923. These experts worked, at maximum speed, to obtain state guarantees and the issuing of Austrian debentures on European and US financial markets.1 ‘Credit’, as the title of a League of Nations Union pamphlet suggested, was needed to prevent the ‘chaos’ of social revolution and the breakdown of the new order in Central and Eastern Europe. Financial stabilisation was represented as vital for preserving the fragile post-war political balance.2 For the old community of bankers and financiers and the new international officials of the League, Austria was nothing less than ‘the first serious effort for the saving of Europe’.3 This chapter examines the efforts of central bankers, international financiers, Austrian state officials and the League of Nations to stabilise Austrian finances through international credit.4 I argue that only the League, particularly its Financial Committee, could provide mechanisms to bring about an international guarantee and a bond issue. The chapter starts by sketching the Austrian situation following World War I, and describes the failed efforts of the Allied powers and the League to prop up the new state between 1919 and 1922. This is followed by an analysis of how the old

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and new international ‘money doctors’ came together to assure the survival of Austria in the second half of 1922. Third, I show how – against great odds – the Austrian Loan Commission sought to sell Austrian long-term debentures in the summer of 1923 with the backing of League experts and Anglo-American bankers. Previous research has suggested that the League’s financial experts acted as straw men for individual or joint Anglo-American banking interests.5 In contrast to these rather cursory treatments, Nicole Piétri has tackled the Austrian stabilisation programme of the 1920s in greater depth, drawing on French and British sources, but also on material from the Austrian, German and League of Nations archives. Piétri, however, focuses on the Austrian and League ‘technicalities’ during the stabilisation programme and tends to neglect international politics. Katharina Erdmenger has painstakingly reconstructed the interaction between British experts in Geneva and London and, in doing so, also mentioned the Austrian loan negotiations.6 However, as she is concerned with the loyalties of the League’s British staff, she says relatively little about the transnational negotiations of financial experts and bankers in 1923. In drawing attention to this latter aspect, I suggest that a closer look at the discussions on the Austrian long-term debentures reveals that neither the League nor the Austrian government officials worked as stooges for the Anglo-Saxon banking community. Instead, they played a crucial role in the establishment of a new economic order after World War I. The money to pay for Austrian or any other debentures might have been in the vaults of the British and US banks, but in the face of post-war hostilities, this capital at first remained unavailable. Investment in the powder keg of Europe seemed unlikely to return any yields, and bankers and financial experts remained suspicious of the new international expertise, since they considered the League’s action an encroachment on the long-tested workings of bankers’ diplomacy.7 Yet, they needed the League. This new international actor offered seemingly objective, scientific mechanisms which could transcend allegedly ‘irrational’ political and national interests, thus generating trust in the post-war economy.8 In this sense, the term ‘money doctors’ – as defined by Marc Flandreau to describe a shared notion of liberal and transnational fiscal engineering and management, for political as well as economic crises – updates the older term ‘banker diplomats’.9 As the League’s appointed High Commissioner to Vienna, Alfred Zimmerman pointed out that ‘all ...

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trouble will be surmounted as long as London, Paris and Geneva work hand in hand’.10 Since central bankers and government financial representatives in the Allied powers remained suspicious of League action which might impinge on national sovereignty, the League’s Financial Committee emphasised economic orthodoxy. According to the League’s leading financial expert, Arthur Salter, the common goal was a return to ‘[t]he world of 1913 [which] seemed to most of us a paradise from which we had been excluded by a flaming sword’. 11 He added that a return to pre-war order would be marked by one ‘notable addition’ – the League of Nations.12 The (im)possibility of chaos: Austria’s situation between 1919 and 1922 Until the elections to the Nationalrat in 1920, the Social Democratic Party was the strongest group in the Austrian parliament. After the Habsburg Monarchy had broken down, Karl Renner became the first Chancellor of the Austrian Republic. Outside the parliament building, banners declared ‘Long live the Socialist Republic’. In Bavaria and Hungary, councils of workers and soldiers took over the government, encouraging their comrades in Austria to follow: social revolution seemed imminent.13 Austro-Marxism, however, differed from the model promoted by the Bolshevists. Otto Bauer, Rudolf Hilferding and Friedrich Adler claimed that revolution could not be achieved by the vanguard of a few cadres, but had to come about ‘naturally’ and by democratic means. Accordingly, in the early days of the Austrian Republic, the Social Democrats cooperated with the second strongest party, the Christian Social Party, and this coalition implemented large-scale social legislation. Inflation, however, undermined the efficacy of these measures. In the 1920 election, the Social Democratic Party lost votes, and a conservative government under Ignaz Seipel, formed by the Christian Social Party and the Pan-German Party, came to power, ruling Austria until 1930.14 However, no Austrian government was able to handle the financial and economic chaos, and the ensuing hardships for the Austrian people, on its own. Austria was ‘just kept alive ... by private and public charity’, humanitarian aid and a series of unilateral short-term credits provided by Great Britain, France and the USA.15 Relief efforts and short-term credits were merely a drop in the ocean, and such credit was quickly consumed by heavy inflation. Mutual mistrust and the post-war depression prevented the states of Europe from coming up with a comprehensive programme to save Austria from financial collapse. The continental European powers did

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not consider the new state to be viable; some hoped for territorial gains (Italy and Hungary), whilst others tried to avert the Anschluss as a security guarantee against a strong Germany (France, Czechoslovakia).16 The British money doctors attempted to help unilaterally, but could not marshal the necessary political will because of war debt and inflation. The Bank of England, heavily involved in the finances of Eastern Europe before the war, had lost its lead role to the US financial markets as the world’s creditor. To yield enough money to cover the vast Austrian deficit, the Bank of England needed US investment in the form of a long-term loan,17 but given the US Senate’s refusal to join the League of Nations, the participation of US financiers seemed unlikely. The new Republican government’s foreign policy rejected official involvement in European affairs. It did not, however, prohibit private ‘financial missionaries’ such as J.P. Morgan & Co. from re-establishing pre-war contacts with Europe and seeking out new markets and profits.18 Although the Allied powers asked the League’s Financial Committee to work on a solution early on, neither the British nor the US state experts and banks used the vehicle initially. Only after the work of the Financial Committee had become an integral part of the post-war economic order, did its members develop independent solutions which transcended and even conflicted with national interests.19 In the early 1920s, however, international civil servants carefully avoided any sign of infringement of national sovereignty. For instance, the first League Economic and Financial Conference in Brussels produced a blueprint for international stabilisation credits in 1920 which, however, failed to produce tangible results. The Ter Meulen scheme asked states to guarantee bonds issued on financial markets in the North Atlantic world,20 and the League opened an office in London to assist states in need of loans. However, nobody called on the office for assistance, as borrowing nations were reluctant to hand over control over their national finances. Lenders, particularly from the USA, considered the process too cumbersome, and did not wish to tie up capital in long-term investments. The office closed a year later.21 Outside the League framework, the Allies’ international efforts to stabilise Europe likewise failed. The last chance for a multilateral effort to re-establish a European economy collapsed at the Genoa Conference in spring 1922. Lloyd George, who initiated the conference, hoped to gain a guarantee for the territorial integrity of France and concessions from France on German reparations payments, but also economic stabilisation

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in Central and Eastern Europe. Having failed spectacularly in these aims, the Conference became known for the separate peace between Germany and the Soviet Union, negotiated at Rapallo.22 With the Genoa Conference as well as unilateral Austrian fundraising efforts having unravelled, Ignaz Seipel travelled around Europe, appealing to the Allied Supreme Council in August 1922. However, the states represented in the Council were loath to pour money into a ‘bottomless pit’. 23 By acting alone, neither states, nor central bankers, nor private financiers, nor the new League financial experts could ensure the guarantees for and issue of long-term bonds that were necessary for the stabilisation of Austrian finances. However, the League’s newly established Joint Provisional Economic and Financial Committee, the kernel of the Economic and Financial Organisation, now designed a new strategy aimed at assuring the profitability of investment in Austrian bonds.24 The scheme rallied the continental European states behind the stabilisation programme, asking them to guarantee the value of Austrian debentures issued in the financial markets. In return, the League experts implemented measures in accord with economic, financial and monetary orthodoxy, hoping in this way to gain the cooperation of the banker diplomats. If successful, the programme could serve as a precedent for all the successor states of the Habsburg Monarchy, as well as other states in Central and Eastern Europe. By implication, it would also entrench the League’s financial and monetary experts as an indispensable and legitimate part of post-war economies.25 League supervision, bankers’ diplomacy and the creation of trust in Austria Following the Austrian Chancellor Seipel’s plea in the League Council, in August 1922 the Allies ‘politely palmed off Austria’, putting the League of Nations in charge.26 After reviewing the situation in Vienna, a League Council commission drafted the Geneva Protocols, and in October 1922 they were signed by Seipel and representatives of Great Britain, France, Italy, Belgium, Switzerland, Czechoslovakia, the Netherlands and Spain. The representatives of these states guaranteed that most of the amount would be raised with the sale of bonds, placing a moratorium on Austria’s foreign debt and reparations. To ensure the implementation of orthodox economic standards and the stabilisation of Austrian finances, the protocols demanded international control over Austria’s expenditure. The stabilisation programme required

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Austria to establish an independent central bank which would stabilise the Austrian currency. Furthermore, it placed the income of the state tobaccomonopoly and customs as internal collateral, and demanded from the government a root-and-branch reform programme of fiscal retrenchment, including the large-scale dismissal of civil servants and far-reaching budget cuts. Most importantly, the League Council appointed a supervisory commission based in Vienna to monitor Austria’s income and expenditure, and its progress towards retrenchment. The head of the League’s Vienna team, Alfred R. Zimmerman, reported monthly to the League Council, which then freed the credit tranches to the Austrian government.27 The High Commissioner and his team of monetary, fiscal and publicity experts took over not only Austria’s financial but also its information policy. The League’s Information Section dispatched the former journalist Adriaan Pelt as public-relations officer, to put a positive spin on the partial and or even non-existent successes of the reforms. This was meant to generate trust in the financial markets to increase the yield of the projected drive towards a longterm loan for Austria. Pelt’s work highlighted the new role of information as a major tool of League diplomacy.28 Seemingly unaware of Pelt’s efforts, the British financial experts Otto E. Niemeyer, Frank H. Nixon and Henry Strakosch asked the League to enforce propaganda activities to create confidence in the stabilisation programme.29 They had little trust in the Austrian government’s ability to execute ‘proper press propaganda’. Niemeyer, a British Treasury civil servant and member of the League’s Financial Committee, demanded a ‘steady and regular drip of fact’ in the financial sections of the main newspapers, since neither Niemeyer nor his colleague Strakosch were ‘professional dope merchants’ whose job it was to feed the press.30 On behalf of the Financial Committee, Arthur Salter rebuffed Niemeyer’s criticism as an undue intrusion into League competencies.31 Nonetheless, Zimmermann convened a meeting of publicity experts from the League’s Information Section during the Council session in Paris in late January 1923, aiming to devise a publicity strategy.32 After the meeting, Pelt reinforced his efforts in Vienna: he wrote weekly progress reports, urged journalists to visit Vienna, distributed press releases, drafted speeches for League officials, wrote articles hailing ‘Austrian’s rising sun’ and monitored the activities of the Social Democratic opposition.33 Eventually, Pelt established a mailing list of 200 persons and institutions, including the League of Nations societies, press offices of foreign ministries and editors

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of major newspapers. Pelt and Zimmermann also distributed newspaper articles which journalists could use as blueprints for their articles.34 In addition, Pelt charged the offices of the League’s Information Section in the capitals of states such as Britain, France and Italy with publishing articles on the Austrian reforms in local dailies. The publicity agents, he said, were meant to ‘inspire’ and ‘indicate the sense in which it would be desirable from our point of view that the foreign press writes about Austria’.35 Vernon Bartlett, head of the League’s London publicity office, transmitted (but also on occasion omitted) League information on the progress of the Austrian reforms in his communications with British newspapers. The League’s public-relations officer in London boasted that the ‘publicity obtained on the work of the Financial Committee’ was a ‘direct result of the work of the Information Section’.36 Zimmerman used Niemeyer’s complaint on the lack of publicity to push the Austrian Chancellor Seipel towards a ‘well-organised press campaign’. Instead of directing the flow of information through the Secretariat in Geneva, the League’s High Commissioner demanded direct access to official Austrian communication channels. Zimmermann put pressure on Seipel to provide access to the treaties between the Press Bureau of the Foreign Ministry and the news agencies Havas, Reuters and Associated Press. After the war, these three agencies, by virtue of monopoly agreements, transmitted and ‘owned’ international news globally.37 Seipel hesitated, as more news on Austria’s situation would also have meant more information on drastic reforms, generating bad publicity in the face of forthcoming elections, scheduled for October 1923. Zimmerman, however, put forward the interests of potential investors and the advice of British as well as French experts, and strongly recommended the setting-up of a proper Austrian press information-service.38 Seipel therefore ordered the head of the Austrian Press Bureau of the Foreign Ministry to cooperate with Pelt. Through the Bureau, Pelt was able to send out regular telegraphic messages to the global and subcontracted national news agencies, but also to the press bureaux of foreign ministries and national League of Nations societies. (The League paid for the transmission, since the Austrian foreign ministry lacked the funds for this service.) Pelt also obtained access to the reports of the Austrian envoys, to check whether the League information was being published in the local newspapers.39 Did League publicity merely reflect the ‘British interests’ of the Treasury? Comert and Pelt went beyond Niemeyer’s demand for a simple drip of facts

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on the progress of Austrian reforms. They emphasised League authorship of the scheme, omitting references to the decisive support of the British Treasury and the Bank of England.40 Pelt personalised the stabilisation programme and connected it to the figure of Zimmermann, who was not particularly well-known for diplomatic tact.41 He distributed biographies, pictures and Zimmermann’s reports across the North Atlantic world.42 Speaking solely for the League, he asked the Secretary of the US Federal Council of Churches for help in publishing Austrian material in the USA, aiming to reach the crucial New York financial market.43 Montagu Norman, Governor of the Bank of England, had no other choice but to accept League promotional activities in order to overcome the deadlock amongst the Allied powers and to go ahead with the actual negotiations over issuing the Austrian debentures. Citing the progress of reform in Austria, Norman pushed his long-time friend Benjamin Strong, of the US Federal Reserve Bank, to ‘consult J.P. Morgan if [it was] possible [to] lend a hand’ in the loan. However, even Norman doubted whether the money for the Austrian bonds could be raised. 44 First, European political conditions threatened the scheme when French and Belgian troops occupied the Ruhr, ‘[t]he black spot of Europe & the world’.45 Secondly, the Austrian as well as the Italian government refused to agree to the appointment of a foreigner at the helm of the newly established Austrian central bank. Salter, being indifferent to the nationality of the new head, supported the appointment of an Austrian against the explicit wishes of the British Treasury. In exchange for this support, Salter obtained, for the first time, official recognition by the Italian government of the League’s stabilisation programme.46 Citing the worsening political situation in Europe and implicitly criticising the League’s independent moves, however, Anglo-American private banks – such as the British-based Morgan, Grenfell & Co. – were not as enthusiastic about the placement of the loan. Morgan, Grenfell said that they could not stand aside if the Bank of England and other London banks went ahead, but they agreed to ask their US partners at J.P. Morgan to place part of the bond issue on the US market.47 The bankers’ hesitation might have been more of a tactical move: behind a carefully crafted image of altruistic action for the stabilisation of Europe, it helped them gain better conditions on the issues of the longterm debentures. Thomas W. Lamont, of J.P. Morgan, who served as an intermediary between New York’s Wall Street and Europe,48 emphasised that John P. Morgan himself was ‘anxious to help’ in the issue of the bonds. ‘Even

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if we cannot sell [them]’, Austrian bonds would be taken on by the bank to show goodwill and trust in Europe.49 Behind the rhetoric of altruism, simple profit-maximisation might have motivated Lamont and Morgan. By March 1923, Austria’s finances were beginning to stabilise under League control, but J.P. Morgan opted not to buy short-term Austrian treasury bills, which covered the period until the long-term loan became available for Austria. Lamont explained that his house wanted to avoid locking money into Austria, which could be more usefully invested in the long-term loan. In the end, J.P. Morgan’s interest in the long-term loan indeed proved to be the better investment.50 Harvesting the rewards: international money doctors, and the issuing of the long-term loan The road to the final issuing of the Austrian bonds was beset by obstacles, because League and Austrian financial experts still needed to overcome prevailing national strife in mainland Europe. The Austrian government, advised by the British Treasury and the Bank of England, appointed a Loan Commission which shuttled across the European financial centres over the following months to negotiate the terms and the size of the loan tranches. The Austrian Loan Commission was headed by Baron Georg von Franckenstein, the Austrian Ambassador to London. It was assumed that Arthur Salter, as head of the Economic and Financial Section of the League’s Secretariat, would serve as the second member of the commission, but the Austrian government preferred to appoint Frank H. Nixon, who had recently left his post as director of the League’s Economic and Finance Section to work for the British Treasury. Nixon was seen as less susceptible to pursuing an independent League policy, reinforcing the notion of an Anglo-American partnership based on economic orthodoxy.51 The Loan Commission faced one major problem: if one negotiating partner demanded changes, others would also ask for them. The Commission’s first visit to Rome managed to tip the draft off balance: Benito Mussolini and his Finance Minister added a list of conditions before agreeing to guarantee and issue the Austrian debentures. Anxious to maintain the national balance between France, Great Britain and Italy on the supervision board, Zimmerman rejected the Italian demand.52 Being blocked in Rome, the Loan Commission continued its journey to Paris, where it met with sympathetic but noncommittal officials of the French state.53

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The Austrian Loan Commission then proceeded to London. The meetings with representatives of the Bank of England and the big banking houses proved to be more promising. Montagu Norman hoped to float the Austrian bonds within the coming five to six weeks. He remarked to Benjamin Strong and J.P. Morgan that ‘it is of vital importance that adequate issue be made on your side’.54 Otto E. Niemeyer of the British Treasury wrote letters to the European ministers of finance to help the Loan Commission on its mission. For instance, at Niemeyer’s invitation the French Finance Minister came to London, promising to push the French bankers for support.55 While in London, the Loan Commission agreed to draft a common scheme for Europe, to include as many states as possible. For the US market, it was crucial to generate the impression of a common European effort.56 Given the shortage of capital in post-war, recession-hit Europe, this was a PR stunt rather than a genuine option. Belgium, devastated by the war, would only offer ‘un beau geste’. The Swiss state had agreed to guarantee a small percentage of the loan, but its bankers made clear that they would not float a great amount of the stock in Switzerland.57 Of the Northern European markets, only Sweden could afford to float a small amount of the loan – the post-war depression had hit the other Scandinavian countries too hard. A Dutch syndicate of bankers under Ter Meulen took an even gloomier view – for them, Austrian Social Democratic lobbying and failed earlier bonds were major reasons to scale back on the previous agreement to help.58 US bankers and their partners, in turn, seemed unready for a bail-out and waited for mainland Europe to take the first step. Following the Ruhr Crisis and its threat to European security, Lamont and Grenfell argued that a booming US stock market was absorbing available funds, and that investors were unwilling to consider European investments. Instead, J.P. Morgan recommended a publicity campaign to develop awareness of the Austrian fiscal improvements and improve the overall image of Austria. Again, the bank’s recommendation seems to have been more of a tactical move to delay the bonds’ issue:59 the financial experts in London, Vienna and Geneva had, in fact, consistently bombarded the USA with information. Vernon Bartlett, the League’s eager PR man in London, invited US newspaper correspondents and, based on Pelt’s weekly digests from Austria, produced articles which were regularly placed in US newspapers; his friends at the London office of the Wall Street Journal, for instance, made ample use of such material.60 Complementing Pelt’s and Bartlett’s work, Arthur Salter briefed both Lord

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Robert Cecil, before the latter toured the USA, and Dwight Morrow of J.P. Morgan.61 The Financial Committee even suggested that the Loan Commission might itself visit the USA; Zimmermann recommended that Arthur Sweetser should accompany it there, because he, as the US publicity expert in the Information Section, ‘would not find it difficult to arouse great interest’ in the bonds on the spot.62 By May 1923, J.P. Morgan had changed its position, or perhaps made its true intention known. It is argued here that there was never any question of the bank not participating in the stabilisation of Europe – feigned indecisiveness on the part of the US bankers was a bargaining chip to bring European finance ministries and bankers to the negotiating table. Eventually, a competitive offer by Gordon Leith, the European representative of the US bank Speyer & Co, seems to have put an end to J.P. Morgan’s hesitation.63 Montagu Norman advised the Loan Commission to stick to the tried and trusted friends of J.P. Morgan, probably to fend off competition, even promising to write letters to the parties concerned in Europe to speed up negotiations and keep J.P. Morgan in the running.64 Frank Murnane of the New York Trust Co., which was also part of the soon-to-be formed syndicate under J.P. Morgan, approached Baron Franckenstein, suggesting a close collaboration with the latter bank.65 Just one day after this talk, Franckenstein received an official reply from J.P. Morgan, announcing that Thomas W. Lamont was on his way to Europe to negotiate on the issuing of the Austrian bonds.66 Before setting sail for Paris, Lamont had asked Charles E. Hughes, the US Secretary of State, to write a letter commending the US bank for its ‘humanitarian’ efforts on behalf of Austria; Lamont probably knew, however, that Hughes would have to refuse the request, given that Warren G. Harding had won the US presidential election on a promise to keep out of European affairs. However, Lamont’s letter to Hughes was circulated, indicating that he was seeking to show his employer’s commitment to Europe.67 Shortly before Lamont’s arrival in Europe, J.P. Morgan announced its conditions for the issuing of the bonds: though the house would not treat the move as ‘an ordinary business transaction’, it still needed to convince the banks in their New York syndicate that conditions in Central Europe were improving. A further incentive for their cooperation might have been a demand for an interest rate of almost 8 per cent; this rate exceeded the maximum agreed upon by the League Council’s Control Commission for the Austrian guarantees.68

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With these tentative successes, the Loan Commission returned to Paris to face the next obstacle. The French bankers had agreed to the low ‘English’ interest rate of 6.5 per cent, but in addition were asking for a 12 per cent bond-coupon tax, which would have increased the price of the Austrian debentures and negated the effect of the low English rate. They argued that any deviation from the standard bond issue would create a lack of trust in the Austrian bonds in France. Again, the Loan Commission turned to Norman and Niemeyer, asking them to negotiate with the French ministers and bankers to fend off the additional tax. Despite these efforts, the French representatives insisted on it, and even postponed the common date for the bond issue from 1 June for two weeks, or even longer, in order to prioritise the issue of internal loans for devastated areas of France.69 Similarly, the smaller European states refused to toe the line. Switzerland agreed to issue a small volume of bonds at a commission of 3 per cent and an interest rate of 6 per cent, on condition that the interest rates in other countries did not rise.70 The Dutch syndicate under Ter Meulen reduced its share, agreeing to float only Dutch guilders worth £212.000, and requiring the same conditions as granted to the US syndicate. These demands rocked the boat once more.71 To make matters worse, the Italian Finance Minister and Italian bankers raised new demands: to avoid the bonds being repaid in depreciated currencies, they asked for repayment in gold-backed money. Zimmermann and the London experts had to rebuff these Italian efforts, since they would have raised the price of the bonds far beyond Austria’s financial capability. Exasperated, Niemeyer advised the Financial Committee and the Loan Commission to omit the Italian market and float the remainder in London as well. Salter, however, refused to budge, conscious of the need to avoid provoking Italy and thus endangering the image of European unity.72 On 10 May, the Bank of England went ahead and declared its readiness to issue the loan in early June, probably in a bid to push the other European states to follow suit. The internal Austrian bonds were also ready for issue. A few days later, Lamont offered to issue Austrian debentures worth £3 up to a maximum of £5 million (US$25 million) in New York, at a high US interest rate.73 The European experts had hoped for a higher amount to be floated in the USA, but estimated US participation as having considerable ‘use for propaganda purposes’ in the sale of the bonds in Europe.74 In Italy, Lamont dispelled doubts over the issuing: he travelled to Rome and advertised the Austrian loan by hinting at possible US loans to Italy. Thus convinced, Mussolini abandoned almost all the Italian conditions.75

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To promote the sale of the Austrian bonds in Great Britain, on 1 June the League’s Vienna High Commissioner, Zimmermann, and members of his team ventured to London.76 Montagu Norman, however, discouraged Pelt and the Vienna team from giving further interviews, to avoid overdoing the propaganda. It seems that the League’s public-relations staff had connected the successful bond emission too closely to the League, withholding any praise from the banker diplomats. In a ‘quite exceptional procedure’, as Pelt remarked, Norman himself convened a press conference of bankers and the Vienna team at the Bank of England, emphasising the true origin of the stabilisation programme.77 Adriaan Pelt met with his colleague Vernon Bartlett in London to launch the last stage of the PR campaign to support the sale of the bonds. Pelt focused particularly on combating recent demands from the Social Democrats in the Austrian Parliament to end League control over the economic situation, since the latter had improved. He asked the Geneva Secretariat and the League offices in London, Paris and Rome to leak an article to the press warning the public of ‘disastrous’ consequences if League control was terminated at this juncture. Pelt acknowledged that this procedure was ‘rather dangerous even for a semi-official publicity agent’, because it touched on ‘political matters’ and contradicted the secretive back-door brokerage of the bankers’ diplomacy, but he considered it imperative to counter news of ‘unrelenting socialists’ threatening the scheme at this time.78 Nonetheless, governments in mainland Europe still refused to fall into line. The French bankers decided only to take a quarter of the French tranche directly, and to postpone the issue date, and in a cascade effect Swiss bankers worried whether they could float bonds worth £1 million, given the fact that the even smaller Dutch tranche was not forthcoming. As in the Italian case, the Austrian Loan Commission used Lamont to convince the Swiss to stick to their promise. In the face of such obstacles, J.P. Morgan stipulated that it would hold the results of the US tranche in trusteeship until all Austrian bonds in Europe had been issued. In the end, the Bank of England promised to float the remaining £3–4 million-worth of the bonds, in case the European market, particularly in Italy, would not be open to them.79 Despite the mainland European bankers’ anxieties, the bonds, issued first in Britain on 8 June and a week later in the USA, proved to be an overwhelming success. In the City, the bonds sold within hours, and in New York within minutes.80 In Austria, the internal issue, as expected, brought the second-highest yield after the British market. The Italian

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government authorised its bankers to participate in the issue on 2 June – only a day after the London issue – which yielded similar success in Italy. In Sweden, the bonds were bought by the Finance Ministry, and sold as part of a Swedish government loan, while in Belgium they were bought by the banks. The Netherlands found they could sell their share with ease. The leading Swiss bankers reported an ‘immense success’.81 Only the Italian and French ‘difficulties’, as the Austrian Loan Commission called them, did not abate, with further demands slowing down the issue of the last Austrian bonds. In the end, France postponed the bond issue until July–August, while the Austrian government had no choice but to deposit the amount of the collateral for the bond taxes.82 Spain was the last country to issue the bonds, in October, because of a change in government and the end of the parliamentary session for the summer.83 Conclusion What made the Austrian loan such a great success, which ensured Austria’s survival? First, the multinational guarantees over the issuing of the loan were unique, and made it appear an almost impeccable investment, particularly to the USA: if the Austrian government had defaulted, the guaranteeing states would have had to pay the creditors. Secondly, the fact that the Bank of England served as the leader for the British syndicate was a novelty, and certainly contributed to the speedy issue of the bonds in London.84 Thirdly, US participation made the whole scheme possible: this was not so much because it issued its share of the bonds, but because it signalled to Europe that US banks would participate in all stabilising efforts.85 Montagu Norman reflected later: ‘It is Jack Morgan personally whom we have to thank for the fact that Austria got money in N[ew] Y[ork].’86 For investors in the US market, the League’s control over the Austrian budget might have seemed all too familiar. Since the nineteenth century, US banks had granted loans to South American states, conditional on their accepting the financial oversight of US money doctors. This so-called ‘dollar diplomacy’ – or ‘informal colonialism’ – had devastating consequences for the creditors, because USA-friendly governments crushed opposition and prevented fiscal retrenchment.87 The fact that the Austrian bonds sold out within minutes in the USA had nothing to do with any ‘affection for Austria’, as J.P. Morgan and its syndicate claimed. Quite simply, as the US weekly New Republic pointed out, it was an ‘excellent investment’, secured by European states and issued at an exceptionally high interest rate.88 Although there is no hard

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evidence, it may be that J.P. Morgan’s syndicate not only issued but also bought the bonds itself, to sell them on to the public at a further profit – a practice that some believed to have guaranteed the success in London.89 In short, it was attractive interest rates and behind-the-scenes brokering by bankers and financial experts from London, New York and Geneva which brought about the long-term loan for Austria. The praise, however, went to the League, particularly its Financial Committee, which, as the Committee itself and almost all subsequent authors claimed, ‘did the real work of reconstruction’.90 Montagu Norman sincerely regretted that the whole world claimed the ‘[f ]atherhood of the League in all these non-rationalistic & almost altruistic endeavours’ instead of acknowledging the actual agents behind the scheme, the brokers of the central banks.91 He was right: the Information Section and League supporters across the globe exploited the scheme’s success. Every article, pamphlet and book since then mentions and emphasises the ‘Austrian reconstruction’ as a great success story.92 The praise for the successful stabilisation of Austria might have contributed to the League Council’s decision in September 1923 to elevate its Economic and Financial Committees from provisional to permanent status, forming the core of its Economic and Financial Organisation.93 In the perception of the money doctors, League mechanisms became tools which transcended European national and potential global conflicts. Without the League, no Geneva Protocols would have been possible: it was they that transferred Austria’s financial sovereignty to League supervision. The country’s constitutional commitment to orthodox financial principles allowed for the long-term loan which safeguarded its existence. Thus, the supposedly non-political agency of the League of Nations did indeed transcend national interests. Given the tendency of mainland European bankers and statesmen to demand higher interest rates for the issue of the bonds in their own countries, or a greater political influence on Austrian affairs, European unity might have been more an impression generated by League publicity than actual fact. The undisputed governmental guarantees of the bonds made the Austrian loan a fail-safe investment. Yet the bonds issued as part of the stabilisation programme were more than a good investment: neither the League nor the Anglo-American banking community could allow the state to fail – even in the face of obstruction, refusal and delays by various statesmen and bankers. For the League, success in Austria provided the first

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evidence of its usefulness. British banks and state officials wanted a political, economical and socially stable Europe to return to the pre-war levels of Britain’s global prestige and economic power. US bankers also aimed at European stability, but to turn New York instead of London into the world’s financial centre.94 For all of them, Austria stood as a test case for the fragile post-war order. First, the Austrian stabilisation programme and subsequent measures prevented, as a Foreign Office official reflected in retrospect, Central and Eastern European states ‘from throwing up their hands and going Bolshy’.95 Secondly, the Austrian scheme provided a precedent for the stabilisation of other Eastern European states, and the issuing of loans for Hungary, Greece, Bulgaria and Estonia. It opened the door for the Dawes and Young Plans, which allowed Germany to re-enter the pre-war economic system – until the Great Depression and the rising tide of nationalism and dictatorship ended this era.96

Notes The author wishes to thank Patricia Clavin, Daniel Laqua, Jasper Heinzen and Florian Pressler for invaluable comments and suggestions. 1.

2. 3.

4.

5.

F.L. Carsten, The First Austrian Republic 1918–1938 (Aldershot, 1986), pp. 36–49, 54ff; Nicole Piétri, La Société des Nations et la reconstruction financière de l’Autriche 1921–1926 (Geneva, 1970), pp. 25–33. Drummond Fraser, Credit or Chaos: The Ter Meulen Credit Scheme of the League of Nations (London, 1921). ‘Alfred R. Zimmermann to Orsini, 24.5.1923’. League of Nations Archives, Geneva, External Fonds: Financial Reconstruction of Austria, C3 (hereafter ‘LONA Reconstruction’). The Anglo-American bankers and League financial experts consistently used the term ‘reconstruction’. The word suggests a return to a pre-existing state, which, in a sense, was the ultimate goal of the programme. As a new state, however, Austria was not so much ‘reconstructed’ as ‘stabilised’ – and this stabilisation was sustained by a transnational network involving bankers, diplomats, politicians and League officials. Peter Berger, ‘The League of Nations and interwar Austria: critical assessment of a partnership in economic reconstruction’, in Günter Bischof, Anton Pelinka and Alexander Lassner (eds.), The Dollfuss/Schuschnigg Era in Austria: A Reassessment (New Brunswick, NJ, 2003), p. 80; Kathleen Burk, Morgan Grenfell 1838–1988: The Biography of a Merchant Bank (Oxford, 1989), pp.

‘Credit or Chaos’?

6.

7. 8.

9.

10. 11. 12. 13. 14. 15.

151

140ff; J. Michael Hogan, Informal Entente: The Private Structure of Cooperation in Anglo-American Economic Diplomacy 1918–1925 (Columbia, MO, 1977), pp. 63–6; Anne Orde, British Policy and European Reconstruction after the First World War (Cambridge, 1990), p. 143; Richard S. Sayers, The Bank of England 1891–1944, Vol. 1 (3 vols., Cambridge, 1976), pp. 163–70; Stephen A. Schuker, ‘Money doctors between the wars: the competition between central banks, private financial advisers, and multilateral agencies 1919– 1939’, in Marc Flandreau (ed.), Money Doctors: The Experience of International Financial Advising 1850–2000 (London, 2003), p. 58. For more balanced, albeit brief, accounts of the Austrian stabilisation programme, see Martin Hill, The Economic and Financial Organization of the League of Nations: A Survey of Twenty-Five Years’ Experience (Washington, DC, 1946), pp. 21–3; Louis W. Pauly, Who Elected the Bankers? Surveillance and Control in the World Economy (Ithaca, NY, and London, 1998), pp. 53–5. Katharina Erdmenger, Diener Zweier Herren? Briten im Sekretariat des Völkerbundes 1919–1933 (Baden-Baden, 1998), pp. 170–236 (see pp. 219ff for a discussion of the loan negotiations); Piétri, La Société des Nations, pp. 93– 107; idem, ‘L’oeuvre d’un organisme technique de la Société des Nations: le Comité Financier et la reconstruction de l’Autriche (1921–1926)’, in United Nations (ed.), The League of Nations in Retrospect (New York and Berlin, 1983), p. 333. Richard H. Meyer, Bankers’ Diplomacy: Monetary Stabilization in the Twenties (New York, 1970); see also note 5 above. Patricia Clavin and Jens-Wilhelm Wessels, ‘Transnationalism and the League of Nations: understanding the work of its Economic and Finance Organisation’, Contemporary European History, vol. 14, no. 4 (2005), pp. 465-492, see esp. p. 471. See also Clavin’s forthcoming book on the EFO and Yann Decorzant’s chapter in this volume. Marc Flandreau, ‘Introduction: money and doctors’, in idem (ed.), Money Doctors: The Experience of International Financial Advising 1850–2000 (London, 2003), pp. 2–6. ‘Zimmermann to Montagu Norman, 28.3.1923’. LONA Reconstruction C3; Erdmenger, Diener Zweier Herren?, pp. 221ff, 234ff. Arthur Salter, Memoirs of a Public Servant (London, 1961), p. 193. Ibid, p. 194. Peter Berger, Kurze Geschichte Österreichs im 20. Jahrhundert (Vienna, 2007), pp. 59–61. Carsten, The First Austrian Republic, p. 97; Karl Vocelka, Geschichte Österreichs: Kultur – Gesellschaft – Politik (Vienna and Colgne, 2000), p. 279. League of Nations Union, What the League has done for Austria (pamphlet, London, 1923), p. 1; Maureen Healy, Vienna and the Fall of the Habsburg Empire: Total War and Everyday Life in World War I (Cambridge, 2004), pp. 255–7; Herbert Hoover, Three Years’ Work of the American Relief Administration in Austria (Vienna, 1922).

152 16.

17.

18.

19.

20.

21. 22.

23.

24. 25. 26. 27.

Internationalism Reconfigured Georg von Franckenstein, ‘The big Austrian loan’, Contemporary Review, vol. 124 (1923), p. 434; Erdmenger, Diener Zweier Herren, pp. 180–97; Orde, British Policy, pp. 112–36; Piétri, La Société des Nations, pp. 25–55. ‘Niemeyer an Zimmermann, 24.3.1923’. BNA, FO371/74  /3; ‘Montagu Norman to Benjamin Strong, 7.2.1923’. Bank of England Archives (hereafter ‘BAE’), 2A165/1, H2/353; see also Erdmenger, Diener Zweier Herren, pp. 216ff. Frank Ninkovich, Modernity and Power (Chicago, IL, 1994), pp. 41–62; Emily S. Rosenberg, Financial Missionaries to the World: The Politics and Culture of Dollar Diplomacy 1900–1930 (Cambridge, 1999). By the end of the 1920s League officials had recognised, by today’s macroeconomic standards, the roots of the Great Depression. They recommended solutions which contradicted the orthodox policies of national treasuries and central banks. Although this advice remained unheeded at the time, it foreshadowed the Bretton Woods system’s monetary policy, which allowed for the raising and stabilising of prices through the money supply. See Patricia Clavin and Jens-Wilhelm Wessels, ‘Another golden idol? The League of Nations’ gold delegation and the Great Depression 1929–1932’, International History Review, vol. 26, no. 4 (2004), pp. 777–95. ‘Jean Monnet to Thomas W. Lamont, 14.5.1921’; ‘Lamont to Dwight M. Murrow, 15.5.1921’. Baker Library, Harvard University, Thomas W. Lamont Papers (hereafter ‘Lamont Papers’), Box 82; Erdmenger, Diener Zweier Herren, pp. 171–6; Marie-Renée Mouton, ‘Société des Nations et reconstruction financière de l’Europe à la Conférence de Bruxelles, 24 septembre–8 octobre 1920’, Relations Internationales, no. 39, (1984), pp. 309-331; Piétri, ‘L’oeuvre d’un organisme technique’, pp. 320ff. Schuker, ‘Money doctors’, p. 58; Dan P. Silverman, Reconstructing Europe after the Great War (Cambridge, 1982), pp. 283–7. Carole Fink, The Genoa Conference: European Diplomacy 1921–1922 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1984), pp. 238–42; idem, Axel Frohn and Jürgen Heideking (eds.), Genoa, Rapallo, and the European Reconstruction in 1922 (Washington, DC, 1991). League of Nations Union, ‘What the League has done for Austria’, p. 1; Klemens von Klemperer, Ignaz Seipel: Christian Statesman in a Time of Crisis (Princeton, NJ, 1972), pp. 186–97. Clavin and Wessels, ‘Transnationalism and the League of Nations’, p. 471; see p. 480 for the structure of the EFO. Pauly, in Who Elected the Bankers?, pp. 52ff, mentions a loan by Baring Brothers to Czechoslovakia in which the League controlled guarantees. League of Nations Union, ‘What the League has done for Austria’, p. 1; Erdmenger, Diener Zweier Herren, pp. 197ff. Salter claims that he, Jean Monnet and Basil Blackett of the British Treasury, together with the League’s Finance Committee, had already devised the

‘Credit or Chaos’?

28.

29.

30. 31. 32. 33.

34. 35.

36. 37. 38. 39.

40.

153

stabilisation programme in 1921, during a boat trip on the Lake of Geneva; see Arthur Salter, Slave of the Lamp: A Public Servant’s Notebook (London, 1967), pp. 97ff; idem, Memoirs, p. 177. See also Erdmenger, Diener Zweier Herren, pp. 199–218; Gottlieb Ladner, Seipel als Überwinder der Staatskrise vom Sommer 1922: Zur Geschichte der Entstehung der Genfer Protokolle vom 4. Oktober 1922 (Vienna and Graz, 1964), pp. 158–60; Piétri, La Société des Nations, pp. 60–8, 87–92; idem, ‘L’oeuvre d’un organisme technique’, pp. 323ff. Pierre Comert, ‘Note pour M. Pelt sur son voyage à Vienne, 12.10.1922’. LONA External Fonds, Pelt Papers, P192; Piétri, La Société des Nations, pp. 88, 92ff. See also Madeleine Herren, Internationale Organisationen seit 1865: Eine Globalgeschichte der Internationalen Ordnung (Darmstadt, 2009), pp. 53–7. The Treasury and the British officials in the League’s Secretariat had already cooperated on the matter since early 1921; see Erdmenger, Diener Zweier Herren, pp. 178–80. ‘Otto E. Niemeyer to Eric Drummond, 19.1.1923’. LONA Reconstruction, C50. ‘Salter to Niemeyer, 12.5.1923’. LONA S116; Erdmenger, Diener Zweier Herren, pp. 216ff. ‘Zimmermann to Niemeyer, 9.4.1923’. LONA Reconstruction, C50. Alfred R. Zimmermann, ‘Austria’s rising sun’, Independent, vol. 114, no. 39 (6 June 1925), pp. 633ff; ‘Pierre Comert to Pelt, 9.2.1923’. LONA Reconstruction, C50; Piétri, La Société des Nations, pp. 88, 92ff. ‘G.L. Leith to Karl Wollanka and draft articles, n.d., 17.1.1922, 18.1.1922’. LONA R1338/22/18586/18586. ‘Pelt to Bartlett, 18.1.1923’; ‘Pelt to Bartlett, 23.2.1923’. LONA Reconstruction C50; see also ‘Bartlett to Pelt, 20.2.1923’; ‘Comert to Pelt, 21.2.1923’; ‘Zimmermann to Niemeyer, 9.4.1923’; ‘Ernst Ludwig to Pelt, 23.2.1923’; ‘N.N. to Pelt, 9.4.1923’. LONA Reconstruction C50; ‘Vernon Bartlett to Arthur Salter, 9.4.1923’. LONA R562/27247/27247. H.R. Cummings, ‘Circulated Report: Publicity on the Austrian Restoration Scheme, 2.8.1921’. LONA R1337/22/14381/14381. ‘Comert, Note pour M. Pelt, 12.10.1922’. LONA External Fonds: Pelt Papers, P192. ‘Zimmermann to Seipel, 13.2.1923’. LONA Reconstruction, C50. ‘Pelt to Vernon Bartlett, 13.2.1923’; ‘Pelt to Zimmermann, Report on the Activity of the Office of the High Commissioner in Vienna on Publicity since the Council Meeting in Paris, 5.3.1923’; ‘Zimmermann to Niemeyer, 9.4.1923’, ‘Pelt to Ludwig, 13.10.1923’; ‘Pelt to Ludwig 7.12.1923’. LONA Reconstruction C50. ‘Austria’s summary of the position up to today, 27.1.1923’. LONA Reconstruction, C50; Erdmenger, Diener Zweier Herren, p. 192.

154 41. 42.

43. 44. 45. 46.

47. 48.

49. 50. 51. 52.

53. 54. 55.

56. 57.

Internationalism Reconfigured Pauly, Who Elected the Bankers?, p. 55; Salter, Memoirs, pp. 180ff. ‘Pelt’s letters from Vienna, 13 and 14.2.1923’; ‘Pelt to Krabbe and Bartlett 23.2.1923’. LONA External Fonds : Pelt Papers, P192; ‘Pelt to Zimmermann, Report on the Activity of the Office of the High Commissioner in Vienna on Publicity since the Council Meeting in Paris’. LONA Reconstruction C50. ‘Pelt to Arthur E. Hungerford, 5.4.1923’. LONA Reconstruction C50. ‘Norman to Strong, 7.2.1923’. BAE, 2A165/1, H2/353. ‘Norman to Strong, 9.4.1923’. BAE, Norman–Strong Corr. In his memoirs, Salter, who led the Vienna team until Zimmermann’s arrival, claims to have burnt Montagu Norman’s telegram announcing the end of the Bank of England’s support (Salter, Slave of the Lamp, p. 73). See also Erdmenger, Diener Zweier Herren, pp. 221ff; Orde, British Policy, p. 142; Piétri, La Société des Nations, pp. 80–2. ‘Otto E. Niemeyer, Note on a Program for Geneva, 18.1.1923’. British National Archives, FO 371/8538; Orde, British Policy, pp. 141ff. Michael J. Hogan, ‘Thomas W. Lamont and European recovery: the diplomacy of privatism in a corporatist age’, in Kenneth Paul Jones (ed.), U.S. Diplomats in Europe 1919–1941 (Santa Barbara, CA, 1981); Robert F. Smith, ‘Thomas W. Lamont: international banker as diplomat’, in Thomas J. McCormick and Walter LaFeber (eds.), Behind the Throne: Servants of Power to Imperial Presidents 1898–1968 (Madison, WI, 1993). For a literature review on the house of J.P. Morgan, see Martin Horn, ‘J.P. Morgan & Co: the House of Morgan and Europe 1933–1939’, Contemporary European History, vol. 14, no. 4 (2005), p. 520, fn 2. ‘Lamont to E.C. Grenfell, 10.3.1923’; ‘Grenfell to Lamont, 22.3.1923’. Harvard, Lamont Papers 82; Horn: ‘J.P. Morgan & Co’, 520. ‘Lamont to Dean Jean [Morgan, Harjes & Co], February 1923’; ‘Lamont and Zimmermann to Niemeyer, 14.3.1923’. LONA Reconstruction C3. ‘Franckenstein, Report 21.3.1923’. LONA Reconstruction C3; Erdmenger, Diener Zweier Herren, pp. 181ff. ‘Franckenstein, Report No. 22, Extract for De Bordes from a report by Schüller to Austrian Foreign Ministry, 23.3.1923’; ‘Four Italian Notes, 27.4.1923’; Note verbale du Ministre italien à Vienne to Zimmermann, 2.5.1923’; ‘Extract of an telegram by Mussolini shown by Orsini to Zimmermann, 10.5.1923’; ‘Zimmermann to Norman and Salter, 24.5.1923’. LONA Reconstruction C3. See also Erdmenger, Diener zweier Herren, pp. 219–22. ‘Franckenstein, Reports 24.3.1923’. LONA Reconstruction C3. ‘Norman to Strong, 4.4.1923’. BAE, 2A165/1, H2/353. ‘Arthur Salter to Zimmermann , 29.3.1923’; ‘Nixon to Zimmermann, 3.4.1923’; ‘Report Franckenstein No. 3 and 4, n.d. and 23.4.1923’. LONA Reconstruction C3. ‘Zimmermann to Seipel, 5.4.1923’. LONA Reconstruction C3. ‘Franckenstein, Reports Nos. 11 and 12’. LONA Reconstruction C3.

‘Credit or Chaos’? 58. 59.

60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68.

69. 70. 71.

72.

73.

74. 75.

76.

155

‘Franckenstein, Reports Nos. 6–9, 6. to 12.4.1923’. LONA Reconstruction C3. ‘Franckenstein to Seipel, 4.4.1923’; ‘Report Franckenstein No. 15’. LONA Reconstruction C3; ‘Salter to Zimmermann, 28.4.1923’. BNA FO371/8541. ‘Vernon Bartlett to Arthur Salter, 5.5, 7.5. and 11.5.1923’. LONA R562/27247/27247; Wall Street Journal, 11 May 1923. ‘Arthur Salter to Philip Baker’, 12.3.1923’. LONA R562/27247/27247. ‘Zimmermann to Niemeyer, 9.4.1923’. LONA Reconstruction, C50. ‘Norman to Franckenstein, 27.4.1923’; ‘Franckenstein Report No. 22’; ‘Gordon Leith to Franckenstein, 5.5.1923’. LONA Reconstruction C3. ‘Report Franckenstein No. 15’, LONA Reconstruction C3. ‘Report Franckenstein No. 16, 22.4.1923’. LONA Reconstruction C3. ‘J.P. Morgan & Co to Morgan, Grenfell & Co, 23.4.1923’; ‘Report Franckenstein No. 17, 23.4.1923’. LONA Reconstruction C3. ‘Lamont to Hughes, 24.4.1923’; ‘Hughes to Lamont, 26.4.1923’. Lamont Papers, Box 82; Orde, British Policy, p. 143. ‘J.P. Morgan & Co to Morgan, Grenfell & Co, forwarded to Franckenstein, 23. and 24.4.1923’; ‘Franckenstein, Report No 17, 23.4.1923’. LONA Reconstruction C3. ‘Franckenstein, Report No. 18, 25.4.1923 and No. 32. LONA Reconstruction C3. ‘Franckenstein Report No. 21, 12.5.1923’. LONA Reconstruction C3. ‘Franckenstein to Union Financière de Genève and Ter Meulen, 10.5.1923’; ‘Ter Meulen to Franckenstein, n.d. and 15.5.1932’; ‘Report Franckenstein No. 32’. LONA Reconstruction C3. ‘Telegram Kwiatowski to Austrian Foreign Ministry, 7.5.1923’; ‘Franckenstein, Report No. 27,; ‘Telegramm Franckenstein, 15 and 16.5.1923’. LONA Reconstruction C3; Erdmenger, Diener Zweier Herren, pp. 219ff. ‘Action in connection with the Austrian long-term loan’; ‘Results of the conversation 5.5.1923’; ‘Note on the Austrian Reconstruction’, 9.5.1923; ‘Report Franckenstein Nos. 26 and 32’; ‘Salter to Zimmermann, 11.5.1923’. LONA Reconstruction C3; London Times, 14 May 1923. ‘Nixon to Zimmermann, 4. and 8.5.1923’. LONA Reconstruction C3. ‘Franckenstein Report No. 36, 24.5.1923 and No. 37, 29.5.1923’. LONA Reconstruction C3; ‘Kwiatowski to Austrian Foreign Ministry, 19.5.1923’. LONA Reconstruction C50; ‘Extract of an telegram by Niemeyer to Panteleoni, 8.5.1923’; ‘Orsini to Zimmermann, 10.5.1923’; ‘Zimmermann to Salter, 12.5.1923’; ‘Franckenstein to Austrian FO, 23.5.1923’; ‘Nixon to Zimmermann, 28.5.1923’. LONA Reconstruction C3; ‘Niemeyer to Under Secretary of State, 23.5.1923’. BNA FO371/8541. ‘Zimmermann to J.P. Morgan & Co, ‘The New Austria’, n.d.’; ‘Lamont to Zimmermann, 1.6.1923’; ‘Zimmermann, ‘The Financial Reconstruction of

156

77. 78. 79. 80.

81.

82.

83. 84.

85. 86. 87.

88. 89.

Internationalism Reconfigured Austria’, speech before US press representatives, London 4.6.1923’; ‘Pelt to Bartlett, 7.6.1923’. LONA Reconstruction C6. Manchester Guardian, 30 May 1923; ‘Pelt to Felkin, 29.5.1923’; ‘Pelt to H.R. Cummings, 9.6.1923’. LONA Reconstruction C50. ‘Pelt to Krabbe, Bartlett and Bruccoleri, 5.5.1923’. LONA Reconstruction C51; Times 10 May 1923. ‘Franckenstein Report Nos. 38 and 39, 6.6.1923’. LONA Reconstruction C3; ‘Seymour to Curzon, 26.5.1923’. BNA FO371/8541. ‘Franckenstein, Report No. 43, 8.6.1923’. LONA Reconstruction C3; ‘Nixon to Zimmermann, 12.6.1923’; ‘Lamont to Zimmermann, 12 and 13.6.1923’. LONA Reconstruction C6; New York Times, 14 June 1923; Orde, British Policy, pp. 143ff. ‘Dominice [of l’Union Financière de Genève] to Lamont, 4.7.1923’; ‘Dominice to Lamont, 31.7.1923’. Lamont Papers, Box 82. See also ‘Nixon to Niemeyer, 31.5.1923’. BNA T160/786; ‘Franckenstein to Austrian Foreign Ministry, 8.6.1923’. LONA Reconstruction C3; ‘C. Barclay to Curzon, 12.6.1923’. BNA FO371/8542; Société des Nations, Journal Officiel, No. 8, August 1923, p. 859. ‘Torretta to Curzon, 2.6.1923’. BNA FO371/8541’. See also ‘Franckenstein to Austrian Foreign Ministry, 6, 10, 13, 16.8.1923’. LONA Reconstruction C3; ‘Niemeyer to Curzon, 16.6.1923’. BNA FO371/8542. ‘S. Alba to Nixon, 19.7.1923’; ‘Nixon to Alba, 22.7.1923’; ‘Nixon to Franckenstein, 27.3.1923’. LONA Reconstruction C3. ‘Franckenstein, Report No. 43, 8.6.1923’. LONA Reconstruction C3. See also Piétri, ‘L’oeuvre d’un organisme technique’, p. 333. Hogan and most AngloAmerican scholars maintain that J.P. Morgan’s European partners formed a syndicate to issue the bonds. My evidence, however, shows that Morgan, Grenfell were indeed the leading British banking house in the issue, but that the Bank of England stood behind the syndicate in terms of arbitrating the issue conditions and the legal procedure (Informal Entente, p. 66). ‘Telegram Franckenstein, 6.6.1923’. LONA Reconstruction C3; Manchester Guardian, 16 June 1923. ‘Norman to Strong 8.10.1923’. BAE, Copies of Benjamin Strong Papers. Rosenberg, Financial Missionaries, pp. 58ff, 120ff. Similarly, the European lead investor, Baring Brothers, granted loans to Turkey and ensured repayment by imposing control of the bank on state customs and tariff as a guarantee (Pauly, Who Elected the Bankers?, pp. 52ff). New Republic, 20 June 1923, p. 84. ‘Parliamentary Question for W. Johnson-Hicks, 16.6.1923’; ‘Chilton to Curzon, 15.6.1923’. BNA FO371/8542. The New York banking house of Dillon Read issued bonds unilaterally on behalf of the Polish government, without supervision of any kind. The bonds failed to sell in the USA, and

‘Credit or Chaos’?

90.

91. 92.

93. 94. 95. 96.

157

this led to the break-up of the government and to a coup by Jozef Piludski (Rosenberg, Financial Missionaries, pp. 176–80). Harold R.G. Greaves, The League Committees and World Order: A Study of the Permanent Expert Committees of the League of Nations as an Instrument of International Government. (London, 1932, repr. 1979), p. 80; ‘Herbert B. Ames to Pelt, 5.3.1924’. LONA Reconstruction C50. ‘Norman to Strong, 8.10.1923’. BAE, Copies of Benjamin Strong Papers. See for instance League of Nations Union, ‘What the League has done for Austria’, p. 1; ‘Archibald Gary Coolidge [editor of Foreign Affairs] to Arthur Salter, 26.2.1924’. LONA R562/27247/27247; Hill, Economic and Financial Organization, p. 28; Francis P. Walters, A History of the League of Nations (London, 1952), pp. 203–11; Gary B. Ostrower, The League of Nations from 1919 to 1929: An Illustrated History and Chronology of the First Ten Years of the League of Nations (Garden City Park, NY, 1996), p. 100. Société des Nations, Journal Officiel, No. 11, November 1923, pp. 1303, 1442; Greaves, The League Committee and World Order, p. 39. Carl P. Parrini, Heir to Empire: United States Economic Diplomacy 1916–1923 (Pittsburgh, PA, 1967), pp. 123–9. ‘Harold Bateman to Sigismund D. Waley, 11.9.1928’. BNA FO/371/12856. ‘Strong to Norman, 9.7.1924’. BAE, Copies of Benjamin Strong Papers; ‘Pelt, Note pour Comert, 7.12.1923’. LONA Reconstruction C50. Orde, British Policy, pp. 266–74, 284–92.

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‘A Real Meeting of the Women of the East and the West’ 161

‘A REAL MEETING OF THE WOMEN OF THE EAST AND THE WEST’ Women and Internationalism in the Interwar Period

Marie Sandell

The international women’s movement,1 with its roots in nineteenth-century philanthropic, abolitionist and temperance activism,2 was severely disrupted by the First World War. Yet it emerged from the conflict with a stronger commitment to internationalism, and a desire to broaden its membership beyond the ‘West’. Existing organisations reinvented themselves and many new associations were formed. An example of the latter was the Pan-Pacific Women’s Conference (later Pan-Pacific Women’s Association), which held its first meeting in August 1928.3 Earlier the same year, its designated chair, Jane Addams, also president of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (WILPF), had declared in WILPF’s journal Pax International that the first conference would represent ‘a real meeting of the women of the East and West’.4 In the event, the Japanese delegation to this gathering proved to be larger than that from either Australia, Canada or New Zealand.5 Eleanor Hinder, present at this conference, wrote afterwards in Pacific Affairs that it differed greatly from the International Federation of University Women’s (IFUW) conference in Christiania (now Oslo) in 1924, where the only Chinese delegate, Grace Yang ‘... splendidly qualified woman though she was, [had been] regarded as a unique representative, and less as one seriously prepared to make a contribution to the gathering’.6

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Both Addams’s and Hinder’s comments imply that so-called ‘Eastern’ women were better represented in and integrated into the Pan-Pacific Women’s Conference – one of several regional women’s organisations that were emerging in the ‘non-Western’ world (especially in South America, the Middle East and Asia) from the late 1920s onwards7 – than was the case with international women’s organisations such as the IFUW, which had been established earlier in the century. These comments are intriguing, as they came at a time when the IFUW and other major international women’s organisations were growing fairly rapidly, spurred on by a renewed interest in international co-operation following the Great War and by a desire to extend memberships beyond Europe, the USA and the British Dominions.8 This expansion, however, took place during a time that witnessed a real surge in non-governmental organisations of all sorts, which not only meant a broadening of internationalism geographically, but also challenges to the views and ideologies of earlier organisations.9 By the end of the First World War three major international women’s organisations had been formed: the International Council of Women (ICW, founded in 1888), the International Woman Suffrage Alliance (1904, and later known as the International Alliance of Women for Suffrage and Equal Citizenship, or IAW), and WILPF (1915). That they were closely related is reflected in Leila Rupp’s suggestion that they should be viewed as ‘grandmother, mother and daughter’, as one in effect gave birth to another.10 While the IAW was born of disagreements within the ICW about whether to take a firm stand with regard to women’s suffrage, WILPF was a product of the challenges posed to the women’s movement by the First World War. It grew out of the conference that was held at The Hague in 1915. Initiated by prominent Dutch Alliance member Aletta Jacobs, it had failed to get an official blessing from the International Woman Suffrage Alliance, which was divided over the war.11 While all three organisations were secular, had no particular political affiliation, and, from the outset, welcomed female members from around the world, the ICW’s avoidance of a clear-cut stance on female suffrage made it more conservative than the IAW and WILPF. While the IAW and WILPF emphasised women’s rights and their equality with men, the ICW was more concerned with international co-operation and comprised women who subscribed to different ‘schools’ of female activism. Despite sharing similar goals and overlapping memberships with the other above-mentioned organisations, the International Federation of

‘A Real Meeting of the Women of the East and the West’ 163 University Women (IFUW), formed in 1919, has been largely overlooked in the existing literature. The IFUW’s focus lay with education and, like the ICW, it presented itself as more ‘moderate’ than the IAW and WILPF, aiming to reach a broad spectrum of women and to win acceptance from the public. Yet, for all their differences, in the aftermath of the First World War these organisations shared a renewed determination to establish new branches where none had previously existed; this was accompanied by a growing interest in the ‘non-West’,12 as reflected in their efforts to attract members from Asia, the Middle East and South America. At the same time, all these organisations were in the process of broadening their aims, working for both political and social rights, and hence appeared more similar to one another than they had seemed in the pre-First World War period. After the war, it was peace work that provided a major driving force behind all of these organisations. A high degree of optimism and the belief that women could make a difference characterised women’s international co-operation in the 1920s, when the above associations experienced unprecedented expansion, and for the first time properly incorporated members from outside the ‘West’.13 While the argument that feminist and women’s movements declined after the First World War14 has been successfully challenged both on a national and international level by historians such as Caitriona Beaumont, Carol Miller and Leila Rupp,15 insufficient attention has been devoted to explaining what the expansion of international women’s organisations in the interwar period meant in practice. To examine this question, this chapter will primarily focus on the 1920s. First, it examines these organisations’ quest for expansion, and especially the measures introduced at this time to achieve their goals of an international membership. Secondly, it explores the increased levels of activity in relation to parts of the non-Western world, and asks whether the organisations’ commitment to internationalism resulted in the broadening of the boundaries of international co-operation to include a wider range of women coming from different countries and cultural backgrounds. In particular, it explores how integrated and active women of different nationalities were within these organisations in practice; whether Addams’s reference to ‘a real meeting of the women of the West and the East’ was confounded by internationalist practices in the 1920s. Conceptualising East and West Any research on international women’s organisations inevitably engages with issues of East/West encounters, colonialism and the construction

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of ‘others’, producing significant challenges in relation to language and terminology. Labels such as ‘the Orient’, ‘Oriental’, ‘the East’ and ‘Eastern’ are problematic, since their usage often implied notions of cultural superiority and involved extensive generalisation about widely different areas and peoples.16 At the same time, contemporaries – by and large – did not treat terms and concepts such as ‘the West’ and ‘Western’ as problematic. Members of international women’s organisations in the interwar period readily employed these contested terms, yet their underlying definitions of what constituted ‘Western’ and ‘Eastern’ were not always clear: the former tended to refer primarily to North American and European women, and the latter to women from Asia and the Middle East. Australia and New Zealand were commonly included in the category of the ‘West’, though it is not always apparent whether ‘non-Western’ regions such as Africa and South America were necessarily included in the ‘East’. Indeed, Rupp has pointed out that East/West did not necessarily refer to geographical boundaries but more to cultural differences.17 However, parts of the world such as South Africa, South America and Palestine pose problems for this type of definition. While women active in international women’s organisations from these areas tended to be of European origin, they did not represent the majority of the local populations, which was frequently perceived as ‘non-Western’. For example, while the Palestine delegation to the IAW 1926 conference did not include any Arab women, three of the four delegates from South Africa lived in London.18 It is more difficult to establish the origins of South Americans, other than that the elite tended to be of Southern European origin. Moreover, Bertha Lutz, Brazilian and a prominent member of the IAW, was apparently the daughter of a Swiss-Brazilian father and an English mother.19 However, we should not overlook the way in which the concepts of ‘the East’ and ‘the West’ were frequently used by members of international women’s organisations precisely in order to illustrate, and proudly celebrate, the global span of their movements. In some instances, these differences were even acted out through, for example, clothing at conferences, with some ‘Eastern’ delegates wearing ‘native dress’ that was rarely worn at home but associated with the ‘East’ by the ‘West’. The quest for international expansion The immediate post-war years witnessed a substantial expansion of international women’s organisations. Some even doubled their membership

‘A Real Meeting of the Women of the East and the West’ 165 in the 1920s, and most included – for the first time – members from countries outside Europe, the USA and the British Dominions. Affiliation to the ICW, IAW and WILPF was through national women’s associations and federations, which in many countries predated the international structure; while WILPF, in contrast with the other organisations, started out with an international structure and had to build national sections. Unlike the national sections of the IAW, WILPF and IFUW, which focused on suffrage and equal citizenship, peace and education, the ICW’s National Councils constituted an umbrella organisation for all types of women’s societies in their respective countries. This meant that the ICW could claim a membership of 40 million women by the mid-1920s.20 Indeed, the number of National Councils affiliated to the ICW rose from eight in 1899 to 38 in 1925.21 In the period following the 1920 Christiania conference alone, 11 new National Councils joined, with the majority from Eastern Europe and South America.22 In 1923, the IAW likewise accepted affiliations from countries outside the ‘West’ and appealed, for instance, to women’s societies from Palestine, India, Japan and Egypt.23 The IAW’s expansion continued at its subsequent conferences in Paris in 1926 and Berlin in 1929: Bermuda, Cuba, Peru, Puerto Rico, Turkey, Ceylon, Dutch East Indies, Syria and Rhodesia all had societies federated between 1926 and 1929, and by the end of the decade it possessed 52 members, of which half had joined during the 1920s.24 ‘Younger’ organisations such as WILPF and the IFUW also expanded noticeably over the course of the 1920s: by the end of the decade, WILPF had 26 affiliated countries, including a section in Japan,25 while by 1929 the IFUW had grown from its initial two organisations (British and American) to 31.26 All these organisations followed a largely similar pattern of geographical expansion: they set out with members and affiliations drawn from predominately Western Europe, North America and Australia, then moved into Southern and Eastern Europe, and finally into South America, Asia and the Middle East.27 The organisations were clearly committed to expanding their activities to areas of the world where they had been poorly represented. Indeed, increased international mobilisation in the interwar period, through the proliferation of both the League of Nations and non-governmental organisations, had induced aspirations to greater co-operation with and understanding between people from different countries.28 World tours became one way of making contact with places that were not well represented, while other forms of recruitment included personal connections and friendships, the

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distribution of journals, and attendance at conferences where potential members might be immersed in a ‘spirit of internationalism’.29 Theoretically, this internationalism continued to include affiliates from the former Central Powers. However, like the situation in other transnational movements, the war had left a legacy of bitterness. The National Council of German Women turned down its invitation to the 1920 ICW conference, as it did not think that there was any basis for the organisations’ internationalism as long as Germany was denied membership of the League.30 Furthermore, Germany’s affiliation to the IFUW was delayed, and caused much debate among its members at the Paris conference in 1922.31 Throughout the interwar period, international women’s organisations cooperated more closely with the League, joining forces across organisational lines to take advantage of the international arena provided by such cooperation. For example, on 19 September 1930 a delegation from six women’s international organisations presented a manifesto (signed by leaders of these organisations) entitled ‘Appeal of Women to the World’s Statesmen’ to Nicolae Titulesco, President of the 11th Assembly of the League of Nations, declaring women’s anxiety about the future and the urgent need to work towards peace.32 Indeed, Miller argues that the support of international women’s organisations for the League actually intensified as its popularity declined in the 1930s, since they shared common humanitarian and internationalist ideals, but perhaps more importantly, because of the League’s reinforcement of women’s work for peace. But, while such work remained important, women’s activities at the League comprised the full range of feminist causes of the time, including women’s rights and social reform. These organisations saw the League, and the international arena that it provided, as a way to counter the anti-feminist stances adopted by various political movements and regimes in the 1930s.33 Prerequisites and implications of expansion The quest for international expansion resulted in a noticeable loosening and bending of rules and constitutions in the 1920s. Flexibility was particularly apparent when encouraging and admitting new affiliations. The organisations recognised, however, that there were difficulties involved in this kind of expansion: problems emerged as to what constituted a national section, whether it was acceptable to admit groups from colonies, and whether it was possible to allow more than one group from countries divided by ethnicity and religion. Zimmermann argues that colonies and

‘A Real Meeting of the Women of the East and the West’ 167 multinational empires proved a challenge to the expansion efforts of the ICW and the IAW in the early twentieth century, as they did not conform to the Western notion of the nation-state. The latter was crucial to these organisations’ conceptualisation of the ‘international’, which was perceived as ‘a multiplication of the national’.34 Indeed, unlike WILPF, the ICW’s constitution only allowed National Councils from independent nations to join. Despite this regulation, it welcomed Palestine and India as members in 1925,35 and by 1930 steps were being taken to study the possibility of the representation of non-independent nations, which resulted in the creation of National Councils in various non-self-governing territories, of which SouthWest Africa became the first to join, in 1938.36 The ICW also continued to have ‘corresponding members’ and ‘honorary organisers’ in countries without an affiliated National Council.37 These organisations were also prepared to admit societies that did not fully comply with the requirements set by their constitutions. For example, Lady Aberdeen, president of the ICW, welcomed Poland to the ICW in 1924, even though she admitted that some slight adjustment in its constitution seemed desirable.38 While membership of the ICW, IAW and WILPF was open to all, a university degree was – not surprisingly – a prerequisite for inclusion in the IFUW, and its expansion was hampered by the requirement that a universityeducated woman could only be admitted to the organisation through a national federation in her own country.39 This meant that despite its rapid growth, few of its members came from outside Europe, the USA and the British Dominions in the 1920s. At the end of the 1920s associations from other parts of the world consisted only of those in India (1921), Mexico (1927) and South Africa (1923). Indeed, as noted by its first president, Caroline Spurgeon,40 the IFUW’s opportunities for expansion were in practice limited by the fact that university education for women had yet to be developed, or even accepted, in many non-Western countries, where the number of women who had received a higher education remained low.41 But as with other organisations, the IFUW was prepared to loosen its rules in order to gain more members. Its 1929 conference called for the establishment of a committee to study ways and means of including groups of university women who were unable to form a national federation. One such case was that of a group of university women in Egypt: this comprised foreign female graduates of other countries, but was ineligible to join the IFUW while it lacked a graduate from Egypt who could form the nucleus of such a national organisation.42 While allowed

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to participate in IFUW’s events, the Egyptian Federation did not become a legitimate member until 1931, as it then, for the first time, included an Egyptian graduate.43 However, the debates over membership continued, and following a proposal by the British Federation the IFUW amended its constitution in 1936 so that, in countries that lacked national federations, women with suitable academic qualifications could, in exceptional cases, be invited to be corresponding members. 44 The greatest degree of this kind of compromise was seen at international conferences where women from the ‘East’ were allowed to represent their native country without a national section having first been affiliated. For example, at the IFUW’s first conference in London, Michi Karwai, an American graduate who was active in the Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA), was asked to speak about Japan.45 This practice continued at the IFUW’s subsequent conferences: in Paris in 1922 Japanese university women were represented by a Mrs Fujisawa, and at Christiania in 1924 Chinese university women were represented by Grace Yang, even though both Japan and China lacked the necessary national federations.46 Time and again during the 1920s, organisations either changed or debated their objectives in order to appeal to more nations. For example, in 1926 the IAW’s work was divided into two sections, one for enfranchised and another for unenfranchised countries,47 a divide drawn roughly between ‘Western’ and ‘Eastern’ countries.48 It also established committees to study specific problems, such as equal pay and the nationality of married women,49 like the system already employed by the ICW. By the early 1920s, the latter organisation already included international standing committees on Peace and Arbitration, Laws and the Legal Position of Women, Suffrage and Rights of Citizenship, Equal Moral Standards and Traffic in Women, Education, and Trades and Professions.50 The agenda of WILPF was similarly discussed at its executive-committee meeting in Paris in 1926. Here some national sections expressed opposition to the strong wording of the organisation’s objectives which had been adopted at the Washington congress (1924); these stated that it was against all wars, including ‘defensive war’, making it difficult for members to support the use of military sanctions by the League of Nations. The Scandinavian sections put forward the need for WILPF to accept educated people who were interested in pacifism, but were not prepared to go as far as the organisation’s programme.51 Others, however, stressed the importance of keeping to WILPF’s original role of attracting women who were determined

‘A Real Meeting of the Women of the East and the West’ 169 to fight for peace, internationalism and social justice under all circumstances. Strength in numbers, they believed, was an illusion, which came at the price of weakening the organisation’s ideals.52 An element of competition characterised the relationship between these international women’s organisations and their quest for expansion. For example, the ICW was keen to increase its membership in Japan, where both the IAW and WILPF had already established a foothold by the 1920s.53 Correspondence during the early part of 1930 between the ICW and leaders of Japanese women’s societies points to the former’s desire for a National Council in Japan. To this end, Aberdeen asked the World YWCA to use its influence with the Women’s Committee on International Relations (WCIR) in Japan. A letter from the World YWCA subsequently emphasised that the ICW was willing to accept a National Council of Japan provisionally even before its constitution was entirely agreed, a procedure that admittedly had been followed before. But while Mrs Tsuji, chair of the Japan WCIR, agreed to represent the committee at the 1930 ICW conference,54 there are no records of her attendance there, and the 1930 conference report expressed disappointment that it could not list Japan as a fully constituted National Council.55 Similarly, the IFUW was disappointed about the lack of members from the USSR, Latin America, Turkey and what it described as the ‘Orient’, areas of the world in which, it was well aware, other organisations already had members, and attempts were thus made to form associations in those regions.56 While it was the ‘Orient’ that appears to have received most attention by these organisations in the interwar period, they also discussed their attitude towards the USSR. WILPF, for instance, had plans for trips to the Soviet Union in order to make its work known there. Josephine Schain (an American member of the IAW, IFUW and the Pan-Pacific Women’s Association) travelled to the country privately in 1935 to investigate the experiments in mass education and to view the effects of the government’s commitment to the equal status of men and women.57 However, international women’s organisations and their members had to tread carefully when it came to the USSR, because of fears of communist subversion. Indeed, in the US, ‘patriotic’ organisations such as the American Legion, the Reserve Officers’ Association and the Daughters of the American Revolution accused the WILPF of belonging to the international socialist-communist movement, by claiming that it deceived a large number of ‘the very best’ American women by using the ‘no more war’ slogan.58 While WILPF displayed

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radical tendencies and included members with socialist sympathies, all these international women’s organisations had their roots in early ‘firstwave’ feminism, which dated back to the late nineteenth century. To a large extent, this feminism was based on assumptions of gender difference, distinct female characteristics shared by all women world-wide, and thus a belief in unity between all women regardless of class or other variables such as race and religion.59 Importantly, these organisations were formed around gender difference; their memberships and most of their activities were restricted to women only, unlike socialist women, whose international activities took place in mixed-sex organisations and forums.60 International women’s organisations continued to grow in the 1930s, but expansion slowed down and they even lost national sections. Financial difficulties resulted in fewer conferences, conference reports shrank in size and journals encountered falling subscriptions. But while European associations were particularly badly affected by the political and economic instabilities,61 non-Western members were represented in increasing numbers and became more integrated within the structures of the organisations, which for the first time held conferences outside Europe and North America.62 Women of the East and the West at international congresses How did the quest for expansion affect the patterns of co-operation between the Eastern and Western women involved in international activity?63 Contemporary records indicate that much emphasis was placed on the first-hand involvement of women from all over the world at international congresses. For instance, one of the evening public meetings at the IAW conference in Geneva in 1920 was specifically dedicated to the ‘Women of the East – Women from India and Japan’. Since this was the first time that ‘Eastern’ women had attended an IAW conference, their participation generated a great deal of positive attention.64 The 1923 IAW conference in Rome reflected even greater participation by women representing the growing number of non-Western societies that had become affiliated, and one of its meetings was duly dedicated to ‘women of all continents’. Its international ‘success’ was described by Carrie Chapman Catt (president until 1923) in her address to the conference: Startling though it may seem, our suffrage movement has in truth girdled the earth and spread from arctic North to Antarctic South. It now counts among its auxiliaries those whose members represent the five great races

‘A Real Meeting of the Women of the East and the West’ 171 of the world, Caucasian, Mongolian, Malay, Polynesian and Indian. Its membership embraces the five great religions: Christian, Hebrew, Buddhist, Confucian and Mohammedan. No such movement among men has yet come into the world. It is something new: a phenomenon, this arising, uniting and marching forward together of a sex.65

From the ‘official literature’ produced by these organisations, it would seem that officers and delegates alike took particular pride in the presence of the Egyptian delegation: We are especially proud to welcome to this Congress delegates from that wonderland of Egypt. In ancient days there were Egyptian queens and woman military leaders of great renown; why not heroines today, bearing aloft the standard of civil and political equality for modern Egyptian women? Bravo, Women of Egypt.66

The first meeting at the subsequent IAW conference in Paris in 1926 was described by the organisation itself as a ‘dramatic meeting of East and West’ and by now the board of officers included Dr Paulina Luisi from Uruguay and Huda Shaarawi from Egypt.67 Margery Corbett Ashby, president of the IAW from 1923, talked of vigorous feminist activity in the Near East and praised Shaarawi for giving new life to the Egyptian association and for bringing about reforms in Egypt.68 The many committees also included women from most of the member countries at the IAW 1929 Berlin conference.69 As with the IAW, the majority of WILPF’s speakers at its conferences were European and North American, yet their meetings witnessed some increase in the level of participation of non-Western women during the 1920s. For example, at the Dublin congress in 1926 Tano Jodai, president of the Japanese section, contributed to the meetings on ‘Women and World Peace’ and ‘Economic Imperialism’.70 And at the congress in Prague in 1929, Indian and Chinese members spoke during the session on the political and racial aspects of the settlement of internal disputes.71 Like the IAW, the WILPF was keen to stress international expansion and co-operation at its conferences.72 Despite the IFUW’s undeniable difficulties in expanding outside the West, its rhetoric similarly demonstrated its commitment to international expansion and a fairer distribution of ‘power’ among its members. Virginia

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Gildersleeve, one of its founders and twice its president, claimed that it had no desire to force ideas on any nation but believed that countries would learn from each other.73 She went so far as to apologise on behalf of the British Federation and the American Association for their predominance at the first conference, and declared that they wished women from non-Englishspeaking countries to take an active part in all its activities.74 But, despite all the measures taken to restrict the dominance of Western women, by the end of the 1920s the IFUW still had no non-Western women either on its board or on any of its committees.75 The 1930s did not see much progress, as its board remained ‘Western’. There were, however, some advances with regard to its committees, which now included representatives from Palestine and South Africa.76 Indeed, the relatively small representation of non-Western women at these organisations’ conferences no doubt contributed to the high level of attention being given to non-Western delegates , suggesting that participants from the non-West had become effective ‘symbols’ of these organisations’ internationalism. This is illustrated by the way in which the IFUW publicised the involvement of its Chinese visitor, Grace Yang, at the 1924 conference.77 Articles expressed amazement at Yang’s six-week-long journey to the conference. Her appearance also drew much comment, in particular her small stature. Yang was portrayed as representative of an ‘exotic’ and distant country, about which most of those present knew very little. Indeed, as conference delegate Hinder remarked: ‘She was ... regarded as a unique representative, and less as one seriously prepared to make a contribution to the gathering.’78 However, her presence caught the imagination of delegates and wider society alike, and played its part in strengthening belief in the importance of international co-operation among women.79 While these international conference reports and newspapers articles do not reveal how Yang herself felt about all this attention, other non-Western activists, such as the Japanese Shidzue Ishimoto, have written about their experiences at international conferences: Always for public lectures and for formal dinners I wore my native costume. It seemed to create the best atmosphere for friendship. Since I wore western costume at other times I often felt as exotic in my native dress as I doubtless looked to others. However, I felt utterly at home in it during a convention at Chicago, which I attended. This had been called by the National Council of Women, and women from many foreign lands

‘A Real Meeting of the Women of the East and the West’ 173 were present to give it an international flavour. Some of these guests were, like myself, in native apparel. Thus I had the pleasure of feeling rather more dignified than exotic as I sat beside Selma Ekrem of Turkey, for example, who wore her fascinating native dress.80

Her comments reinforce the extent to which notions of ‘difference’ actually contributed to, and even underpinned, this co-operation. Ishimoto’s writings suggest that she accepted that her presence added an ‘international flavour’ and that she was ready to take on, or rather perform, the part of the ‘Eastern’ woman (as she was then seen by the majority of Western women), and was happy to focus a great deal of attention on clothing and general appearance. She distinguished herself from the other delegates, placing herself in the ‘non-Western’ camp together with Selma Ekrem from Turkey, and was clearly conscious that their presence was designed in part to endow the gathering with greater international credibility. Indeed, as her words indicate, Ishimoto’s appreciation of Ekrem was linked to the fact that she deflected some attention away from Ishimoto herself. Indeed, the frequent comments about non-Western women at international conferences may be taken to indicate the limitations of the organisations’ transnational features. It was the ‘acting out’ of national differences at conferences that seems to have served as the most powerful symbol of the international character and unity of these organisations. Thus, international co-operation and sisterhood were manifested in the clothes worn by the delegates themselves, as well as in the way that venues were decorated. Conference halls were often garlanded with the flags of all the nations represented, entertaining performances were carried out by various national groups, and delegates were often encouraged to wear their ‘native’ costumes.81 As pointed out by Rupp, emphasising difference became a vivid way of highlighting the international character of the organisation.82 National costume could also attract the attention of the general public,83 but while the wearing of native costume was supposed to highlight just how international these organisations had become and how much women world-wide had in common, it could be argued that it had precisely the opposite effect, reinforcing notions of difference. For example, the wearing of national academic dress at the opening meeting of the 1924 IFUW conferences led Swedish delegate Naima Sahlbom to remark that ‘the simple white student hat [in Sweden] … is a modest symbol among the Anglo-Saxon, decorative red robes and “square” hats’.84 Thus, while delegates in academic dress served to demonstrate the international aspirations of

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the Federation, the practice also focused attention on differences between countries and their academic traditions. Other measures apart from clothing were also introduced to emphasise the international scope of these organisations. For example, as a sign of ‘international friendship’, speeches by WILPF delegates to a reception held in New York prior to the 1924 Washington Congress were made in each speaker’s native tongue.85 Likewise all these organisations developed membership symbols, which allowed members from around the world to express their allegiances as well as their commitment to internationalism.86 Regardless of the staging and celebration of diversity, non-Western women and those outside the core membership had to overcome barriers presented by factors such as language and distance. Moreover, the fact that these organisations had emerged from the historical context of nineteenthand early twentieth-century North America and Europe,87 meant that they tended to take Western cultural values for granted88 and members from the West continued to dominate the associations throughout the interwar period. There remained real distinctions between women involved in international organisations, primarily between the old and new members. Whereas many of the older members in, for example, North America and Europe had by now gained suffrage, experiencing significant progress in terms of women’s political emancipation, new members were often only just beginning to define the aims of their national organisations. Moreover, Western women’s views were informed by prevalent colonial attitudes, which tended to regard non-Western societies as being in need of Western assistance. A fascination with and attention to differences in appearances and clothing between East and West, in particular, represented a crucial part of discourses in which Western dress was depicted as ‘modern’ and Eastern as ‘backward’.89 While encouraging members to wear national costume at conferences, Western members were quick to draw conclusions about women’s status based on the very same clothing. For example, much emphasis was placed on the veil and its negative impact on women. This was reflected in the attention paid to Shaarawi’s decision to unveil once she returned to Egypt after attending the IAW 1923 conference in Rome,90 thus treating unveiling as a consciousness-raising exercise brought about by attending an international women’s conference.91 A remark by Eva Upmark (president of the Swedish National Council) that a Chinese visitor, Lo Chong, ‘walked on real feet’92 at the ICW 1920 conference, demonstrates a similar fascination with Eastern women’s appearances, and implies that she viewed Chong as more ‘modern’

‘A Real Meeting of the Women of the East and the West’ 175 than women with bound feet.93 Yet, the presence of the former at these conferences undoubtedly made an impact on their Western counterparts, challenging prevailing stereotypes, and while there were certainly imperialist internationalists, it is important to point out that anti-colonial critique could also be linked to women’s organisations. This was particularly the case with WILPF, which often discussed the negative effects of imperialism in its publication Pax International.94 WILPF also passed resolutions along anti-imperialist lines, for example, on ‘Occupied Territories’ in 1928: ‘This Executive Committee is of the opinion that all territories occupied by foreign military forces, such as Egypt, the Rhineland, Nicaragua and Hayti [sic] should be evacuated with the least possible delay.’95 Despite WILPF’s criticism, international women’s organisations, on the whole, remained silent on colonial issues, a decision that was clearly influenced by their non-political stance but also by the fact that the topic seemed to have little relevance for Western women, who, as we have seen, continued to dominate these organisations. However, it was becoming an important issue for their growing number of non-Western members, whose activism became increasingly shaped by their dual battle against gender inequalities and colonialism, a concern that was reflected in the expansion of regional organisations and conferences in 1930s, for example the All-Asian Women’s Conference in Lahore in 1931.96 Thus, while much was made of non-Western women’s membership of international women’s organisations and in particular their presence at international conferences, these associations originated from the West and their ideologies were steeped in Western traditions. Despite the process of expansion, the leadership remained firmly in Western hands. Conclusion The 1920s were characterised by the desire of international women’s organisations to expand their membership beyond Europe, the USA and other ‘Western’ areas, notably the British Dominions. They all wished to move away from being dominated by ‘Western’ and in particular Englishspeaking countries, and accordingly introduced a range of measures aimed at achieving this. During this period they experienced unprecedented expansion, and conferences took on a more noticeably international character. Indeed, for the first time they provided space for face-to-face meetings between women from the West and East, as women from the latter were increasingly given the chance to represent themselves and their

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own countries, which helped to generate a positive outlook and belief in the benefits of world-wide co-operation among women. Yet although their expansion in the 1920s was relatively impressive, they still encountered problems in recruiting outside the West, and above all in working out how to involve all their members as fully as possible. Despite the great deal of talk that was generated by these organisations, we can question the extent to which their international ambitions actually translated into meaningful achievement. International women’s organisations tended to focus on specific topics, seeking to provide a platform for women from anywhere in the world to join forces with each other in the struggle for female emancipation. Yet the organisations’ discourse remained firmly rooted in Western cultural traditions, and they continued to be dominated by their earliest – that is, European and North American – members throughout the 1920s. Although increased international co-operation between women from the East and West had clearly managed to bring women of different nationalities closer together, it was not co-operation between people who necessarily acknowledged each other as equals. Indeed, relations between different members not only continued to be influenced by their national origins, and by existing power dynamics between countries and regions, but also by other factors such as the distinction between enfranchised and unenfranchised affiliates. Regional women’s associations, on the other hand, were organised around a geographical focus, and their agendas were influenced by the particular countries and cultures that they represented. Both the location of regional women’s conferences (primarily outside Europe and North America) and the inclusion of a larger number of regional issues certainly contributed to more sizeable delegations of non-Western women attending these, as compared to international conferences. The leadership of international women’s organisations certainly acknowledged at times that they were not as ‘international’ as they hoped to be, and highlighted the success of the newly emerging regional women’s organisations in attracting and above all integrating women from the non-West. Indeed, the transnational cooperation of these organisations, their perceived unity and their definition of internationalism were increasingly challenged by the changing political and economic circumstances of the 1930s, in particular the looming war and the rise of nationalist movements in the non-West.

‘A Real Meeting of the Women of the East and the West’ 177 Notes 1.

2.

3.

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

This was not a homogenous movement, but included a wide range of organisations with different agendas. However, the ‘international women’s movement’ is often used as a kind of shorthand to refer collectively to all these associations. See Janet Zolinger Giele, Two Paths to Women’s Equality: Temperance, Suffrage, and the Origins of Modern Feminism (New York, 1995); Patricia Ward D’Itri, Cross Currents in the International Women’s Movement, 1848–1948 (Bowling Green, OH, 1999); Ian Tyrrell, Woman’s World, Woman’s Empire: The Woman’s Christian Temperance Union in International Perspective, 1880–1930 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1991). The Pan-Pacific Women’s Conference was held under the auspices of the PanPacific Union, which was a well-established mixed-sex regional organisation fostering collaboration and understanding among the peoples of the Pacific. The Pan-Pacific Women’s Conference was the forerunner of the Pan-Pacific Women’s Association (PPWA), which was formed at its second conference in 1930. See Georgina Sweet, ‘History of the PPWA’, in Women of the Pacific: A Record of the Proceedings of the Fourth Triennial Conference [of the PPWA], Vancouver, Canada, July, 1937 (Vancouver, 1937). Remark made by Jane Addams about the imminent session of the Pan-Pacific Women’s Conference in ‘The Honolulu Congress’, Pax International, vol. 3, no. 9 (1928). Australia 16, Canada one, China five (of which three were Western women), one each from the Dutch East Indies, Fiji and India (all three Western), 91 from Hawaii, 18 from Japan, 17 from New Zealand, two from the Philippine Islands, three from Samoa and 27 from the USA. See Women of the Pacific: A Record of the Proceedings of the First Pan-Pacific Women’s Conference, Honolulu, 9–19 August, 1928, under the Auspices of the Pan-Pacific Union (Honolulu, 1928). Eleanor M. Hinder, ‘Pacific women: personnel of the Pan-Pacific Women’s Conference, Honolulu, August 9–19, 1928’, Pacific Affairs, vol. 1, no. 3 (1928). Others included the British Commonwealth League, the All-India Women’s Conference and the Inter-American Commission of Women, as well as regional conferences such as the Oriental Congress of Women and the AllAsian Women’s Conference, held in Damascus in 1930 and Lahore in 1931 respectively. See Leila J. Rupp, Worlds of Women: The Making of an International Women’s Movement (Princeton, 1997) for information about the growth of the ICW, the IAW and the WILPF; see Edith C. Batho, A Lamp of Friendship 1918–1968: A Short History of the International Federation of University Women (Eastbourne, 1968) for a history of the IFUW.

178 9.

10. 11. 12.

13.

14.

15.

16.

17. 18.

Internationalism Reconfigured See Nitza Berkovitch, ‘The emergence and transformation of the international women’s movement’, in John Boli and George M. Thomas (eds.), Constructing World Culture: International Nongovernmental Organizations since 1875 (Stanford, CA, 1999), pp. 100–126. Rupp, Worlds of Women, p. 13. Catherine Foster, Women for All Seasons: The Story of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom (Athens, GA, 1989), pp. 7–11. For lack of a better term, ‘non-West’ is used in this chapter to refer to areas outside Europe, North America and white-settler countries such as Australia and New Zealand. The exceptions were Argentina, which had a National Council federated to the ICW in 1901, and China, since a society there had become affiliated to the International Woman Suffrage Alliance in 1913, following the world tour of Carrie Chapman Catt and Aletta Jacob. However, Chinese women did not attend either the congress in Budapest in 1913 or that in Geneva in 1920, arriving too late due to travel difficulties. See International Woman Suffrage Alliance, Report of Eighth Congress, Geneva, Switzerland, 6–12 June, 1920 (Manchester, 1920); ICW, Combined Third and Fourth Annual Report of the Seventh Quinquennial Period, 1922 to 1924, Compiled by Fru Anna Backer, Hon. Corresponding Secretary. On the decline of feminism in the interwar period, see for example Martin Pugh, ‘Domesticity and the decline of feminism, 1930–1950’, in H.L. Smith (ed.), British Feminism in the Twentieth Century (Aldershot, 1990), pp. 144–64; Susan Kingsley Kent, ‘The politics of sexual difference: World War I and the demise of British feminism’, Journal of British Studies, vol. 27, no. 3 (1988), pp. 232–53; Rebecca L. Sherrick, ‘Toward universal sisterhood’, Women’s Studies International Forum, vol. 5, no. 6 (1982), pp. 655–61; Mineke Bosch and Annemarie Kloosterman, Politics and Friendship: Letters from the International Woman Suffrage Alliance, 1902–1942 (Columbus, OH,1990), pp. 175–83. Caitriona Beaumont, ‘Citizens and feminists: the boundary negotiated between citizenship and feminism by mainstream women’s organisations in England, 1928–39’, Women’s History Review, vol. 9, no. 2 (2000), pp. 411–29; Carol Miller, ‘“Geneva – the Key to Equality”: inter-war feminists and the League of Nations’, Women’s History Review, vol. 3, no. 2 (1994), pp. 219–45; Rupp, Worlds of Women. See for example Chandra T. Mohanty, ‘Under Western eyes: feminist scholarship and colonial discourses’, in Mohanty, A. Russo and L. Torres (eds.), Third World Women and the Politics of Feminism (Bloomington, IN, 1991). See Rupp, Worlds of Women. The Palestinian delegation comprised Dr Mina Berligue, Mme Debora Grasowski, Dr Rina Junovitch and Dr Rosa Welt Strauss. IAW, Report of the Tenth Congress, La Sorbonne, Paris, France, 30 May to 6 June, 1926 (London, 1926).

‘A Real Meeting of the Women of the East and the West’ 179 19.

20. 21. 22. 23.

24.

25.

26.

27.

28. 29.

30. 31. 32.

See June E. Hahner, ‘Feminism, women’s rights, and the suffrage movement in Brazil, 1850–1932’, Latin American Research Review, vol. 15, no. 1 (1980), p. 99. ICW, Bulletin, vol. IV, no. 4 (1926). ICW, Report of the Quinquennial Meeting, Washington, 1925, Edited by the Marchioness of Aberdeen and Temair, President of the ICW (London, 1926). ICW, 1922–24 Combined Annual Report. Others countries that had societies affiliated included Brazil, Jamaica, New Zealand, Newfoundland, Lithuania and Ukraine; see IWSA, Report of the Ninth Congress, Rome, Italy, 12–19 May, 1923 (Dresden, 1923). IAW, 1926 Conference Report; IAW, Report of the Eleventh Congress, Berlin, 17–22 June, 1929 (London, 1929); Rupp, Worlds of Women, p. 18. More than one society per country was allowed to affiliate. WILPF, Resolutions of the Prague Congress of the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, 24–28 August 1929, with the Constitution, Rules of Order, Commissions and Addresses of National Sections. International Headquarters: Maison Internationale, 12, Rue de Vieux-Collége, Geneva, Switzerland. Representatives of newly joined federations in Yugoslavia, Ireland, Latvia and Lithuania were welcomed at the IFUW conference in 1929; IFUW, Bulletin No. 11, Report of the Fifth Conference, Geneva, 7 –14 August 1929 (London, 1929). ICW, 1922–24 Combined Annual Report; ICW, 1925 Conference Report; IAW, 1926 Congress Report; WILPF, Report of the Third International Congress of Women, Vienna, 10–17 July, 1921 (Geneva, 1921); WILPF, Report of the International Conference of Women at The Hague, 7–9 December, 1922, Organised by WILPF (London and Geneva, 1922); WILPF, Report of the Fourth Congress, Washington, 1–7 May, 1924 (Washington, 1924); WILPF, Report of the Fifth Congress, Dublin, 8–15 July, 1926 (Washington and Geneva, 1926); WILPF, Resolutions of the Dublin Congress 1926 (Geneva, 1926); WILPF, Report of the Sixth Congress, Prague 24–28 August, 1929 (Geneva, 1929). See for example Boli and Thomas, Constructing World Culture; Malcolm Waters, Globalization (London and New York, 2001). Rupp, Worlds of Women, pp. 180–1. Rupp refers to recruitment by the ICW and the IAW in the pre-First World War period. These recruitment techniques were expanded during the interwar period and were also employed by WILPF and the IFUW. ICWW, Women in a Changing World: The Dynamic Story of the International Council of Women since 1888 (London, 1966), p. 46. IFUW, Bulletin No. 4, Report of the Second Conference, Paris, July, 1922 (London, 1922). The deputation was also received by Mr Henderson, first delegate of the British Empire, and Dr Curtius, head of the German delegation, and was also

180

33.

34.

35.

36. 37.

38. 39. 40. 41.

Internationalism Reconfigured printed in WILPF’s journal in October 1930. ‘Appeal of women to the world’s statesmen’, Pax International, vol. 5, no. 11 (1930). The League was actually trying to bolster support by intensifying collaboration with women over peace issues. See Carol Miller, ‘Lobbying the League: women’s international organisations and the League of Nations’ (unpublished DPhil thesis, Oxford University, 1992); Miller, ‘“Geneva – the Key to Equality”’. For example, the Habsburg Monarchy, the Swedish-Norwegian question and Finnish-Russian relationships, as well as the Australian Commonwealth, all proved problematic for the Council’s recruitment, and its response prior to the First World War had remained ambiguous: while being prepared to federate National Councils from the Commonwealth of Australia, Norway, Hungary and Finland, it denied independent representation for the Bohemian women’s movement and for Polish women from the former kingdom of Poland, by then ruled by Russia. Susan Zimmermann, ‘The challenge of multinational empire for the international women’s movement: the Habsburg monarchy and the development of feminist inter/national politics’, Journal of Women’s History, vol. 17, no. 2 (2005), pp. 87–117. WILPF, 1924 Congress Report; see also Margot Badran, Feminists, Islam and Nation: Gender and the Making of Modern Egypt (Princeton, 1995) for a discussion on the policies of the IWSA. ICW, Report on the Quinquennial Meeting, Vienna, 1930, Edited by The Marchioness of Aberdeen and Temair, President of the ICW (Tarland, 1930). In 1930 honorary organisers could be found in Russia, China, Japan, Southern Rhodesia and Albania, of which the last three were also corresponding members, joined by Egypt and Mexico in 1936. Iceland and Spain were also corresponding members of ICW in 1935. ICW, Booklet, General Officers and NCW, E I, Svenska Kvinnors Nationalförbund (SKN), Kvinnohistoriska samlingarna (KS), Göteborgs Universitet, Göteborg; ICW, 1930 Conference Report. The changes required were not specified. See ‘President’s Report’, ICW, 1922– 24 Combined Annual Report. Journal of the American Association of University Women, vol. XVI, no. 2 (1923). The Yorkshire Path, 5 February 1923, Caroline Spurgeon Papers (CS Papers), PP7/6/1/5, RHUL Archives, Royal Holloway, University of London. The development of higher education for women was clearly uneven. For example, according to the 1923 edition of The Journal of the American Association of University Women, each year more women graduated from US universities than the total of alumnae in all the rest of the 17 countries of the Federation put together: see Journal of the American Association of University Women, vol. XVI, no. 2 (1923). Moreover, in the USA women constituted a high proportion of American college students (47 per cent in 1920); see Susan

‘A Real Meeting of the Women of the East and the West’ 181

42. 43. 44.

45. 46. 47.

48. 49.

50. 51.

52. 53. 54.

55.

56.

Levine, Degrees of Equality: The American Association of University Women and the Challenge of Twentieth-Century Feminism (Philadelphia, PA, 1995), p. 14. IFUW, 1929 Conference Report. IFUW, Bulletin No. 14, Report of the Sixth Conference, Edinburgh, 27 July to 4 August 1932 (London, 1932). IFUW, Bulletin No. 18, Report of the Seventh Conference, Cracow, 22 August to 1 September, 1936 (London, 1936). There were also problems about how to incorporate minorities, whether based on language, cultural or national origin, within the IFUW. Friendly arrangements were reached in the 1920s, for example, with the Polish Association, which expressed a willingness to allow Ukrainians in Poland to form a special section of the national federation. However, it became more difficult to make such arrangements during the troubled 1930s; see Batho, A Lamp of Friendship, p. 17. IFUW, Bulletin No. 1, Report of the First Conference, London, July, 1920 (London, 1920). IFUW, 1922 Conference Report; IFUW, Bulletin No. 6, Report of the Third Conference, Christiania, July, 1924 (London, 1924). Adele Schreiber and Margaret Mathieson, Journey Towards Freedom, Written for the Golden Jubilee of the International Alliance of Women (Copenhagen, 1955), pp. 29, 37. See Bosch and Kloosterman, Politics and Friendship, p.175. The committees were on equal pay, the nationality of married women, family allowances and illegitimate children, and equal moral standards; see Schreiber and Mathieson, Journey Towards Freedom, p. 29. ICW, 1922–24 Combined Annual Report. Including the American, British, Poles, Danes, Norwegians and Swedes; ‘Utländska brev 1920-talet’, E I: 2, Internationella Kvinnoförbundet för Fred och Frihet, KS. Gabrielle Duchêne, ‘The League must not go backward’; Marguerite Gobat, ‘The danger of crystalization’, Pax International, vol. 1, no. 7 (1926). Both the IAW and WILPF had Japanese sections affiliated in the 1920s; see IAW and WILPF conference reports. Fusae Ichikawa to Lady Aberdeen, 30 April 1930; WYWCA to Miss Yamamoto, 1 March 1930. Collection on Japanese Women’s Suffrage Movement I 1918– 1946, 0326, 0327. Fusae Ichikawa Memorial Association Library, Tokyo. ICW, 1930 Conference Report. Japan was finally affiliated in 1936. See ICW, President’s Memorandum Regarding the Council Meeting, Dubrovnik, 28 September to 9 October, 1936 (Brussels, 1936). A Brazilian federation was affiliated in 1931, and a Mexican established in 1928; IFUW, 1924 Conference Report; IFUW, Bulletin No. 8, Report of the Fourth Conference, Amsterdam, 28 July to 2 August 1926 (London, 1926); IFUW, 1929 Conference Report; IFUW, 1932 Conference Report; IFUW, 1936 Conference Report.

182 57.

58.

59.

60.

61.

62.

63.

Internationalism Reconfigured WILPF, Report of the Seventh Congress, Grenoble, 15–19 May, 1932 (Geneva, 1932); Josephine Schain to a travel agent and to several representatives of Russia in the US (Alfred Zaidner, Intourist Inc, New York, Mourasheff, Hotel National Moscow, Leonid Tolokovski, Consul General), 3 December 1934, Josephine Schain Papers, Sophia Smith Collection (SSC), Smith College, Northampton, MA. Fred R. Marvin (ed.), ‘The searchlight. Data on subversive movements against the American government, political and labor radicals, communists and the “pinks”’, New York Commercial, 17 May 1924; ‘Women’s peace league rapped. Denounced as backed by German socialists in National Civic Federation resolutions. Pacifist aims attacked.’, American New York City, 25 April 1924, and ‘The Searchlight. Data on Subversive Movements’, 24 May 1924’, Schwimmer-Lloyd Collection, SSC. This kind of early ‘liberal’ feminism, with its origins in the West, eventually came to be challenged by women from the non-Western world, by women of colour and by some (primarily working-class) women in the West itself, who maintained instead that women possessed multiple and conflicting identities and loyalties and that many of them were faced with inequalities that were not based on sex but on other factors such as race, class and religion. See, for example, Mohanty, ‘Under Western eyes’; Mrinalini Sinha, Donna J. Guy and Angela Woollacott, ‘Introduction: why feminisms and internationalism?’, in idem (eds.), Feminisms and Internationalism, pp. 1-16; see also ‘Part IV: Centres of difference: decolonising subjects, rethinking boundaries’, in Sue Morgan (ed.), The Feminist History Reader (London and New York, 2006), pp. 271-384. Karen Hunt, ‘“The Immense Meaning of it All”: the challenges of internationalism for British socialist women before the First World War’, Socialist History, no. 17, (2000), pp. 22–42. See also June Hannam and Karen Hunt, Socialist Women: Britain, 1880s to 1920s (London and New York, 2002). For example, national sections of major international women’s organisations closed down in Italy, Germany and Austria, and associations in Spain, Czechoslovakia and Japan were practically inoperative in the 1930s. See WILPF, 1932 Congress Report; Schreiber and Mathieson, Journey Towards Freedom, p. 51; ICWW, Women in a Changing World, pp. 65–70. The IAW held its 1935 congress in Istanbul, while the ICW organised a joint conference with its Indian National Council in Calcutta in 1936. See IAWSEC, Report of the Twelfth Congress, Istanbul, 18–24 April, 1935 (London, 1935); and Elizabeth Zellweger, ‘International Women’s Conference in Calcutta’, ICW Bulletin, No. 7 (1936). See Charlotte Weber, ‘Unveiling Scheharazade: feminist orientalism in the International Alliance of Women, 1911–1950’, Feminist Studies, vol. 27, no. 1 (2001), pp. 125–57. See idem, ‘Making Common Cause: Western and

‘A Real Meeting of the Women of the East and the West’ 183

64. 65. 66. 67. 68. 69.

70. 71. 72. 73.

74. 75. 76.

77. 78. 79. 80.

Middle Eastern Feminists in the International Women’s Movement, 1911– 1948’ (unpublished PhD thesis, Ohio State University, 2003), for a discussion of the relationship between Western and Middle Eastern feminists within the IAW and WILPF during the first part of the twentieth century. IWSA, 1920 Conference Report. Address of the President, Carrie Chapman Catt, IWSA, 1923 Congress Report. Ibid. IAW, 1926 Congress Report. Ibid; Schreiber and Mathieson, Journey Towards Freedom, p. 36. Turkey and Uruguay had representatives on all committees, while Egypt, Palestine and Brazil were represented on a few. Shaarawi was also a special board member on the committee for peace and the League of Nations; IAW, 1929 Congress Report. WILPF, 1926 Congress Report. ‘Prague Congress’, Pax International, vol. 4, no. 10 (1929). See for example the report of Emily Greene Balch, WILPF secretary-treasurer, on the 1921 congress (WILPF, 1921 Congress Report). The Yorkshire Path, 5 February 1923, PP7/6/1/5, RHUL Archives; Virginia Gildersleeve, Many a Good Crusade: Memoirs of Virginia Crocheron Gildersleeve (New York, 1954), pp. 137–8; IFUW, 1920 Conference Report. Ibid. IFUW, 1929 Conference Report. Mrs Mohl from the Palestine Federation was a member of the Committee on the Economic Status of University Women from 1936 to 1939. (Notes on The National Associations of University Women that Have Been Members of the International Federation of University Women, Prepared by Headquarter office (London, 1946); IFUW, 1936 Conference Report; IFUW, Bulletin No. 21, Report of the Eighth Conference, Stockholm, 6–15 August, 1939 (London). There was a South African woman on the Travel Committee (IFUW, 1939 Conference Report). Press cuttings, CS Papers, PP/7/6/4, RHUL Archives. Hinder, ‘Pacific women’. Press cuttings, CS Papers, PP/7/6/4, RHUL Archives. Shidzue Ishimoto, Facing Two Ways: The Story of My Life (London, 1935), pp. 381–2. Another ‘Eastern’ woman at the International Congress of Women in Chicago was the Chinese Wu Yi-Fang, who claimed she and the other foreigners were referred to as ‘the distinguished guests from foreign lands’. Wu recalls that she spoke at one evening session and once at the round table on ‘Education’. She was also asked to give a 15-minute talk, which she had failed to get written out beforehand as so many participants wanted to speak to her; Wu Yi-Fang to ‘Ginling Sisters’, Banff, Canada, 22 Aug. 1933. Ginling College Collection, Smith College Archives (GC Collection SCA), Northampton, MA. Wu had been invited to represent Chinese women (Minnie Vantrin,

184

81.

82. 83. 84. 85.

86. 87. 88.

89.

90. 91.

92.

93.

94.

Internationalism Reconfigured Ginling College, Nanking, China, to ‘Dear Friends’, 1 December 1933, GC Collection SCA). As can be demonstrated by a photograph of delegates in national costumes at a garden party at the 1926 WILPF Congress in Dublin; see WILPF, 1926 Congress Report. The flags of affiliated countries were placed under ‘the [IAW] banner as a symbol of worldwide cooperation’ at the 1929 Congress. (IAW, 1929 Congress Report). Rupp, Worlds of Women, pp. 109–10. ICW Bulletin, vol. V, no. 8 (1927). Article by Naima Sahlbom, Nya Dagligt Allehande. CS Papers, PP/7/6/4, RHUL Archives. ‘Women of 30 lands appear here tonight. Delegates to international peace meeting in Washington will be reception guests. To speak in native tongues’. New York Evening Post, 23 April 1924, Schwimmer-Lloyd Collection, SSC. Rupp, Worlds of Women, pp. 160–2. See Antoinette Burton, ‘Some trajectories of “feminism” and “imperialism”’, in Sinha et al (eds.), Feminisms and Internationalism, pp. 214–24. Blom highlights how concepts of equality and individuality, central to both Western philosophy and feminism, differed much from the value system respected by Indian women. See Ida Blom, ‘Gender and nation in international comparison’, in Blom, Karen Hagemann and Catherine Hall (eds.), Gendered Nations, Nationalisms and Gender Order in the Long Nineteenth Century (Oxford, 2000), p. 10. See for example, Edward Said, Orientalism (London, 2003); Reina Lewis, Gendering Orientalism: Race, Femininity and Representation (London and New York, 1996). See for example ‘Visit to Egypt 1923’. Margery Corbett Ashby Papers, the Women’s Library, London. Interestingly, Shaarawi’s own recollections of the Rome conference, published in IWSN in August 1923, do not mention the veil incident at all. See Huda Charoui, ‘Egypt. First deputation from women to a minister’. International Woman Suffrage News, August 1923 This remark was made in a private notebook, which included descriptions of and comments on many of the delegates. These notes probably constituted a way of remembering the many delegates from different countries once the conference was over. ‘Anteckningar om det Internationella Kvinnomötet, International Council of Women’s 5-års möte: Kristiania 8–18 Sept. 1920, Eva Upmark’. F I:1. SKN, KS. For more information about the practice of and attitudes towards footbinding, see Dorothy Ko, Cinderella’s Sisters: A Revisionist History of Footbinding (Berkeley, CA, 2005) See for example Mary Sheepshank, ‘Colonial and economic imperialism’, Pax International, vol. 1, no. 11 (1926).

‘A Real Meeting of the Women of the East and the West’ 185 95. 96.

‘Resolutions passed by Executive Committee at Lyon’, Pax International, vol. 4, no. 1 (1928). All-Asian Women’s Conference, Lahore, 19–25 January 1931 (Bombay, 1931), Country Collection, SSC.

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The Lifeblood of the League?

187

THE LIFEBLOOD OF THE LEAGUE? Voluntary Associations and League of Nations Activism in Britain

Helen McCarthy

Surveying the new League of Nations societies springing up in the wake of the First World War, a British observer offered the following prediction in late 1919. Such associations, he ruminated, would serve both as the interpreter of the League outwards to the peoples, and of the peoples inwards to the League. They must explain the purposes of the League on the one hand, and the desires of the people on the other. They will form the great channel of communication both ways, the connecting link between an organized international society and the various bodies of opinion which go to make up that society.1

The belief that ‘public opinion’ held the key to the League’s fortunes, and that voluntary League societies provided a vehicle through which that opinion could be educated, mobilised and expressed, was widely held between the wars. Although founded as an inter-governmental body, for many progressives – in Europe and beyond – the League represented a new, democratised form of diplomacy which relied for its legitimacy on openness, publicity and the participation of non-state actors. Historians, once absorbed with the task of explaining the failures of collective security, are now beginning to look anew at the League as an institutional space

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which helped to nourish and reconfigure various forms of transnational activism between the wars.2 A growing body of scholarship reveals how feminists, pacifists, anti-colonial campaigners and humanitarian reformers worked across national borders and through the international machinery of the League to advance their respective causes. As a conceptual category, the ‘transnational’ appears to capture the dynamics of these activist networks more effectively than the more conventional analytical strictures of the nation-state. Yet at the same time, scholars interested in League-centred activism have remained ever-attuned to the potential limitations as well as possibilities of cooperation across borders; activist networks, they argue, frequently displayed a bourgeois and euro-centrist bias, with common alliances and shared endeavours often constrained by the inhibiting forces of national cultures.3 Whilst such qualities enabled voluntary associations to address domestic publics and influence national governments, at a conceptual level these tensions within the transnational project rather throw into question the presumed role of voluntary associations as agents of democratisation within international relations. This essay aims to survey the ‘transnational’ turn in League historiography, and to offer a fresh perspective on the dynamics of internationalism between the wars by way of a case study of the British League of Nations Union (LNU). The LNU was a mass-membership pressure group which promoted the cause of international government to domestic audiences, and played a leading role in internationalist networks overseas. The essay will show how the LNU persuaded a major cross-section of British civil society to embrace the League as an institution which promised to foster friendly relations between peoples, as well as between states. Yet in as much as the LNU and its allies in Britain appeared to belong to the rich, transnational community of interwar internationalists, their influence rested ultimately on a particular understanding of British – rather than global – public opinion. Like many other European internationalists, the LNU promoted a brand of internationalism which accepted nations as ‘natural’ stateforms, and, in addition, privileged Britain’s national achievements as an exemplary parliamentary democracy and liberal imperial power. The British case study thus illustrates that voluntary associations did not serve to give voice to global public opinion or to promote ‘transnational’ activism in any straightforward way. International cooperation amongst non-state actors could result in the accentuation of national differences as well as pointing to ways of transcending them.

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Non-state actors and the League of Nations Writing amidst the heightened nationalist mood of the First World War, the internationalist thinker Leonard Woolf remained convinced that, in the long term, history was on his side. A ‘profound change’, he argued, had taken place within international relations over the previous century: ‘In every department of life, even where the conflict of national interests ought to be most acute, international interests are far stronger and far more real than national interests’, a claim Woolf substantiated by pointing to the existence of permanent legislative organs and international bureaux, such as the Universal Postal Union and the Telegraphic Union, and to the periodic conferences and conventions staged to unify national laws on everything from shipping lanes to the trafficking of women.4 Given these proliferating ties, Woolf argued, independence was a ‘legal fiction’, and the only sensible path forward led to stronger, more effective forms of international organisation. Surveying the scene a decade later, the American political scientist Pitman Potter described a similar process of mounting global interdependence, driven, in his view, by improved communications and transportation, expanding markets for goods and services, and a whole raft of inter-governmental agreements. This massive expansion of ‘international intercourse’, he noted, spanned a dizzyingly broad field of human endeavour, encompassing travel, trade, the arts and sciences, religion, sport, education and social reform, and engaging a diverse range of both state and non-state actors.5 What is striking in these accounts is the frequency with which the global processes under scrutiny involved the creation of new associational forms, which engaged the energies of an eclectic cross-section of non-state actors. Alongside the broader integrating forces of law and commerce, international society was (and to a large extent, still is) imagined to reside in associational spaces – in congresses, conferences, federations and unions – with memberships drawn from groups of like-minded individuals residing in multiple nations. Potter counted some 18 meetings of what he called ‘private international bodies’ in the 1850s, a figure which rose to 270 three decades later, whilst another estimate put the number of such bodies created between 1840 and 1914 at close to 450.6 These transnational gatherings spanned almost every conceivable interest, from anti-slavery and feminism to evangelical Christianity and social and moral reform. Bodies were established linking artists, scientists, sportsmen and educationalists, led for the most part by middle-class liberals who shared a broad belief in the possibility of humanity’s progress through the beneficent offices of

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representative government and free trade.7 Yet transnational association had a ‘proletarian’ face, too, most visible in the foundation of the First and Second Internationals (in 1864 and 1889 respectively) as organisational expressions of the principle of workers’ solidarity.8 These activist networks were intimately related to the nascent regime of inter-governmental organisation noted by Woolf, and in certain cases could claim considerable credit for facilitating major international agreements, such as the First Geneva Convention on the Care of the Wounded in War in 1864, or the International Agreement for the Suppression of White Slave Traffic ratified 40 years later.9 Although the outbreak of the First World War put many of these activities into cold storage, the associational character of internationalism emerged after the Armistice renewed and restored, with the Paris Peace Conference of 1919 becoming an immediate target for activists pursuing an eclectic range of agendas, from self-determination for colonial peoples to civil and political equality for men and women.10 In the longer term, the founding in Paris of the League of Nations by the great powers created an institutional focus for the work of many existing voluntary associations, and encouraged new transnational endeavours.11 Humanitarian bodies leveraged the resources of the League from the outset to ease the desperate plight of the millions left homeless, malnourished or struck down by disease after the War.12 Other voluntary associations became, alongside League officials and government representatives, part of a tripartite alliance dealing with child-welfare issues and global health problems, whilst employers’ and workers’ associations were given formal representation within the International Labour Organisation.13 Much of this non-state expertise was channelled through the series of Advisory Committees established to support the League’s Secretariat and Technical Organisations, but voluntary societies could also lobby officials directly or target delegates attending Council and Assembly meetings. Women’s organisations enjoyed particularly warm relations with the Head of the Social Section, Dame Rachel Crowdy, and made special efforts to cultivate allies amongst female delegates.14 Educational reformers meanwhile engaged closely with the League’s Committee on Intellectual Cooperation and the Institute of the same name in Paris, with the latter establishing in 1925 a Co-ordinating Committee for voluntary associations working to promote internationalist education in schools.15 Some activists utilised the League’s machinery to publicise the shoddy treatment of native peoples under the Mandates System; others drew attention to violations of the post-

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war Minorities Treaties, whilst yet others still continued their struggle, from new bases in Geneva, against human trafficking and the international drugs trade.16 Under these conditions, the ‘private international associations’ surveyed by Potter flourished in the 1920s as never before, with some 560 listed in the League’s Handbook of International Organisations by the end of the decade.17 The perceived legitimacy of these non-state actors was greatly bolstered by the democratic idealism of the post-war years, with many hopeful internationalists trumpeting the League as the embodiment of a new kind of diplomacy in which ‘public opinion’ was accorded pride of place. In part a response to widespread revulsion against ‘secret treaties’, and in part a reflection of mass mobilisation followed by the toppling of autocratic regimes in the wake of the war, this vision of a democratised world order placed great emphasis on the involvement of peoples – rather than mere elites – in transforming international relations and securing future peace. International government was viewed as a crucial conduit for the expression of the popular will, as recognised by one group of British observers tasked by the Foreign Office in July 1918 with evaluating potential schemes for post-war co-operation: At a moment when the forms and spirit of popular government are acquiring a noticeable accretion of strength in every direction, and when the vast majority of those who have to fight are not only voters but civilians by profession and inclination, it is becoming an article of faith widely and sincerely professed in most countries that there is no quarrel between nations for which an equitable settlement could not be found without recourse to war, provided the voice of the people could make itself heard, and the necessary machinery were called into existence.18

This spirit of openness was institutionalised in various ways at the League, with members of the public able to tour its main buildings, attend sessions of the Assembly and access a huge catalogue of official publications.19 Voluntary associations made the most of these channels in pursuing their respective goals, but in February 1932 united in spectacular fashion behind the cause of disarmament, the subject of a major inter-governmental conference opening in Geneva that month. The first session, on 6 February, heard speeches from representatives of dozens of international organisations, representing perhaps 200 million people from more than 100 different

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countries.20 Arthur Henderson, a British Labour MP and President of the Conference, later wrote of the ‘deep impression’ which these speeches left on the national delegations, and of the volume of petitions, declarations and resolutions which continued to flood his office throughout the conference proceedings.21 This remarkable demonstration of support for arms limitation testified to the powerful hold which the principle of international cooperation had come to exercise over broad swathes of global public opinion, from trade unionists and feminists to churchmen and war veterans. The desire to build a more peaceful world was implicit in much of the internationalism of the nineteenth century, and wholly explicit in the activities of dedicated peace bodies, such as the Inter-Parliamentary Union (1889), the International Peace Bureau (1891) and the hundreds of national associations whose representatives met annually at the Universal Peace Congresses held from 1889 onwards.22 During and immediately after the war, peace-focused societies greatly proliferated, with the international system embodied by the League becoming both a cherished ideal and an arena for action. To this group belonged the dozens of League of Nations societies which sprang into being after 1919, aiming to promote the principles of international government to publics across Europe and beyond. An International Federation of League of Nations Societies (IFLNS) was established in 1921, with a secretariat in Brussels and by the mid-1930s some 40 national affiliates, whose representatives met annually in congress to share ideas and co-ordinate activity. Links to the League were close: it became customary from the mid-1920s for a deputation from the Federation to wait upon the President of the Assembly in order to present resolutions adopted at that year’s annual congress, which were later published in full in the Assembly’s official journal.23 In 1930, Eric Drummond, the League’s Secretary-General, warmly congratulated the League societies, whom he described as ‘scouts sent on ahead by the army of international progress’, whilst the Assembly took the unprecedented step two years later of formally recognising the Federation’s role in educating public opinion on the League’s humanitarian work.24 Composition and style varied from nation to nation, although the leaders of the League societies tended, on the whole, to be moderate liberals, often prominent politicians or intellectuals, whilst memberships were drawn from broad-based core constituencies in the universities and schools, churches and women’s associations. In the USA, for example, the League of Nations

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Non-Partisan Association was established in 1922 with endorsements from 112 well-known figures spanning business, religion, education, journalism and politics, while in France, the movement won particularly strong followings amongst teachers and ex-servicemen.25 By far the largest and most successful of the League societies, however, was the British League of Nations Union (LNU), which could boast in 1933 of having recruited more than a million people through its dense network of local branches, a packed programme of public meetings, and extensive and often highly innovative propaganda work.26 On the face of it, League societies like the LNU embodied perfectly the values of international society described by Woolf and Potter. Cooperating across national borders, they sought to build a more peaceful world by forging bonds between the peoples and articulating the heartfelt support of publics everywhere for the institutions of international government. Yet a closer look at the work of the British LNU reveals a more complex picture, and one which exposes the tensions and limitations of transnational activism, as well as its abundant possibilities. The League of Nations movement in Britain Founded in 1918 from a merger of two wartime bodies, the LNU became a powerful advocate in Britain of international co-operation, and one of the most influential voluntary associations of the period.27 Its chief moving spirits were the maverick Tory aristocrat and minister, Robert Cecil, and the Oxford classicist and Liberal, Gilbert Murray, who were joined on the Executive Committee over the years by politicians, intellectuals, religious leaders, feminists and businessmen of all stripes. Generous donations from the oilman Lord Cowdray and the colliery owner David Davies MP allowed the LNU to maintain a fully-staffed headquarters in London, where the bulk of the movement’s propaganda activities were co-ordinated. Volumes of leaflets, flyers, posters and educational materials were churned out every year, alongside the LNU’s flagship journal, Headway, which enjoyed a monthly circulation of 100,000 at its peak in 1931.28 Much of this literature was more widely disseminated through the movement’s 3,000 or more local branches, each of which ran its own programme of events. These ranged from public meetings and musical entertainments to study circles and children’s essay competitions, with many branches sustaining at the same time a constant flow of resolutions, memos and letters addressed to MPs, ministers and high-ranking League officials. Individuals joined local branches by paying an annual subscription, but the LNU reached a far wider public through

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its affiliated ‘corporate’ membership of church congregations, trade union branches, Rotary clubs, Women’s Institutes and many other civic bodies.29 Amassing this grassroots membership was considered a vital task by LNU leaders, as upon it rested their claim to speak for British public opinion. The belief that the League represented a democratised diplomatic arena was central to the ideology of the movement, which routinely presented itself as a mouthpiece through which ordinary people’s voices could be heard at the highest levels. As Gilbert Murray told the General Council of the LNU in 1932: ‘Everything now for the future of the world depends upon public opinion, and it is on the voluntary societies existing in all the nations of Europe, like the League of Nations Union in this country, that public opinion really rests and is built up.’30 The League was to be welcomed as an institution which rejected the secrecy and intrigue of the ‘old’ diplomacy in favour of structures which allowed for rigorous public scrutiny and for the pressures of opinion outside Geneva to be felt by elites within. Cecil expressed this view in a letter to Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin in 1926: ‘One of the chief principles on which the success of the League depends is that the general public opinion of the world is in favour of peace, and that in international difficulties an appeal shall be made to this opinion.’31 Following Wilson’s call for ‘open covenants openly arrived at’ in his famous Fourteen Points speech of January 1918, ‘publicity’ became the LNU’s watchword. In the aftermath of a conflict which had claimed the lives of millions, it was no longer conceivable that questions of war or peace should be settled in private by elites without even the merest consultation of mass electorates. ‘Kings and emperors, statesmen and diplomats, victorious generals and admirals who formerly made the great political changes are now almost powerless to secure the world against war,’ remarked an editorial in Headway in 1930. It was up to ‘ordinary people’ to keep the peace, by demanding that their governments abandon narrow national self-interest and pursue instead foreign policies which would serve the ‘interests of the whole international community’. 32 Like many other voluntary associations of an internationalist character, the LNU adopted a dual strategy which sought on the one hand to bring pressure to bear domestically on the British government, and on the other to foster friendly relations between peoples of different nationalities by working through the IFLNS and other transnational networks. In other words, the movement recognised the importance of trying to alter the behaviour of individual nation-states, whilst at the same time pursuing the wider objective

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of strengthening the structures and linkages of international civil society. Both tasks required, in the first instance, education. Responsible citizens needed to inform themselves about foreign affairs, LNU activists argued, and particularly about the workings of the League, if they were to hold their governments effectively to account. As one LNU author put it: The old days when the nation was content to leave acquaintance with international problems to the Foreign Office, and to trust blindly to dim oracles pronounced by Foreign Ministers, are gone and gone for ever. The people are aware that their fate hangs on these issues, and they are determined to learn and to make up their own minds about them.33

The LNU encouraged the study of foreign affairs through its broad array of publications, an extensive lending library at its headquarters and a regular programme of conferences and summer schools. Collaboration was facilitated with universities, adult-education bodies and schools; in the latter case, the LNU tapped into the League’s aforementioned campaign to internationalise the classroom curriculum, an initiative with which it was linked through the person of Gilbert Murray, who for many years sat on the International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation. As well as instructing individuals on the principles behind international cooperation, the LNU’s educational mission aimed to teach British citizens about the habits, cultures and histories of other peoples, as a means of fostering international understanding. Headway frequently carried articles documenting life in other countries, while the LNU encouraged branches to set up pen-pal schemes and foreign exchanges, sometimes involving League societies overseas.34 Collaborations with the BBC’s schools and adult-education broadcasts resulted in a great many wireless talks on foreign travel, customs and culture, which aimed, as one broadcaster put it, to help listeners gain ‘a more complete imaginative sense’ of their neighbours overseas.35 In all these guises, the LNU’s educational work proved popular with major groups within British civil society, many of whom were affiliated to the movement as corporate members, or collaborated by other means. A standing joint committee involving representatives of Rotary International, the luncheon club for businessmen, was established in January 1926, leading to the appointment of 150 ‘International Peace representatives’ to serve as a link between LNU branches and local Rotary clubs.36 Meanwhile the National Federation of Women’s Institutes regularly sent representatives to

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the LNU’s summer schools, and encouraged individual Institutes to arrange League-themed talks; as many as 572 Institutes were in receipt of LNU literature in 1934.37 The Anglican and Nonconformist churches proved a particularly reliable source of support, with many slotting the LNU’s fourpage inset, Church and World, into their parish magazines, whilst a thousand clergymen joined the LNU’s panel of specialist preachers, delivering regular sermons on the theme of international cooperation.38 At no moment was this groundswell of popular support for the League more apparent than during the ‘Peace Ballot’, an unofficial referendum masterminded in 1934 by the LNU which invited all citizens over the age of 18 to record their views on Britain’s membership of the League, international control of armaments and collective security.39 A staggering 12 million voted in the referendum, with an impressive 500,000 volunteering to deliver and collect the ballot papers, many doing so under the auspices of organisations affiliated to the LNU. Some 40 organisations sent representatives to the National Declaration Committee, which oversaw the whole process from London, and local branches reproduced this broad-based coalition at grassroots level. In Blackpool, for example, it was reported that ‘every phase of our local communal life, churches, trade unions, political bodies, and many others’ were represented at an inaugural meeting to plan the Ballot, whilst an ‘army of school teachers’ was later recruited to undertake the final count after all the forms had been collected.40 Much of the Ballot’s popular success can be attributed to a simple and deeply-felt desire to avoid another war, along with all the suffering and destruction it would inevitably bring in its trail. Yet these groups also proved receptive to internationalist appeals because they increasingly saw themselves as belonging to the emergent international society described by contemporary observers such as Woolf and Potter. The Scout Association, for instance, which lent the LNU much useful assistance, expanded its reach after the war, moving beyond the English-speaking nations of the British Empire in order to become a genuinely global movement which regularly boasted of its close affinity with the ideals of the League.41 The movement’s mammoth International Jamborees were described in Scout discourse as representing a ‘junior’ League of Nations, whilst League officials were frequently in touch with the Boy Scouts International Bureau, whose director, Hubert Martin, wrote in Headway in 1923 of the mutuality of Scouting values and international cooperation.42 The British women’s movement provided another example of growing international engagement, providing crucial

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leadership, in such figures as Margery Corbett Ashby, Kathleen Courtney, Helen Archdale and many others, for the transnational network of women’s organisations centred on the League.43 Their activities concerning child welfare, human trafficking and nationality laws were closely followed at home, forming the subject of countless public meetings, journal articles, campaigns and appeals.44 The LNU’s Women’s Advisory Committee helped to co-ordinate and sustain this interest by drawing together representatives of more than 50 organisations to discuss League questions deemed of special importance for women.45 British ex-servicemen also came to see themselves as belonging to an international community through their ties to veterans’ organisations overseas, formalised through the creation of the Fédération Interalliée des Anciens Combattants (FIDAC) in 1920.46 The churches, meanwhile, continued to strengthen their ecumenical links through bodies such as the World Alliance for Promoting Friendship through the Churches, founded in 1914 under the presidency of the Archbishop of Canterbury, and the ‘Life and Work’ movement, which led eventually to the establishment of the World Council of Churches, based in Geneva.47 Continuing to pursue the pre-war goal of church unity, these ecumenical initiatives gave high priority to the fostering of peace and understanding between nations and peoples, with influential individuals such as Cosmo Lang and William Temple viewing the League as an arena in which the contemporary relevance of Christianity might be effectively demonstrated.48 In all these ways, different groups within British civil society were increasingly drawn into the orbit of the League and the transnational activist networks which it nourished. The LNU spearheaded this process, encouraging British people to look beyond the borders of their own nation in order to recognise the responsibility they owed to a wider international community. Yet this attempt to democratise the diplomatic arena by mobilising public opinion did not, for the British LNU, necessitate any fundamental re-ordering of existing global hierarchies of nations and peoples, and nor did it vitiate national differences, as the final section of this essay now suggests. The tensions of transnationalism As many theorists and historians of international relations have observed, internationalism evolved during the course of the nineteenth century alongside the modern nation-state. Both phenomena were produced by the same historical moment, as the Great Exhibitions demonstrated

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perfectly, showcasing industrial and imperial rivalries whilst simultaneously facilitating both international and transnational dialogue and exchange.49 Similarly, the expanding regime of intergovernmental co-operation noted by Woolf relied upon stable nation-states capable of representation on the international stage, a model replicated in the structures of many transnational movements. As Lyman White, another American political scientist, observed, most of the latter were composed of national bodies to which individuals subscribed: very few associations were genuinely ‘cosmopolitan’ in the sense of having a single mixed membership made up of individuals of multiple nationalities. ‘Not only do national organisations seem to form a satisfactory basis for most international organisations,’ White remarked, ‘but international organisation tends to develop and strengthen national organisation.’50 This duality became even more pronounced following the First World War, when the Wilsonian principle of national self-determination supplied a dominant paradigm for thinking about statehood. Building on earlier currents of thought which held nations to possess distinct psychological characteristics, the settlement which emerged from the Paris Peace Conference enshrined the notion that the nation was the ‘natural’ state form and the ultimate goal of all peoples as they advanced towards civilisation.51 This sort of language was ubiquitous amongst liberal internationalists, who rejected more radical blueprints for a single World State in favour of permanent organs of cooperation between sovereign nations. It was these nations which constituted the membership of the League, an arrangement mirrored in the IFLNS, whose members were national League societies; the body’s constitution made it clear that there could be only one society representing each nation, and the proceedings of the annual congresses emulated those of the League Assembly and Council as closely as possible. The IFLNS also resembled the League in its eurocentric character: its annual congresses took place in European cities and tended to be dominated by European personalities, with small delegations from the USA, China and Japan and occasional attendances from further afield, such as Argentina and South Africa.52 These congresses were lavish affairs, often held in grand public buildings, such as the Reichstag (1927) or the Sorbonne (1932), and delegates, like tourists, would be taken on sight-seeing excursions and regaled with other cultural offerings, from traditional folk music to gastronomic specialities.53

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Thus, nationality was inescapably on display in the internationalist politics of the interwar years, constituting a fundamental marker which shaped relations between British League activists and their counterparts elsewhere. LNU leaders made little attempt to conceal their obvious satisfaction concerning the British movement’s vastly superior size and efficiency when compared to the fledging League societies in other nations. At the Geneva congress in 1921, one British participant observed that the delegation ‘was able to give many hints to the weaker Societies’, whilst the following year, Lady Gladstone, a member of the LNU Executive, remarked that ‘an immense responsibility and power for good’ lay in their hands on account of the LNU’s status as ‘incomparably the strongest body in the Federation’.54 As a consequence, LNU personnel spent much time tutoring their overseas colleagues on effective means of publicity and propaganda. It was noted by Headway that the resolutions adopted at the 1924 congress on this subject ‘represented no great advance on the work the League of Nations Union is already doing in Great Britain, but for many societies in other countries they set a standard that is still far from being reached’.55 Secretary-General Maxwell Garnett spoke frequently on the LNU’s work in Britain, and in 1929 it was agreed that some of the movement’s most effective literature would be circulated so as to allow societies elsewhere to learn from the British example.56 The phenomenal success of the Peace Ballot only strengthened British activists’ belief in their superior organisation and influence. Cecil delivered a long account of how the Ballot had been conceived and executed at the Brussels congress in June 1935.57 British delegates also played a leading role in setting the Federation’s policy, often supplying draft resolutions or memoranda which formed the basis for discussion of major questions. Sir Willoughby Dickinson, a Liberal MP and later peer, was closely involved in the Federation’s work on minorities, chairing a special commission on the subject in 1922 which produced an important memorandum on the position of Christian minorities in Constantinople four years later, and another for consideration by the congress of 1928.58 A resolution on disarmament adopted in 1926 was based on proposals drafted by the LNU, whilst Cecil later chaired a sub-committee on the same subject which devised the programme agreed at the 1931 Budapest Congress.59 This programme went on to form the chief demands of the campaign launched by a much larger coalition of voluntary associations in connection with the World Disarmament Conference the following year.60 Cecil also presided at the 1932 and 1933 IFLNS meetings,

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using his authority at the latter to sooth frayed tempers concerning the attitude of German delegates towards their government’s persecution of Jews.61 Four years later, his LNU colleague Clifford Allen aroused a ‘fervent response’ for his memorandum on ‘peaceful change’ at the congress in Bratislava.62 The high opinion which British activists held of their own movement was reinforced by broader perceptions of national difference. They, like many other British people between the wars, believed themselves to be largely free of the deeply volatile and highly emotive brand of nationalism to which continentals were supposedly susceptible.63 Lady Gladstone was struck in 1922 by the animosity with which certain delegates discussed questions of minorities, their ill-tempered exchanges proving an eye-opener for her colleagues, ‘whose outlook has escaped the distortion of the more violent emotions of nationalism’.64 Six years later, Headway lamented the slow progress made by other League societies, suggesting that some of the LNU’s sister organisations were ‘so weak as to be almost negligible, and the national point of view not infrequently overshadows the international’.65 The British, it was believed, could take a more objective view thanks to their relatively peaceful encounter with modernity, which had entailed a gradual democratisation of the state overseen by enlightened governing elites who recognised and responded appropriately to potentially destabilising socioeconomic change. This Whiggish narrative was enfolded into the ideology of the LNU, which liked to present the League as the crowning glory of centuries of steady advance towards civilisation. One publication of 1931 began the story in the 12th century, when Henry II abolished private wars amongst his feudal chiefs, subsequently moved on to the founding of the ‘Mother of Parliaments’ and the development of representative government throughout the Empire, and culminated finally in the establishment of a ‘world society’ through the Covenant of the League, which marked the first step towards ‘government of the people, by the people, for the people’ on a global scale.66 Or, in the words of another British activist: ‘The League of Nations exists to generalize the peaceful progress which is the characteristic of English history.’67 In these accounts, Britain’s status as a large multinational state and liberal imperial power equipped her people for internationalism in ways unavailable to smaller nations or to those with (supposedly) more troublesome imperial pasts. This was due, in the view of F.S. Marvin, a former schools inspector and prolific LNU author, to the fact that the British had grappled for

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centuries with ‘the reconciliation of patriotism and the larger allegiance to mankind’. It was, he remarked, among the many special advantages of England and the British Commonwealth of nations that we have been able to achieve so great a variety of combinations between local and larger patriotisms. We have the Welshman with his intense devotion to his native hills, and at the same time a loyal and enthusiastic member of the Empire, and an ardent friend of the League of Nations.68

League activists often described this flair for yoking love of country to a wider international loyalty as ‘enlightened patriotism’, a state of mind which, according to one writer in Headway, ‘is easier for the British subject than for any other, and easiest of all perhaps for us who carry on in the heart of the Empire’.69 In LNU discourse, the relationship between the League and the British Commonwealth was one of mutuality; the latter, it was frequently asserted, represented a microcosm of the international society which the former sought to build. The League, as one supporter put it, imperfect as it is and likely to be until perfection becomes attributable to human institutions, stands for an attempt to apply to the organised nations of the world at large the principles that are the living principles of the British Empire.70

These lofty assertions were, of course, as ethnocentric in character as those of any nationalist from mainland Europe. They propounded an idealised version of British history and a self-congratulatory account of Britain’s status as an exemplary democracy and humane imperial power. League activists tended to conflate their own movement’s success with this narrative of national exceptionalism, assuming that the LNU’s natural role in the IFLNS – like that of Britain in the League itself – was to lead where others might follow. Occasionally this superiority complex spilled over into the private correspondence of LNU leaders, who were not immune from making casual use of derogatory stereotypes like ‘frog’, ‘small dark Latin races’ and ‘dago nations’ in reference to foreign statesmen and delegates.71 From the perspective of the 21st century, these qualities were hardly admirable, yet they do offer a clue as to how the LNU was able to build such

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a powerful movement in a country better known historically for its ‘splendid isolation’ than its close engagement with European affairs. By emphasising the mutuality of nation, Empire and League, British activists effectively domesticated the idea of international government, rendering it palatable to an electorate taught to believe it belonged to a great civilisation which stood as a mighty force for good in the world. This was a strategy which worked on several levels; it marginalised critics who feared that the League would erode national sovereignty and undermine the familial bonds of Empire; it pre-empted damaging accusations of disloyalty or anti-patriotism which were frequently levelled at pacifists between the wars; and finally, it enabled the LNU to link its message in the public mind with prominent symbols of national identity, from the Church of England to the monarchy. One of the movement’s proudest moments came in October 1930, when the Prince of Wales addressed a banquet hosted in honour of delegates attending the Imperial Conference in London. Gathered to celebrate, as the Prince put it, ‘our common faith in two great institutions – the British Commonwealth and the League of Nations’, he expressed the hope that the people of this country, which has been the pioneer of so many great and beneficent movements, will realise the urgent importance of doing all in their power to assist the League of Nations Union in the greatest crusade of all – the crusade for world peace.72

Conclusion The experience of the British LNU thus reveals both the possibilities and tensions inherent in the transnational activist networks which grew up around the League of Nations between the wars. With its desire to educate and mobilise public opinion, the British movement embodied the notion that international relations had become a more democratic affair, involving peoples and not merely governing elites. By popularising the idea of international government, the LNU encouraged the British to reflect upon their responsibilities to a wider international community and to extend the hand of friendship to their fellow man, whatever his nationality. Together with its sister societies in the IFLNS, the LNU helped to sustain and extend the transnational associational linkages which had first been forged in the mid-nineteenth century, and which many internationalists saw as the best hope for preserving peace between nations. Yet at the same time, British

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League activists could not escape the material or emotional strictures of the nation-state. The affective bond to the nation was a powerful one, and deemed natural and healthy in the post-war flush of Wilsonian idealism. Liberal internationalists believed that the world citizen could wear several hats at once, demonstrating loyalty to his or her country and empire, as well as to humanity at large. Looking ahead, this model could hardly be sustained beyond 1945, when decolonisation and Cold War politics greatly reduced Britain’s global power and prestige. Yet it was a comforting philosophy which suited British League activists well between the wars, enabling them to reconcile their internationalist ideals with the imperatives of nationality.

Notes 1. 2.

3.

4. 5. 6. 7.

8.

9.

‘The voluntary society and its relation to the League of Nations’, The Covenant, October 1919, p. 10. For a perceptive overview of recent research on the League, see Susan Pedersen, ‘Back to the League of Nations’, American Historical Review, vol. 112, no. 4 (2007), pp. 1091–117. Patricia Clavin, ‘Defining transnationalism’, Contemporary European History, vol. 14, no. 4 (2005), pp. 421–39. On the efforts of groups and movements which transcended national boundaries, see also Akira Iriye, Cultural Internationalism and World Order (London, 1997). Leonard Woolf, International Government (London, 1916). Pitman B. Potter, An Introduction to the Study of International Organization (London, 3rd edn. 1927). Potter, Introduction, p. 38; F.S.L. Lyons, Internationalism in Europe 1815– 1914 (Leyden, 1963), p. 14. See Christiane Eisenberg, ‘The rise of internationalism in sport’, in Martin H. Geyer and Johannes Paulmann (eds.), The Mechanics of Internationalism: Culture, Society, and Politics from the 1840s to the First World War (Oxford, 2001), pp. 375–403; Eckhardt Fuchs, ‘Educational sciences, morality and politics: international education congresses in the early twentieth century’, Paedagogica Historica, vol. 40, no. 6 (2004), pp. 757–84; Elisabeth Crawford, Nationalism and Internationalism in Science, 1880–1939 (Cambridge, 1992). Moira Donald, ‘Workers of the world unite? Exploring the enigma of the Second International’, in Geyer and Paulmann (eds.), Mechanics of Internationalism, pp. 177–203. Lyons, Internationalism; Anne Summers, ‘Which women? What Europe? Josephine Butler and the International Abolitionist Federation’, History Workshop Journal, vol. 62, no. 1 (2006), pp. 214–31.

204 10.

11. 12.

13.

14.

15.

16.

17.

18.

Internationalism Reconfigured Erez Manela, The Wilsonian Moment: Self-Determination and the International Origins of Anticolonial Nationalism (Oxford, 2007), p. 59. For the Pan-African Congress, see The Times, 24 February 1919, p. 9; Leila Rupp, Worlds of Women: The Making of an International Women’s Movement (Princeton, NJ, 1997), ch. 9. The League’s founding charter, known as the Covenant, constituted the first 26 articles of the Treaty of Versailles. Patricia Clavin, ‘Europe and the League of Nations’, in Robert Gerwarth (ed.), Twisted Paths: Europe 1914–1945 (Oxford, 2007), pp. 325–54; John F. Hutchinson, ‘“Custodians of the sacred fire”: The ICRC and the postwar reorganisation of the International Red Cross’; Bridget Towers, ‘Red Cross organisational politics, 1918–1922: relations of dominance and the influence of the United States’, in Paul Weindling (ed.), International Health Organisations and Movements, 1918–1939 (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 17–35, 36–55. Carol Miller, ‘The Social Section and Advisory Committee on Social Questions of the League of Nations’, in Weindling (ed.), International Health Organisations, pp. 154–75; Barbara Metzger, ‘Towards an international human rights regime during the inter-war years: the League of Nations’ Combat of Traffic in Women and Children’, in Kevin Grant, Philippa Levine and Frank Trentmann (eds.), Beyond Sovereignty: Britain, Empire and Transnationalism, c. 1880–1950 (Basingstoke, 2007), pp. 54–79; Martin David Dubin, ‘The League of Nations Health Organisation’, in Weindling (ed.), International Health Organisations, pp. 56–80; Charles Chatfield, ‘Intergovernmental and nongovernmental Associations to 1945’, in Jackie Smith, Charles Chatfield and Ron Pagnucco (eds.), Transnational Social Movements and Global Politics: Solidarity Beyond the State (Syracuse, NY, 1997), pp. 19–41. Rupp, Worlds of Women; Carol Miller, ‘Lobbying the League: Women’s International Organisations and the League of Nations’ (unpublished DPhil thesis, University of Oxford, 1992). Elly Hermon, ‘The international peace education movement, 1919–1939’, in Charles Chatfield and Peter Van Den Dungen (eds.), Peace Movements and Political Cultures (Knoxville, TN, 1988), pp. 127–42. See for example Susan Pedersen, ‘The meaning of the Mandates System: an argument’. Geschichte und Gesellschaft, vol. 32, no. 4 (2006), pp. 560–82; Carole Fink, Defending the Rights of Others: The Great Powers, the Jews, and International Minority Protection, 1878–1938 (Cambridge, 2004); Metzger, ‘Towards an international human rights regime’. Lyman Cromwell White, The Structure of Private International Organisations (Philadelphia, PA, 1933). This figure included inter-governmental organisations, but White noted that the vast majority were of a private character. Final Report of the Committee on the League of Nations (the Philimore Committee), dated 18 July 1918. Zimmern Papers, Bodleian Library

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19.

20.

21.

22. 23. 24. 25.

26.

27.

28. 29.

30. 31. 32. 33. 34.

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(hereafter BoL), Oxford, MSS 82, f. 7. For background to the committee, see George Egerton, Great Britain and the Creation of the League of Nations: Strategy, Politics, and International Organisation, 1914–1919 (Chapel Hill, NC, 1978). The British League of Nations Union organised tours to Geneva which included visits to the League’s headquarters at the Palais Wilson and to the main offices of the ILO. These tours were timed to coincide with the meeting of the League Assembly in September and the ILO’s annual conference in June. See ‘Seeing life’, Headway, September 1930, p. ii. Thomas Davies, The Possibilities of Transnational Activism: The Campaign for Disarmament between the Two World Wars (Leiden, 2007). This figure represented about one tenth of the world’s population at the time. Vox Populi (Geneva: Vox Populi Committee, 6 February 1932), in Trades Union Congress archive, Modern Records Centre, University of Warwick, 292.906.5/7, p. 8. Sandi E. Cooper, Patriotic Pacifism: Waging War on War in Europe, 1815–1914 (Oxford, 1991). ‘The voice of the people’, Headway, October 1929, p. 181. ‘Organised opinion: League societies from many lands confer’, Headway, July 1930, p. 134; Headway, December 1932, p. 223. Warren Kuehl and Lynne Dunn, Keeping the Covenant: American Internationalists and the League of Nations, 1920–1939 (London, 1997); Christian Birebent, Militants de la Paix et de la SDN (Paris, 2007). In 1933, the LNU announced that it had enrolled one million members since its inception in November 1918. However, the number of paid-up subscriptions was smaller, peaking at around 400,000. The standard work on the LNU is Donald Birn, The League of Nations Union 1918–1945 (Oxford, 1981). See also Helen McCarthy, The British People and the League of Nations: Democracy, Citizenship and Internationalism, c.1918– 1945 (Manchester University Press, forthcoming). LNU, Annual Report for 1931 (London, 1932), p. 50. The LNU had over 4,000 corporate affiliates in the early 1930s. See for example LNU, Statistical Supplement to the League of Nations Year Book 1934 (London, 1935). General Council minutes, 28 June 1932. British Library of Political and Economic Science (hereafter BLPES), London, LNU/1/2, f. 115. Cecil to Baldwin, 31 March 1926. Cecil Papers, British Library, London, Add. 51080, f. 172. Headway, January 1930, p. i. Freda White, ‘Fact and fancy’, Headway, June 1935, p. 106. See for example the series on ‘The New World’ which ran in Headway from October 1922 to January 1924, featuring articles on 16 different countries. For pen-pal and exchange schemes, see ‘A junior branch’, Headway, December

206

35. 36. 37. 38. 39.

40. 41.

42.

43.

44.

45. 46.

47.

Internationalism Reconfigured 1928, p. ii; G. McWillie, ‘Imported pupils; exchanging English boys for German’. Headway, September 1930, p. 168. C.A. Siepmann, ‘The League and the radio: educating the public by loudspeaker’, Headway, July 1930, p. 124. Executive Committee minutes, 21 January 1926. BLPES, LNU/2/7, ff. 101–2; Headway, February 1926, p. 38. Home and Country, January 1934, p. 44. Christian Organisations Committee minutes, 6 November 1935. BLPES, LNU/5/12, f. 143. Martin Ceadel, ‘The first British referendum: the Peace Ballot, 1934–5’, English Historical Review, vol. 95, no. 377 (1980), pp. 810–39; Helen McCarthy, ‘Democratizing British foreign policy: rethinking the Peace Ballot, 1934–5’, Journal of British Studies, vol. 49, no. 2 (2010), pp. 358–87. Blackpool Gazette, 6 October 1934, p. 9; 1 December 1934, p. 24. Tammy Proctor, On My Honour: Guides and Scouts in Interwar Britain (= Transactions of the American Philosophical Society, Vol. 92, Pt. 2) (Philadelphia, 2002); John Springhall, Youth, Empire and Society: British Youth Movements, 1883–1940 (London, 1977); Allen Warren, ‘“Mothers for the Empire”? The Girl Guides Association in Britain, 1909–1939’, in J.A. Mangan (ed.), Making Imperial Mentalities: Socialisation and British Imperialism (Manchester, 1990), pp. 96–109. Hubert Martin, ‘The world-wide brotherhood of Scouts’, Headway, February 1923, p. 270; Proctor, On My Honour, p. 95. See also W. Lewis Bailey, ‘Scouts and the League’, Headway, October 1926, p. 192. The World Jamboree of 1929, held in Birkenhead, was attended by 30,000 Scouts from 71 countries. Miller, ‘Lobbying the League’. Corbett Ashby was President of the International Alliance of Women between 1923 and 1946; Courtney was First Vice-President of the Peace and Disarmament Committee of Women’s International Organizations, based in Geneva; Archdale chaired Equal Rights International between 1926 and 1934. Johanna Alberti, Beyond Suffrage: Feminists in War and Peace, 1914–1928 (Basingstoke, 1989); Joyce Goodman, ‘Working for change across international borders: the Association of Headmistresses and Education for International Citizenship’, Paedagogica Historica, vol. 43, no. 1 (2007), pp. 165–80; Carol Miller, ‘Women in international relations? The debate in inter-war Britain’, in Rebecca Grant and Kathleen Newland (eds.), Gender and International Relations (Milton Keynes, 1991), pp. 64–82. For a complete list, see Appendix to Executive Committee minutes, 21 December 1922. BLPES, LNU/2/5, ff. 24–5. Niall Barr, The Lion and the Poppy: British Veterans, Politics, and Society, 1921– 1939 (London, 2005). The British Legion, the largest veterans’ organisation in Britain, joined FIDAC in 1921. Darril Hudson, The Ecumenical Movement in World Affairs (London, 1969).

The Lifeblood of the League? 48.

49. 50. 51. 52.

53. 54.

55. 56.

57. 58.

59. 60. 61. 62. 63.

64. 65. 66. 67. 68.

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See for example Lang ‘The need and the hope of a League of Nations’, based on a speech delivered at the Victoria Hall, Sheffield on 19 December 1918. In Davidson Papers, Lambeth Palace Library, London, MSS 410, ff. 316–9. For Temple, see John Kent, William Temple: Church, State and Society in Britain, 1880–1950 (Cambridge, 1992). See also McCarthy, The British People. Jeffrey A. Auerbach and Peter H. Hoffenberg (eds.), Britain, the Empire, and the World at the Great Exhibition of 1851 (Aldershot, 2008). White, The Structure of Private International Organisations, p. 35. Glenda Sluga, The Nation, Psychology, and International Politics, 1870–1919 (Basingstoke, 2006). Some 20–25 societies sent delegates to the annual congress, out of a total of around 40. Turkish delegates attended regularly from 1922, and Persia sent a delegate in 1935. See, for example, Blanche Dugdale, ‘Discovering Tregaron: new light on a British minority problem’. Headway, August 1926, p. 147. B.E.C. Dugdale, ‘League of Nations societies in congress’, Headway, July 1921, p. 99. Viscountess Gladstone, ‘The voluntary societies and world peace’, Headway, July 1922, p. 130. ‘The Lyons conference’, Headway, August 1924, p. 146. Headway, July 1927, p. 136; Vice-Admiral Drury-Lowe, ‘The people’s chamber: League of Nations societies in congress’, Headway, July 1929, pp. 134–5. Viscountess Gladstone, ‘The Federation at Brussels’, Headway, July 1935, p. 125–6. ‘The trouble at Prague’. Headway, July 1922, p. 123; ‘At Salzburg’, Headway, November 1926, p. 214; A.E.W. Thomas, ‘World opinion: League societies in conference at The Hague’, Headway, August 1928, pp. 156–7. Headway, March 1931, p. 43; ‘Other LNUs: societies in conference in Budapest’, Headway, July 1931, p. 135. Davies, The Possibilities of Transnational Activism. Captain L.H. Green, ‘Some impressions of the Montreux conference’, Headway, July 1933, p. 130. Headway, July 1937, p. 123. For a masterful overview of this subject, see Peter Mandler, The English National Character: The History of an Idea from Edmund Burke to Tony Blair (London, 2006). Gladstone, ‘The voluntary societies and world peace’. Headway, July 1928, p. 123. LNU, The British Empire and the League of Nations (London, 1931). BLPES, LNU/7/8, f. 565. F.S. Marvin, ‘Britain and the League of Nations’ in idem (ed.), England and the World (London, 1925), p. 224. Ibid, p. 236.

208 69. 70. 71.

72.

Internationalism Reconfigured ‘Past, present and future’, Headway, May 1929, p. i. R.F. Cholmeley, ‘Our two-fold loyalty’, Headway, May 1926, p. 87. See, for example, Murray to Cecil, 25 September 1931. Murray Papers, BoL, MSS 210, f. 182; Murray to Philip Noel Baker, 4 September 1931. Ibid, f. 137; Cecil to Noel Baker, 5 February 1930. Churchill Archives Centre, Cambridge, Noel Baker Papers, NBKR/9/89. The Times, 31 October 1930, p. 16.

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RECONCILIATION AND THE POST-WAR ORDER The Place of the Deutsche Liga für Menschenrechte in Interwar Pacifism

Daniel Laqua

The outbreak of World War I caused significant damage to the transnational bonds that had connected European peace activists.1 Yet interwar pacifism was subject to ideological as well as national rifts. Most pre-war peace societies represented stances that are captured by terms such as ‘liberal internationalism’, ‘pacific-ism’, ‘organisational pacifism’ or ‘pacifisme ancien style’: they championed international arbitration, the extension of international law and the establishment of international organisations. After the war, such views were increasingly challenged by pacifists who fundamentally objected to the traditional conduct of international relations and who advocated conscientious objection – views that have been labelled ‘antimilitarism’, ‘integral pacifism’ or ‘pacifisme nouveau style’.2 The case of the Deutsche Liga für Menschenrechte (DLM) illustrates these divisions. Furthermore, because of its commitment to Franco-German reconciliation, the association relates to a prominent topic in the fields of transnational and peace history.3 Having been founded in November 1914 as the Bund Neues Vaterland (BNV), it adopted its new name in 1922. Thus, the DLM established itself as the German partner of the Ligue des Droits de l’Homme. The Ligue plays a key role in the historiography of French republicanism, with recent research being facilitated by the return of its

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archives to France.4 In contrast, the literature on the BNV/DLM is more limited: while it usually features in surveys of the German peace movement, there are no recent studies beyond article-length.5 As I suggest in this chapter, the work of the association sheds critical light on important issues in the transnational history of the interwar years. It highlights the aspirations and practices of actors who worked for reconciliation and campaigned for a new international order, but also the obstacles created by the national and institutional frameworks in which interwar pacifism operated. The chapter stresses the transnational dimension of the BNV/DLM’s efforts – involving speaker tours, youth exchanges, debates on the post-war order and the League of Nations, as well as cooperation with key figures in the international peace movement. However, this transnational commitment was intertwined with national considerations and configurations; thus, the case of the BNV/DLM also offers insights into the political culture of Weimar Germany. German pacifism and the Deutsche Liga für Menschenrechte From its foundation, the Bund Neues Vaterland was outspoken in its condemnation of German war policies. Its members Albert Einstein and Georg Friedrich Nicolai had previously signed the Manifesto to the Europeans, contradicting the German intellectuals who had backed their government with the Manifesto of the 93 in September 1914.6 Owing to institutional repression, the BNV’s work was interrupted between February 1916 and October 1918.7 The association’s revised constitution of November 1918 suggested a broadened remit, calling for the ‘construction of a German socialist republic on a democratic basis’ – with the subsequent caveat that ‘socialist’ did not describe a specific ideological current.8 The BNV/DLM was never particularly large: even at its peak, it only claimed around 2,000 members.9 In 1923, the German authorities ascribed much of the organisation’s public profile to the efforts of its secretary-general, Otto Lehmann-Russbüldt.10 The limited size of the association should not lead to rash conclusions as to its role within the peace movement: after all, European pacifism seldom produced mass organisations. Even significant associations such as the Association pour la Paix par le Droit or the Deutsche Friedensgesellschaft (DFG) were hardly an exception: the French association had between 4,000 and 7,000 members, and the DFG declined from a peak of around 30,000 members (in 1927) to 5,000 (in 1932) under a more radical leadership.11

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Instead of defining their importance in terms of membership numbers, many peace societies built links with like-minded groups and individuals. The BNV/DLM proved quite adept in this respect. Hellmut von Gerlach, a well-known republican activist and editor of the Welt am Montag, was a leading figure in the association. The journalists Carl von Ossietzky (in 1926 and 1932) and Kurt Tucholsky (from 1926) were committee members. Both wrote for the Weltbühne, which shared the association’s antimilitarist agenda and, according to Walter Laqueur, was ‘second to none in its desire for reconciliation and friendship with France’.12 The DLM’s advisory board also included prominent figures of Weimar Germany’s intellectual life, for instance Albert Einstein, Heinrich Mann and Ernst Toller.13 The association benefited from the affiliation of local branches of the Social Democratic Party, trade unions and the freethinking Deutscher Monistenbund. Moreover, as Hans Manfred Bock has noted, the DLM existed in ‘symbiosis’ with other German peace organisations such as the DFG.14 Its members were among the initiators of the annual No-More-War demonstrations, which brought together between 100,000 and 200,000 people in Berlin in the early 1920s.15 At its foundation, the association recruited protagonists from different pacifist currents. This was evident in the membership of, on the one hand, Walter Schücking, an expert in international law, and on the other hand Helene Stöcker, an advocate of conscientious objection and a major figure in German feminism. However, by the early 1920s many organisational pacifists had left the association, whereas radical pacifists began to play a more prominent part. The increasing significance of ‘radical’ or ‘integral’ pacifists within the DLM and DFG had implications for the German peace movement as a whole. In 1929, tensions between the different camps caused the dissolution of the German Peace Cartel, which had represented a wide spectrum of German peace groups.16 Similar rifts occurred in other peace movements, exemplified by new associations such as the War Resisters League in the United States (1923), the Ligue internationale des combattants de la paix in France (1930) and the Peace Pledge Union in Great Britain (1934).17 The DLM had been involved in the German Peace Cartel from the start, with Gerlach acting as its deputy president. Being increasingly linked to integral pacifism, the association became party to the inner-pacifist struggles. In 1926 Kurt Hiller – leader of the Gruppe revolutionärer Pazifisten – brought the DLM

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into crisis by revealing that it had received donations from abroad, implying that its representatives were agents of foreign governments.18 Although the DLM stressed that the donations had come from pacifist groupings,19 subsequent investigations brought to light financial irregularities. These revelations triggered the withdrawal of some older members and entrenched the DLM more firmly in the ‘integral’ camp.20 The association’s history thus exemplifies a wider issue, namely the ‘ardent devotion with which Weimar pacifism carried out feuds against itself ’.21 The DLM’s transnational features: from its beginnings to the Ruhr crisis As early as 1923, German government officials noted the association’s ‘close relations with a range of foreign societies’.22 The involvement in transnational networks was evident from the beginning. During the war, the BNV established contact with the Fabian Society and the Union of Democratic Control in Britain, and with the pacifist author Romain Rolland in France.23 BNV delegations participated in the Peace Congress organised by the Dutch Anti-Orloog Raad in The Hague (April 1915), the International Trade Union Congress in Amsterdam (February 1921), and the Universal Peace Congress in Luxembourg (August 1921).24 In December 1921, the BNV member Harry Graf Kessler attended a meeting of the Democratic International, which had been founded by the French Catholic pacifist Marc Sangnier.25 On the occasion of this trip, Kessler led talks with representatives of the Ligue des Droits de l’Homme, laying the groundwork for the Paris visit of a BNV delegation. As the fruit of these efforts, the French and German associations issued a joint declaration in January 1922.26 Having adopted its new name, the Deutsche Liga für Menschenrechte contributed to the foundation of the International Federation of Human Rights Leagues in May 1922. The DLM supported the federation financially, and in the 1930s, after being forced into exile by the Nazis, Gerlach was involved in its secretariat.27 The DLM was not the only German peace association to form part of an international structure. The International Peace Bureau continued the prewar tradition of Universal Peace Congresses, and had several German affiliates. With German involvement, integral pacifists developed and maintained separate structures, from the War Resisters’ International (1921) to the Joint Peace Council in Vienna (1930). The League of Nations societies – for instance Britain’s League of Nations Union, the French Association française pour la Société des Nations and the Deutsche Liga für Völkerbund – also established an international federation.28 Feminism and religion served

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as further stimuli for the creation of international peace organisations: the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom, founded during the war, soon had members in around 30 European countries. Christian peace organisations such as the International Fellowship of Reconciliation and the World Alliance for Promoting Friendship Through the Churches also expanded during the interwar years.29 DLM members played an active role in transnational pacifist networks: the association was affiliated to the International Peace Bureau, of which Gerlach was a member. Until 1926, he also acted as correspondent for the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.30 The 1924 Universal Peace Congress in Berlin, with the Reichstag as venue and the Ligue’s president Ferdinand Buisson as a key speaker, was partly made possible through the DLM’s connections. The connection to the Ligue was significant because the latter was a genuine mass organisation: in the mid-1920s, it had about 130,000 members and 1,300 branches in France, counting prominent radical and socialist politicians amongst its ranks. Politicians such as Edouard Herriot and Paul Painlevé held Ligue committee positions, as did Louise Aline Menard-Dorian, who hosted the ‘salon of republican France’.31 Founded in 1898 in the wake of the Dreyfus affair, the French association covered a wide spectrum of political causes. Peace activism was not one of the association’s initial ends, yet the association engaged with the networks of pre-1914 pacifism.32 During the war, the Ligue supported the Union sacrée government, yet it criticised censorship and other aspects of the war effort, called for a conciliatory post-war settlement, and addressed issues such as national self-determination.33 In the interwar years, the Ligue engaged in local peace campaigning, and its publications addressed the question of Franco-German relations.34 Accordingly, in 1922 the French peace leader Théodore Ruyssen described the association as a ‘pacifist power of the first order’.35 This also meant, however, that by the 1930s, the Ligue was affected by the divisions between ‘moderate’ and ‘integral’ pacifists. The strength of the transnational links between the DLM and the Ligue was tested early on. After the occupation of the Ruhr region by French and Belgian troops in January 1923, German pacifists had to tread a narrow line. Whilst promoting Franco-German reconciliation, they did not approve of French military action and had to take into account ‘the violence of national feeling’ across class divisions in Germany.36 When the German government proclaimed passive resistance, most German peace associations accepted it as a legitimate form of protest.37 The German Peace Cartel’s immediate

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response to the occupation was a letter to the German chancellor Cuno. It advised him to appeal to the Hague Tribunal or the International Court of Justice, and it rejected the ‘arousal of national passions or the use of senseless rumours’.38 A DLM representative on the Peace Cartel subsequently initiated a telegram to Hjalmar Branting, asking the Swedish internationalist to take the case before the League of Nations (Sweden had joined the League Council a few weeks earlier).39 The search for potential mediators was underlined by the German pacifists’ proposal that the International Peace Bureau take joint action with League of Nations societies and the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom.40 The French and German Human Rights Leagues contributed to this flurry of activity. The Ligue condemned Poincaré’s policies, and Victor Basch, one of its founding figures, represented this stance at a congress of French peace societies. His successful motion described the Ruhr occupation as justified from a strictly juridical standpoint, but as ‘contrary to the interests and good reputation of France and the cause of world peace’.41 In Germany, the DLM attacked acts of sabotage undertaken by nationalist circles, stressing that these measures undermined the policy of passive resistance.42 Cooperation between the two associations enabled the French pacifist Paul Langevin to attend a No-More-War meeting at the peak of the Ruhr crisis, although the authorities had forbidden him to address open-air demonstrations.43 According to Hellmut von Gerlach, the French guest met with an enthusiastic reception.44 Despite many setbacks, Gerlach later concluded that ‘the seed that had been planted’ had survived the Ruhr crisis.45 Subsequently, the policies of Gustav Stresemann and the electoral victory of the Cartel des gauches in France, which included several Ligue members, provided a more favourable setting for Franco-German reconciliation. Despite pacifist criticism of Stresemann’s policies, Ossietzky acknowledged his contribution to Franco-German understanding in his obituary for the German politician.46 An ongoing commitment to transnational exchange Both before and after the Ruhr crisis, the DLM organised ‘border-crossing’ actions for international understanding, drawing on its close links with the Ligue. On 11 June 1922 it held a one-day conference in the Reichstag with speeches by Kessler, Einstein, French Ligue representatives and the Reichstag president Paul Löbe.47 After the event, the DLM organised a lecture tour involving Ferdinand Buisson, Victor Basch and Henri Guernut. Another

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speaker series took place around the Universal Peace Congress of 1924. French guests were paired with DLM members, a special combination being that of two former war generals, Martial-Justin Verraux and Paul Freiherr von Schoenaich.48 The organisation of these talks was no small achievement: the authorities often refused permission, and events with French speakers frequently provoked violent reactions from right-wing groups. In October 1924, Basch’s talk in Potsdam required the protection of the republican Reichsbanner, and subsequent lecture series also met with hostility.49 Faced with these odds, Gerlach described the 1924 lecture tours with Buisson, Basch and Verraux as a ‘triumphant pilgrimage’; in Essen alone, Buisson spoke to an estimated audience of 1,500 workers at the Krupp plant.50 The nationalist press nonetheless continued to discredit the DLM as an ‘antiGerman French propaganda enterprise’.51 In 1926, for example, an article in the völkisch newspaper Der Tag asserted that the organisation had hosted a French Revolution-themed ball at its headquarters, denouncing one of the DLM’s secretaries as a ‘fanatic Frenchling’ with a tricolour in his office.52 In France, L’Ami du Peuple – a widely read newspaper on the extreme right – mocked Victor Basch as ‘Herr Basch’ because of his promotion of FrancoGerman understanding and his visits to Germany.53 The French lectures in Germany were reciprocated by the DLM: in 1924, representatives of the German association embarked on speaking tours of France. Gerlach, who had previously attended a Ligue committee meeting during the Ruhr crisis, also addressed the French association’s annual congress that year.54 A memorandum of October 1924 underlines the transnational dynamics of such exchanges: on the same day that Buisson was in Stuttgart for a German event, the DLM representative Robert Kuczyinski paid a visit to the Ligue secretariat in Paris, and the German pacifist Emil Gumbel was in the middle of a tour of eight French cities.55 Although disruptions to speaker meetings in France were less frequent than in Germany, Gumbel met with opposition in some cities, and not all Ligue branches were prepared to host an event with him.56 In spite of such obstacles, these trips fulfilled an important function: they provided speakers with the opportunity to inform foreign audiences about political developments in their country. After returning home, the visitors were able to report back on the insights gained abroad.57 Martin Ceadel has suggested that ‘even when they have found themselves working with the grain of public opinion, peace campaigners have rarely contributed as much to political outcomes as they have understandably

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liked to believe’.58 Indeed, campaigners such as Gerlach and publications such as the DLM bulletin Die Menschenrechte were likely to exaggerate the success of their events and the enthusiasm with which pacifist speeches had been received. Nonetheless historians have acknowledged that activists such as Gerlach, Kessler, Buisson and Basch contributed to the ‘relative stabilisation of political relations between Germany and France’.59 The potential significance of the work of the DLM and the Ligue is reflected in their involvement in the release of the last 30 German prisoners of war in France in 1922.60 Buisson, together with the German peace leader Ludwig Quidde, was awarded the 1927 Nobel Peace Prize for his contribution to Franco-German reconciliation. Beyond such explicitly political events, the DLM promoted another form of transnational contact – namely exchanges of schoolchildren. In the interwar years, youth exchanges were a concern for pacifists and internationalists from different ideological camps. In 1925, for instance, the Internationale Arbeiterhilfe (Workers’ International Relief ), a Cominternrelated organisation, organised a six-month French exchange for German children.61 From a different political angle, the Deutsche Liga für Völkerbund aimed to launch a letter exchange between German and French school students.62 One of the most widely reported youth meetings was organised by the Catholic pacifist Marc Sangnier: in 1926 a ‘Locarno of Youth’ in the French town of Bierville brought toghether over 5,000 people.63 DLM representatives contributed to the exchange of the Internationale Arbeiterhilfe and to Sangnier’s event.64 Moreover, the association launched its own Franco-German school exchange in 1926.65 This peaked in 1929, with 350 participants on each side, and continued until 1931. The association’s bulletin published the participants’ positive testimonies, presenting these events as an important ‘building block for genuine reconciliation between the peoples’.66 However, because of the limited nature of such exchanges, the majority of the German population remained unaffected, as reflected in Tucholsky’s bitter remarks: The children will come back home, and once again it will not be permitted to take photos of them on the German railway station, so that no-one in Germany will get to see how the French, the cannibals, care for children.67

As Dieter Riesenberger has argued, events such as the ‘Locarno of Youth’ depended on the actual Locarno Pact and the rapprochement policies

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of Briand and Stresemann.68 This interplay with official policies may explain why it was more difficult for the DLM to launch Polish-German reconciliation efforts. Many German pacifists found it difficult to accept Germany’s eastern borders, and were reluctant to establish closer links with Polish groups.69 Gerlach himself described the post-war borders as ‘relatively just’,70 and Hans Schwann, a former committee member and secretary at the DLM’s Berlin office, campaigned for the recognition of Poland’s western borders. Significantly, Gerlach had been under-secretary in the Prussian Ministry of the Interior in 1919 and negotiated with the new Polish administration about food supplies for the German population in Upper Silesia. However, for this fact alone, he was a target of the nationalist German press. Generally speaking, the DLM was more conciliatory vis-àvis Poland than were many other German peace groups.71 Its initial efforts included the formation of a German-Polish study group in 1919, and the participation of members of the Warsaw soldiers’ council at the BNV’s Berlin convention in 1919. However, it was only after the foundation of a Polish Human Rights League in 1925 that closer links with Polish activists were established, and it took until the spring of 1929 for a lecture tour with Polish deputies and members of the Polish Peace Society to take place. While speaker tours and youth exchanges were transnational phenomena, the DLM also benefited from the transnational transmission of pacifist strategies. In the second half of the 1920s it was involved in the attempt to implement Arthur Ponsonby’s Peace Letter campaign in Germany. Ponsonby, a British Labour politician, had previously corresponded with Lehmann-Russbüldt and emerged as Britain’s ‘leading pacifist’ in the second half of the 1920s.72 By December 1927, he had collected 128,770 signatures for a letter in which the signatories pledged themselves not to participate in military activity in the event of a war. Proposals for such a campaign had circulated in Germany for several years.73 A German event which outlined Ponsonby’s endeavours inspired the German pacifists to launch a pledge campaign, based on the acceptance of conscientious objection and of a general strike against war.74 In 1926–27, local committees of the DLM, the DFG and a social-democratic veterans’ organisation, the Reichsbund der Kriegsbeschädigten, ran a trial campaign in the district of Zwickau. Given disagreements amongst pacifists as well as logistical challenges, the collection of 86,942 ‘pledges for peace’ in the Zwickau district (out of 523,392 citizens) was remarkable.75 Although similar efforts were launched in western Germany, internal (pacifist) and external (political) obstacles prevented the

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campaign’s implementation nation-wide. Lehmann-Russbüldt admitted early on that such campaigns could only have limited success, unless accompanied by peace education and backed up by substantial funding.76 Moreover, as Reinhold Lütgemeier-Davin has pointed out in his study of German interwar pacifism, the campaign’s focus on conscientious objection proved problematic for the representatives of organisational pacifism. Seen from this angle, the campaign was another stage in the fragmentation of the pacifist camp.77 In Britain, however, this approach to war prevention continued with the foundation of the Peace Pledge Union and the collection of over 100,000 individual peace pledges in the 1930s.78 Pacifist perspectives on the post-war order George Mosse has suggested that ‘[p]acifism was handicapped from the start in a defeated and humiliated nation where the question of war guilt was an emotional issue on which all political movements had to take a stand.’79 The DLM’s approach to international order clearly sat at odds with the widespread rejection of the post-war settlement in Germany – a position which Hans Mommsen has described as the Weimar Republic’s ‘inner rejection of peace’.80 Hostility to the Versailles treaty was shared by many German pacifists: in a National Assembly speech of May 1919, the DFG president Ludwig Quidde urged the German government not to sign the agreement, and the Reichstag president Paul Löbe described Versailles as a ‘dictated peace’.81 In contrast, the DLM refused to condemn the treaty outright. DLM activists differed in their assessment – some accepted it, whereas others sought its revision by peaceful means. The Weltbühne expressed its ‘faith in the ultimate wisdom of the Versailles treaty’,82 and Ossietzky even described it as the ‘most favourable of all possible peace settlements’.83 Differing viewpoints notwithstanding, DLM members were united in their opposition to nationalist anti-Versailles propaganda. This was captured in Lehmann-Russbüldt’s criticism that right-wing circles had managed ‘to convince the entire German people, including the Communists, that the Versailles Treaty alone was responsible for the economic, social and political misfortunes of the Reich’.84 The German objections to article 231 of the Versailles Treaty – the socalled war-guilt clause – have been widely studied.85 Efforts to combat the notion of German responsibility for the war involved Foreign Ministry officials, archivists and historians, as well as ‘war guilt associations’.86 In contrast, the DLM worked with individuals who, to some extent, accepted

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German responsibility, for instance Georg Friedrich Nicolai and the pedagogue Friedrich Wilhelm Foerster.87 Gerlach stressed the central role of Germany in the escalation of the July Crisis, claiming that ‘at this particular moment, the others were as innocent as angels’ (reine Unschuldsengel).88 Kessler estimated that ‘Germany may have well had the primary, but not the sole guilt for the outbreak of war’.89 Lehmann-Russbüldt saw the Versailles Treaty as the ‘consequence of a megalomaniac Prussian-German policy of power and conquest’.90 In ascribing prime responsibility to the ‘old and militaristic Germany of the autocrats’, the DLM distinguished between the German government and the German people.91 These observations mirrored the French Ligue’s emphasis on the existence of ‘another’ Germany, different from the militarist circles which were responsible for the Reich’s war policies. A Ligue event in Pont-Saint-Vincent, a small town in Lorraine, exemplified this discourse: the speaker distinguished between ‘the Germany of Potsdam – militaristic, monarchist and inspired by the spirit of revenge; and the Germany of Weimar – republican and well-convinced by the necessity of an entente with France’.92 The Cahiers des Droits de l’Homme, published as a successor to the Ligue’s bulletin from 1920, addressed the question of war guilt.93 However, as both William Irvine and Norman Ingram have pointed out, that question was ‘a perennial and divisive issue’ for the Ligue.94 Within the association, a minority group questioned the premises on which France had entered the conflict. Being connected to the Société d’études documentaires et critiques sur la guerre, this faction contradicted the views of Victor Basch and other leading Ligue figures, who had accepted their government’s claims. Given the contentious nature of this question, the joint 1922 declaration of the German and French associations did not contain a clear statement on war guilt itself. Instead, it called for an independent inquiry into the causes of war and the release of all relevant government documents.95 In 1925, this demand was renewed in another joint declaration of the two Human Rights Leagues.96 The DLM enabled Henri Guernut, Basch and other French activists to present their views on these issues to a German audience. This, however, was far from universally popular amongst German pacifists: the ‘revolutionary pacifist’ Kurt Hiller, for instance, argued that German peace organisations should not have provided Basch with a forum.97 The challenges of transnational pacifist dialogue on war guilt became evident in a dispute between representatives of the Bund Neues Vaterland and

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Britain’s Union of Democratic Control (UDC). The UDC believed that no state was solely responsible for the conflict, and that the problems had been systemic. They drew attention to more general economic and political causes as well as to the detrimental effects of secret diplomacy and the inadequate nature of the old international structures. Arthur Ponsonby summarised this view in a long letter to Gerlach: ‘The people who pile gunpowder in a room are far more to blame than the man who drops the match … no isolated incident, no letters, telegrams, negotiations, mobilizations, ultimatums, etc. can be detached as the root cause.’98 E.D. Morel, co-founder of the UDC, expressed a similar opinion in a letter to the Austrian-German pacifist and Nobel Peace laureate Alfred Fried.99 The disagreement between British pacifists and the BNV was a public matter: Ponsonby and Morel gave an interview to the Berliner Tageblatt, in which they alluded to difficulties with the BNV and expressed their disappointment that some German pacifists saw Germany as the sole culprit.100 In other words, the UDC charged the BNV with making matters more difficult for pacifist propaganda in Britain. Ponsonby even suggested that the BNV’s stance prevented the latter ‘from participating in a great international movement’. The BNV’s supporters saw it the other way round, objecting to Morel’s ‘deception’ (Irreführung) and the ‘exploitation of his false opinion by German reactionaries’.101 The letter exchange between Ponsonby and Gerlach ultimately revealed a desire for dialogue: both emphasised their willingness to meet and present a more unified pacifist front. Nonetheless the case illustrates one of the peculiarities of pacifism after World War I, as Ponsonby noted: It is a usual phenomenon in war that the progressive forces in different countries should each time blame their own government and point out the reasons for ascribing responsibility for the catastrophe to them. It follows therefore that the reactionary militarist forces in each country take every opportunity of quoting from the progressive parties in other countries.102

This, it has to be said, was a concern which did not affect all peace groups – after all, many peace activists had found it difficult to condemn their own governments back in 1914. There were further challenges to promoting acceptance of the post-war order: article 231 of the Versailles Treaty connected the emotive issue of ‘war guilt’ with the duty to pay reparations.103 The DLM supported the

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fulfilment policy of the Wirth/Rathenau government and drew attention to the devastation Germany had caused in northern France. The joint declaration of the French and German Leagues in January 1922, as well as Kessler’s speech at the Franco-German Reichstag event in June that year, described the payment of reparations as a moral rather than a purely legal issue.104 This stance was backed by the Weltbühne: Istvan Deak has suggested that ‘there was no issue of the Weltbühne at that time which would not have argued ... the possibility of paying reparations’.105 The DLM rejected the notion that Germany’s economic problems were due to the reparations issue. It stressed that it was in the interest of the creditor countries that the German economy should not collapse.106 DLM committee member Robert Kuczynski published the Deutsch-französische Wirtschaftskorrespondenz, in which he explored the possibilities of fulfilling the reparation terms;107 according to the DLM, international dialogue was a prerequisite for any revision of those terms. The opposite was also true: only with the London reparations settlement of 1924 and the Locarno Pact of 1925 did a ‘real’ peace settlement emerge, as Patrick Cohrs has argued.108 The championing of international norms was intertwined with the hopes vested in the League of Nations. The Deutsche Liga für Völkerbund provided a link between the Weimar parties, the German peace movement and League of Nations supporters in other countries. The organisation operated in close connection with the German foreign office, whilst maintaining a degree of independence.109 However, the connection of the League of Nations Covenant to the Versailles Treaty, as well as ongoing German exclusion from the new organisation, meant that advocacy for German membership was not a popular cause. Subsequent developments in Eupen-Malmédy and Upper Silesia hardly increased the League of Nations’ popularity in Germany. Many peace activists were critical of the actual shape of the League. Kessler had drafted an alternative plan, proposing a world parliament in which all social groups would be represented. His Guidelines for a true League of Nations were supported by the DLM and approved at the 1920 German Peace Congress in Braunschweig. Once the League was fully operative, pacifists argued for modifications in its structure, for instance the scrapping of permanent seats on the League Council. At its annual meetings, DLM members affirmed their vision of developing the League from a ‘cabinet of great powers’ into a ‘world parliament’.110 Despite their misgivings, German pacifists campaigned for their country’s accession to the League of Nations. In 1923, the DLM organised a public

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demonstration in favour of League membership, meeting with a considerable public response.111 It also urged members of the Reichstag to apply for League membership to overcome the Ruhr crisis.112 In such campaigns, the DLM could rely on its French partner organisation, whose 1921 congress had called for Germany’s admission.113 Through contacts between the Ligue and the Cartel des gauches government, the DLM committee managed to arrange a meeting with prime minister Edouard Herriot during the Fifth Session of the League of Nations General Assembly in September 1924. On this occasion, Herriot expressed his support for German accession.114 After Germany had joined the League in 1926, pacifist work shifted to other issues. The cause of disarmament played an important role in this respect, in line with the broader campaigns launched by pacifist and internationalist groups in the second half of the 1920s.115 Furthermore, the question of potential League wars of sanction became a hotly debated topic, with some pacifists calling for the establishment of a League of Nations army, whereas others interpreted this as a new form of militarism. Finally, there was the notion of a ‘United States of Europe’ and its potential role in the international order. Lehmann-Russbüldt had already published a pamphlet on this matter in 1914, and when Richard Coudenhove-Kalergi’s Pan-European Movement gained momentum, the DLM established links with it. Plans for European integration were debated at the 1924 Universal Peace Congress in Berlin and at the Brussels congress of the International Federation of Human Rights Leagues in 1926. The Leagues envisaged the establishment of a European tariff union, followed by the free movement of citizens and the transfer of certain national prerogatives to an international level.116 In political and geographical terms, the visions of the DLM were broader than the aims of the Pan-Europeans. The call for European integration was renewed in 1930, when the French and German Human Rights Leagues published a joint declaration on the occasion of the Rhineland evacuation, calling on the French and German governments to help establish a European federation within the framework of the League of Nations. Basch was a vocal supporting of this project. Returning from a visit to Germany in February 1930, he stressed that within such a body, ‘national enmities would dissolve by themselves’ and that the abolition of tariff barriers ‘would establish hitherto unknown economic prosperity on our continent’.117 Later that year, he reiterated this view, stressing that a European federation should pose no threat to the League of Nations, but would have to be ‘part of this organism’. According to Basch, such a federation

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should not be run by government representatives alone, as this would repeat structural problems which had previously undermined popular enthusiasm for the Geneva institutions. These concerns notwithstanding, he expressed the hope that European integration might ‘heal some of the most burning wounds which the treaties have inflicted on the vanquished nations’.118 Obstacles and limitations Why did the outcomes of DLM campaigns remain relatively limited? This question is particularly relevant if one considers how British pacifists and internationalists influenced debates on international politics and the League of Nations.119 Considering that neither the DLM nor other German peace associations had large memberships, the absence of strong links to political parties was a significant factor. Before World War I, the German peace movement had been linked to centre-left liberalism, an alliance that was embodied by Ludwig Quidde, the doyen of the German peace movement. After the war, both Quidde and Gerlach were involved in the foundation of the German Democratic Party (DDP). Yet the party remained reluctant to embrace pacifist policies and continued to support defence minister Otto Gessler, who was the object of antimilitarist criticism. The divide grew wider in 1930, when the DDP reorganised itself as the Deutsche Staatspartei, taking on board the nationalist Jungdeutscher Orden.120 The process of estrangement was underlined by Gerlach’s departure from the DDP in 1922; six years later, Schoenaich – who by then had emerged as a leader of ‘integral’ pacifism – was asked to leave the party. Pacifism rarely appealed to the DDP’s core electorate, as Schoenaich and Kessler discovered when standing as parliamentary candidates in 1924 and 1925. The BNV/DLM’s links with German socialism dated back to the war years: anti-war socialists such as Kurt Eisner and Eduard Bernstein, who in 1917 established the Independent Social Democratic Party (USPD), contributed to the BNV’s foundation. After the war, the peace movement and social democracy became more closely aligned.121 Several socialist politicians were DLM committee members, including the Reichstag member Paul Levi, the Prussian deputy Heinrich Ströbel and the Saxon politician Hugo Freund. In 1925, the DLM activist Arnold Freymuth was elected vice-president of the Reichsbanner, a republican defence organisation which was close to the Social Democratic Party (SPD) and also featured Gerlach and Kessler on its board. However, the SPD did not embrace pacifist policies wholeheartedly,

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even when it took up pacifist issues such as opposing the building of ‘Battle Cruiser A’.122 In the late 1920s, both the SPD and the Deutsche Staatspartei prohibited their members from being part of the DFG, after the latter had embraced integral pacifism. Parties that combined pacifist and radical-republican concerns, for instance the Republikanische Partei (with Ossietzky) in 1923, the Radikaldemokratische Partei (with Gerlach) in 1930 and the Sozialistische Arbeiterpartei (with Ströbel and Schoenaich) in 1931, did not attract much electoral support. Moreover, there was little common ground with German communism: despite occasional cooperation in the second half of the 1920s, the communists considered war against ‘imperialist’ powers as legitimate, rejected the Versailles Treaty and the Young Plan, and were hostile to the DLM’s pro-French attitudes.123 German pacifists thus found themselves in a difficult position. During the later years of the Weimar Republic, the loss of electoral support for the parties which were closest to them complicated matters further. The limited appeal of pacifism can be linked to German perspectives on the war itself. In 1932 Ossietzky pointed to this aspect when denouncing the ‘popular idolisation of the soldier’s coat’ in Germany.124 Historians such as Richard Bessel have suggested that Germany did not make ‘the transition from a ‘war society’ (Kriegsgesellschaft) to a ‘peace society’ (Friedensgesellschaft)’, and Wolfram Wette has pointed to a ‘flood-like’ (flutartig) remilitarisation of public opinion in the 1920s.125 The war’s impact on German political culture had many dimensions, ranging from the way in which the ‘war experience’ continued to be celebrated in public commemorations to the stances adopted by the German Kriegervereine and their umbrella organisation, the Kyffhäuserbund.126 The appeal of war-related myths was also evident amongst the younger generation, with nationalist student groups gaining ground at universities. The problems faced by Emil Gumbel, a mathematician at Heidelberg University who was active in the DLM, demonstrate the obstacles for a republican and pacifist professor.127 Nationalist discourse juxtaposed the commitment of German soldiers at the front with images ‘of the demobilized hero of the trenches coming home to an unappreciative, disrespectful, scornful home front’.128 As early as 1919, the Bund Neues Vaterland attempted to counter the myth that German soldiers had been ‘stabbed in the back’ by unpatriotic revolutionaries at home.129 Whilst Erich Maria Remarque’s highly successful novel Im Westen nichts Neues (‘All Quiet on the Western Front’) seemed to undermine the

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glorification of war, it also triggered a large number of counter-publications. A film based on Remarque’s book was banned by the Republican Film Censorship Committee, and condemned even by the Communist party.130 The DLM was involved in the campaigns against its prohibition, organising 51 screenings with more than 30,000 visitors in 1931.131 There were pronounced differences between the obstacles encountered by German pacifists and the situation in France. As a frequent visitor to Paris, Gerlach came to the conclusion that ‘with few exceptions, the whole people can be regarded as pacifist’.132 Such comments cannot be detached from the German activist’s political concerns; however, several historians have stressed the extent of anti-war sentiment in interwar France. For instance, Antoine Prost’s work has shown that French veterans’ organisations embraced a ‘Fighting Man’s Antimilitarism’: even authoritarian ex-servicemen associations such as the Union Nationale des Combattants supported reconciliation and war-prevention policies.133 Furthermore, Jean-François Sirinelli has pointed to the ‘pacifist generation’ of students at the Khâgne and the École Normale Supérieure in this period.134 The challenges for German pacifists were underlined by the DLM’s struggle against the ‘Black Reichswehr’ – a campaign against the secret attempts to circumvent the Versailles Treaty’s restrictions on the German military. The DLM addressed this issue from 1925, publishing investigative studies and establishing a special committee on military matters.135 By revealing the activities of paramilitary troops and the illegal proliferation of weapons, German pacifists risked legal prosecution and the temporary suppression of their publications.136 Carl von Ossietzky’s imprisonment – which continued after 1933 and prevented him from accepting the 1935 Nobel Peace Prize – was due to a Weltbühne article on illegal airforce activities.137 Exiled DLM representatives encouraged the Ligue des Droits de l’Homme to take an active role in the Nobel nomination campaign for Ossietzky: Henri Guernut drafted a memorandum on Ossietzky’s pacifist credentials, and the Ligue subsequently forwarded it to French university professors who were entitled to put forward candidates for the Nobel Peace Prize.138 In his own letter to the Nobel committee, Basch praised the German journalist as a ‘martyr of peace’.139 Due to their antimilitarist activities in Weimar Germany, pacifists were vulnerable to being represented as ‘unpatriotic’ or even ‘treasonous’. After the ‘Black Reichswehr’ revelations in 1925, right-wing newspapers denounced the DLM and its members as ‘Liga der Landesverräter’, ‘vaterlandslose

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Pazifisten’, or simply ‘Landesverräter’.140 In response, activists such as Gerlach emphasised that their criticism was directed at a domestic audience: he refused to answer questions on German military activity at events in France.141 Significantly, the DLM portrayed its campaigns as a patriotic duty. It argued that secret military activities were bound to undermine international confidence in Germany’s trustworthiness and cited Basch as a French witness.142 The pacifist critique of secret armaments was also meant to protect the republic from a military ‘state-within-the-state’. As early as 1920, Ossietzky had suggested that the true enemies of the German people were the nationalist and military circles within their own country.143 This republican take on patriotism was captured in Kurt Grossmann’s provocative phrase of the ‘duty to treason’ (Pflicht zum Landesverrat). Grossman, at this stage the DLM’s secretary-general, thus redefined ‘patriotism’ in connection with the acceptance of international norms.144 The attempt to challenge the right’s claim on patriotism was also illustrated by Lehmann-Russbüldt’s attack on the ‘International of the Armaments Industry’. Basch, after a visit to Germany, praised the German pacifist who had ‘revealed the cynicism with which ... the arms manufacturers put the fulfilment of their vile interests before all elementary patriotic questions’.145 Another light that failed? From the mid-1920s onwards, defence of the republic became an increasingly central issue for the DLM. In a joint declaration of May 1925, the DLM and Ligue expressed concern about the election of Hindenburg as president of the republic.146 One year later, the annual No-More-War demonstrations on 1 August ceased, with the intention of boosting the turnout for the celebrations of the republic’s constitution on 11 August.147 In 1927, the DLM created a ‘political advisory council’, and revised its constitution, stressing the ‘protection and defence of human rights’ as central aims.148 It is particularly striking that this shift emerged in what is often regarded as the Weimar Republic’s most stable period. After the fall of Weimar democracy, DLM members, especially Gerlach and Lehmann-Russbüldt, used their French and British contacts for the benefit of German exiles. In cooperation with the Ligue, the DLM’s newly constituted Paris section was a contact point and advocacy group for people who had fled Nazi Germany.149 This mirrored the experience of the DLM’s Italian counter-part, the Lega Italiana dei Diritti dell’Uomo, which brought together anti-fascist exiles from the 1920s.150

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Seen from one angle, the case of the DLM seems to highlight the challenges for interwar pacifism in Germany: after all, the country’s domestic conditions hardly provided a favourable setting for effective peace propaganda. However, the association’s different levels of action reveal a more complex set-up: although the association itself was often marginalised and had little cachet in national politics, its contacts with the Ligue des Droits de l’Homme and the international peace movement opened up new campaigning opportunities. As a result, the DLM organised large-scale events and, on a limited scale, gained access to political elites abroad. While responding to national developments, it endeavoured to involve itself in a dialogue with partners in Paris, Geneva, London and Warsaw. The association aimed for an alternative to traditional foreign policy – through transnational contacts, it sought to effect the rapprochement of peoples rather than governments. However, this approach conflicted with the attempt to fight off charges of being ‘unpatriotic’. In this respect, the case of the DLM exemplifies the interdependence of national and transnational factors in pacifist campaigning. Activists had to address multiple constituencies at once: politicians and the public at home, partners abroad, and the new international institutions that had been created in the wake of World War I.

Notes 1.

2.

3.

Sandi Cooper, Patriotic Pacifism: Waging War on War in Europe, 1815-1914 (Oxford, 1991); Verdiana Gross, Le pacifisme européen: 1889–1914 (Brussels, 1994). For definitions, see Martin Ceadel, Thinking about Peace and War (Oxford, 1987); Karl Holl, ‘Pazifismus’, in Otto Brunner et al (eds.), Geschichtliche Grundbegriffe, Vol. 4 (Stuttgart, 1987), pp. 767–87. On the divisions within interwar pacifism, see Maurice Vaïsse (ed.), Le Pacifisme en Europe des années 1920 aux années 1950 (Brussels, 1993); Peter Brock and Nigel Young, Pacifism in the Twentieth Century (New York, 1999). For the terms ‘ancien style’ and ‘nouveau style’, see Norman Ingram, The Politics of Dissent: Pacifism in France 1919–1939 (Oxford 1991), pp. 9–11. For studies which offer a broader perspective on the contacts between French and German pacifists, see Ilde Gorguet, Les mouvements pacifistes et la réconciliation franco-allemande dans les années vingt (1919–1931) (Bern, 1999); Sophie Lorrain, Des pacifistes français et allemands, pionniers de l’entente franco-allemande, 1871–1925 (Paris, 2000). On Franco-German relations as a part of transnational history, see Hans Manfred Bock, ‘Transaktion, Transfer,

228

4.

5.

6.

7.

8.

9. 10.

Internationalism Reconfigured Netzwerkbildung: Konzepte einer Sozialgeschichte der transnationalen Kulturbeziehungen’, in idem (ed.), Französische Kultur im Berlin der Weimarer Republik: Kultureller Austausch und diplomatische Beziehungen (Tübingen, 2005), pp. 11–36; Michel Espagne and Michael Werner (eds.), Transferts: Les relations interculturelles dans l’espace franco-allemand (Paris, 1988); Michel Espagne, Les transferts culturels franco-allemands (Paris, 1999). See e.g. William Irvine, Between Justice and Politics: The Ligue des Droits de l’Homme, 1889–1945 (Stanford, CA, 2007); Norman Ingram, ‘A la recherché d’une guerre gagnéé: The Ligue des Droits de l’Homme and the war guilt question’, French History, vol. 24, no. 2 (2010), pp. 218–35; idem, ‘Selbstmord or euthanasia? Who killed the Ligue des Droits de l’Homme’, French History, vol. 22, no. 3 (2008), pp. 337–57. On the association’s archives, see Grégory Cingal and Sonia Combe (eds.), Retour de Moscou: Les archives de la Ligue des Droits de l’Homme 1890–1940 (Paris, 2004). For a special focus on the DLM’s political campaigns, see Hans Manfred Bock, ‘Heimatlose Republikaner in der Weimarer Republik: die Deutsche Liga für Menschenrechte (vormals Bund Neues Vaterland) in den deutschfranzösischen Beziehungen’, Lendemains, vol. 23 (1998), pp. 68–102. For a largely institutional overview, see Lothar Mertens, ‘Die Deutsche Liga für Menschenrechte in der Weimarer Republik’, in Bert Becker and Horst Lademacher (eds.), Geist und Gesellschaft im historischen Wandel: Facetten deutscher und europäischer Geschichte, 1789–1989 (Münster, 2000), pp. 257– 79. Erwin Gülzow, ‘Der Bund Neues Vaterland: Probleme der bürgerlichpazifistischen Demokratie im Ersten Weltkrieg’ (PhD thesis, Berlin, 1969), is a Marxist analysis of the association’s early years. Jürgen von Ungern-Sternberg, Der Aufruf ‘An die Kulturwelt!’: Das Manifest der 93 und die Anfänge der Kulturpropaganda im Ersten Weltkrieg (Stuttgart, 1996). James Shand, ‘Doves among the eagles: German pacifists and their government during World War I’, Journal of Contemporary History, vol. 10, no. 1 (1975), especially pp. 97–9. Deutsche Liga für Menschenrechte, Vorstand – Programm – Aufnahmebedingungen 1914–1924 – Satzungen – Beitrittserklärung (Berlin, 1925), p. 20. Cf. Otto Lehmann-Russbüldt, Der Kampf der deutschen Liga für Menschenrechte (vormals Bund Neues Vaterland) für den Weltfrieden (1914– 1927) (Berlin, 1927), p. 139. DLM, 40 Jahre Kampf um Menschenrechte (Berlin, 1953), p. 7. Memorandum of 27 July 1923 in Reichskommissar für Überwachung der öffentlichen Ordnung, dossier ‘Deutsche Liga für Menschenrechte’, R 1507, Bundesarchiv Berlin (henceforth RkÜöO). In Germany, the pacifist’s name was spelt ‘Lehmann-Rußbüldt’; this chapter opts for the spelling ‘LehmannRussbüldt’ which he himself used when campaigning and publishing in English. In 1926, Kurt Grossman succeeded him as secretary-general; see

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11.

12.

13.

14. 15.

16.

17. 18. 19. 20. 21. 22. 23. 24.

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Lothar Mertens, Unermüdlicher Kämpfer für Frieden und Menschenrechte: Leben und Wirken Kurt R. Grossman (Berlin, 1997), pp. 63–80. For these numbers, see Ingram, The Politics of Dissent, p. 23, and Dieter Riesenberger, Geschichte der Friedensbewegung (Göttingen, 1985), p. 160. On the history of the DFG, see Friedrich-Karl Scheer, Die Deutsche Friedensgesellschaft (1892–1933): Organisation, Ideologie, Politische Ziele (Frankfurt, 1981); for the period before 1914, see Roger Chickering, Imperial Germany and a World without War: The Peace Movement and German Society, 1892–1914 (Princeton, NJ, 1975). Walter Laqueur, Weimar: A Cultural History, 1918–1933 (London, 1974), p. 68. Cf. Istvan Deak, Weimar Germany’s Left-Wing Intellectuals: A Political History of the Weltbühne and its Circle (Berkeley, CA, 1968). The Weltbühne’s founding editor, Siegfried Jacobsohn, was also a (non-active) BNV/DLM member. On Tucholsky’s links to the peace movement, see Reinhold Lütgmeier-Davin, ‘Nie wieder Krieg! – Tucholskys Rolle innheralb der pazifistischen Organisationen der Weimarer Republik’, in Friedhelm Kreis and Ian King (eds.), Der Antimilitarist und Pazifist Tucholsky (St. Ingbert, 2008), pp. 57–81. On Einstein’s relations with the BNV, see Hubert Goenner and Giuseppe Castagnetti, ‘Albert Einstein as pacifist and democrat during World War I’, Science in Context, vol. 9, no. 4 (1999), pp. 325–86. Bock, ‘Heimatlose Republikaner’, p. 74. For comments on the transnational features of this movement, see Ilde Gorguet, ‘Nie-wieder-Krieg: une réaction à la guerre?’, Revue d’Histoire Diplomatique, vol. 109, no. 1 (1995), pp. 67–71. A key study on the Cartel also provides a detailed analysis of German interwar pacifism: Reinhold Lütgemeier-Davin, Pazifismus zwischen Kooperation und Konfrontation: Das Deutsche Friedenskartell in der Weimarer Republik (Cologne, 1982). Scott Bennett, Radical Pacifism: The War Resistance League and Gandhian Nonviolence in America, 1915–1963 (Syracuse, NY, 2003). Rolf von Bockel, Kurt Hiller und die Gruppe revolutionärer Pazifisten (1926– 1933) (Hamburg, 1990), p. 60. ‘Erklärung’, Die Menschenrechte, 1 November 1926. No. 42 in dossier 511 (‘Akten betreffend pazifistische Bestrebungen und Verbände’), Reichskanzlei, R431 (henceforth RK), Bundesarchiv Berlin. This is the way in which Holl has described interwar pacifism in Germany – see Karl Holl, Pazifismus in Deutschland (Frankfurt, 1988), p. 146. Memorandum of 18 March 1927, RKÜöO, no. 3. Cf. Pierre Grappin, Le Bund Neues Vaterland: Ses rapports avec Romain Rolland (Lyon, 1952), especially pp. 38–70. See e.g. Shand, ‘Doves among eagles’, p. 97; Karl Holl, Ludwig Quidde (1858– 1941): Eine Biographie (Droste: Düsseldorf, 2007), pp. 176–8; LehmannRussbüldt, ‘Dritter Weltfriedenskongress’, Weltbühne, 28 December 1922.

230 25.

26.

27.

28.

29.

30.

31. 32. 33.

34.

35.

36.

Internationalism Reconfigured Gorguet, Mouvements pacifistes, p. 23. For Sangnier’s role in a broader political and chronological context, see James McMillan, ‘France’, in Tom Buchanan and Martin Conway (eds.), Political Catholicism in Europe 1918–1965 (Oxford, 1996), pp. 34–69. ‘Für eine Verständigung mit Frankreich! An die Demokratien Deutschlands und Frankreichs!’; see Kurt Grossmann, Ossietzky, ein deutscher Patriot (Munich, 1963), pp. 449–59; Holl, Ludwig Quidde, pp. 317–9. In 1931, its envisaged financial contribution to the International Federation exceeded that of the other non-French affiliates by a wide margin: Fédération Internationales des Ligues pour la Défense des Droits de l’Homme et du Citoyen, ‘Compte-rendu de la séance du conseil du 26 janvier 1931’, in Fonds delta rés. 798/54 ‘Ligue internationale des Droits de l’Homme’, BDIC. On Gerlach’s involvement, see e.g. minutes of 7 February 1935, in ibid. Joachim Wintzer, Deutschland und der Völkerbund (Paderborn, 2006), pp. 255–7; cf. Ingram, Politics of Dissent, p. 22, and Helen McCarthy’s contribution to this volume. On the latter, see Julian Jenkins, ‘A forgotten challenge to German nationalism: the World Alliance for International Friendship Through the Churches’, Australian Journal of Politics and History, vol. 37, no. 2 (1991), pp. 286–301. On the Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom and its expansion beyond Europe, see Marie Sandell’s contribution to this volume. Hellmut von Gerlach, Ein Demokrat kommentiert Weimar: die Berichte Hellmut von Gerlachs an die Carnegie-Friedensstiftung in New York 1922–1930, ed. Karl Holl and Adolf Wild (Bremen, 1973). Gerlach, ‘Die Herberge der Pazifisten’, Weltbühne, 9 July 1929. Irvine, Between Justice and Politics, p. 132. As an example, see Henri Guernut, La Ligue des Droits de l’homme, la guerre et la paix (Paris, 1918); on self-determination, see Emmanuel Naquet, ‘La Ligue des Droits de l’Homme. De la défense de l’individu a la défense des peoples? (1898–1919)’, Lendemains, vol. 23 (1998), pp. 14–27;. Norman Ingram, ‘Defending the rights of man: the Ligue des Droits de l’Homme and the problem of peace’, in Peter Brock and Thomas Socknat (eds.), Challenge to Mars: Essays on Pacifism from 1918 to 1945 (Toronto, 1999), pp. 117–33; Roland Faivre, ‘Le pacifisme et la LDH en CharenteInférieure pendant les années 1920’, Le Mouvement Social, no. 183 (1998), pp. 135–8; François Beilecke, ‘Der Deutschlanddiskurs in den Cahiers des Droits de l’Homme 1920 bis 1930: Begründungsstrategien der Ligue des Droits de l’Homme für eine deutsch-französische Annäherung’, Lendemains, no. 23 (1998), pp. 42–67. Théodore Ruyssen, ‘Frankreich’, in Walter Fabian and Kurt Lenz (eds.), Die Friedensbewegung: ein Handbuch der Weltfriedensströmungen der Gegenwart (Berlin, 1922), p. 250. F.L. Carsten, Britain and the Weimar Republic: The British Documents (London, 1984), p. 130. Carsten’s comments specifically refer to German socialists.

Reconciliation and the Post-War Order 37. 38. 39. 40.

41.

42. 43. 44. 45. 46. 47. 48.

49.

50. 51. 52. 53. 54. 55.

231

Lütgemeier-Davin, Pazifismus, p. 223–4. On the debates amongst German pacifists, see also Holl, Ludwig Quidde, pp. 329–36. Letter Quidde to Cuno, 20 January 1923, in RK, doss. 510, no. 136–7. Wintzer, Weimarer Republik und der Völkerbund, p. 299. Letter Quidde to Golay, 25 June 1923. On the Peace Bureau’s stance, see, ‘Aufruf des Internationalen Friedensbüros an die Regierungen und an den Rat des Völkerbundes’, 29 January 1923, signed by Henri La Fontaine and Henri Golay, both documents in IPM/IPB, 318/319, League of Nations Archives, United Nations Library, Geneva. See pamphlet ‘Le Xe Congrès francais’. The congress was held on 5 and 6 May 1923 at the Musée Social in Paris. On the Ligue’s reaction, including a French event with Gerlach, see Gorguet, Mouvements pacifistes, pp. 41–3. Cf. Lorrain, Des pacifistes français et allemands, pp. 198–205. Leaflet An die Funktionäre der demokratisch-republikanischen Parteien!, July 1923, RKÜöO, no. 18. Letter of Auswärtiges Amt of 24 July 1923, RKÜöO, no. 13. On this episode, see Gorguet, Mouvements pacifistes, pp. 44–6. Gerlach, Ein Demokrat, p. 89. Idem, Von rechts nach links (Zürich, 1937), p. 266. Carl v. Ossietzky, ‘Abschied von Stresemann’, Weltbühne, 8 October 1929. Scheer, DFG, p. 452. Cf. Paul Löbe’s memoirs: Der Weg war lang: Lebenserinnerungen (3rd edn., Berlin, 1954), pp. 125–6. Thomas Lory, ‘Symbolische Gesten: Paul Freiherr von Schoenaich und die französischen Friedensgeneräle Martial-Justin Verraux (1855–1939) und Alexandre Percin (1846–1928)’, in Wolfram Wette (ed.), Pazifistische Offiziere in Deutschland 1871–1933 (Bremen, 1999), pp. 218–29. Kuczynski, Deutschland und Frankreich, p. 95. On public opposition and disruptions, see e.g. the report on a meeting with Schoenaich and Guernut in Hamburg, Vossische Zeitung, 7 August 1924, and ‘Die Basch-Vorträge’, Die Menschenrechte, 1 July 1928. Cf. letter of the Reich Minister of the Interior, 11 October 1924, RK no. 511, no. 119 and the account in Gorguet, Mouvements pacifistes, pp. 121–7. On the Reichstag event and the subsequent speaker tours, see also Lorrain, Des pacifistes français et allemands, pp. 205–9. Gerlach, Ein Demokrat kommentiert Weimar, p. 124. Tägliche Rundschau, 27 December 1926 (cf. RKÜöO, no. 225). ‘Merkwürdige Anwälte der Republik’, Der Tag, 12 October 1926 (cf. RKÜöO, no. 216). Cf. Basch, ‘Retour de l’Allemagne’, La Volonté, 3 February 1930. Vossische Zeitung, 24 December 1924 (cf. RKÜöÖ, no. 72). Letter to Henri Guernut, 13 October 1924, in Fonds delta rés. 798/6, ‘Correspondance des membres du Comité Central: Henri Guernut’, Bibliothèque Documentaire Internationale Contemporaine (BDIC), Nanterre.

232 56.

57.

58. 59.

60. 61. 62. 63. 64. 65. 66. 67. 68.

69.

70. 71. 72.

Internationalism Reconfigured Arthur D. Brenner, Emil J. Gumbel: Weimar German Pacifist and Professor (Boston, MA, 2001), p. 50. The Bordeaux and Parthenay branches did not want to stage an event with Gumbel – see letter to Guernut, 14 October 1924, in Fonds delta rés. 798/6, ‘Correspondance des membres du Comité Central: Henri Guernut’, BDIC. Cf. Gerlach, ‘Pariser Eindrücke’, Weltbühne, 26 January 1922; idem, ‘Soll man nach Paris reisen?’, Weltbühne, 11 September 1924; Basch, ‘A la Ligue allemande des Droits de l’Homme’, La Volonté, 2 February 1930; idem, ‘Retour d’Allemagne’, 3 February 1930. Martin Ceadel, Semi-Detached Idealists: The British Peace Movement and International Relations, 1854-1945 (Oxford, 2000), p. 4. Scheer, DFG, p. 461. On Basch, see Sophie Lorrain, ‘L’amant de la paix et le rapprochement franco-allemand’, in Françoise Basch, Liliane Crips and Pascale Gruson (eds.), Victor Basch, 1863-1944, un intellectuel cosmopolite (Paris, 2000), pp. 103–10; on Buisson, see Sandi Cooper, ‘Ferdinand Buisson: Die Abrüstung des Hasses’, in Michael Neumann (ed.), Der Friedensnobelpreis von 1926 bis 1932 (Zug, 1989), p. 134. DLM, 40 Jahre Kampf, p. 8. Ignaz Wrobel (= Tucholsky), ‘Deutsche Kinder in Paris’, Weltbühne, 7 April 1925. Letter Deutsche Liga für Völkerbund to Rothbart, IICI, 27 May 1927 folder ‘Deutsche Liga für Völkerbund’ (A.XI.3), IICI Archives, UNESCO, Paris. Cf. Gorguet, Les mouvements pacifistes, pp. 167–74. Riesenberger, Geschichte der Friedensbewegung, p. 207. ‘Zum deutsch-französischen Schüleraustausch’, Die Menschenrechte, 1 February 1927 . ‘Junge Stimmen für die Völkerversöhnung’, Die Menschenrechte, 20 April 1927. Wrobel, ‘Deutsche Kinder in Paris’ – his quotation refers to the exchange organised by the Internationale Arbeiterhilfe. Dieter Riesenberger, ‘The German peace movement and its attitude towards Poland in the 1920s and early 1930s’, in Guido Grünewald and Pieter Van den Dungen (eds.), Twentieth-Century Peace Movements: Successes and Failures (Lewiston, ID, 1995), p. 68. See Gerlach’s estimation that while hostility to France had decreased in the course of the 1920s, there had not been similar changes in German attitudes vis-à-vis Poland: ‘Wandlungen der deutschen Mentalität seit 1918’, Die Zeit, January 1930, repr. in Ein Demokrat kommentiert Weimar, p. 231 Gerlach, Die große Zeit der Lüge: der Erste Weltkrieg und die deutsche Mentalität (1871–1921) (1926, repr. Bremen, 1994), p. 7. Kurt Grossmann, ‘A chapter in Polish-German understanding: the German League for Human Rights’, Polish Review, vol. 15, no. 3 (1970), pp. 19–31. Ceadel, Semi-Detached Idealists, p. 268.

Reconciliation and the Post-War Order 73.

74. 75.

76. 77. 78. 79. 80. 81. 82. 83. 84.

85.

86.

87.

88. 89. 90. 91. 92.

233

Cf. entry for 15 June 1919 in Harry Graf Kessler, Tagebücher, ed. Wolfgang Pfeiffer-Belli (Frankfurt, 1996), p. 183, and Helene Stöcker’s speech on ‘a pledge against taking part in war’ at the WILPF congress of 1921 (RK doss. 510, doc. 98). On the Ponsonby campaign, see Lütgemeier-Davin, Pazifismus, pp. 240–8. For these numbers, see Die Menschenrechte, 25 February 1931. For late June 1927, Lütgemeier-Davin cites 60,283 signatures for a district of 524,392 people: Pazifismus, pp. 246–7. For a copy of the appeal, see RKÜöO, doc. 283. Lehmann-Russbüldt, ‘Ein internationaler Nie-wieder-Krieg-Schatz’, Die Menschenrechte, 16 August 1926. Lütgemeier-Davin, Pazifismus, p. 242; cf. Holl, Ludwig Quidde, pp. 398–9. Cf. Martin Ceadel, Pacifism in Britain 1914-1945: The Defining of a Faith (Oxford, 1980). George Mosse, Fallen Soldiers: Reshaping the Memory of the World Wars (Oxford, 1990), p. 197 Hans Mommsen, The Rise and Fall of Weimar Democracy (Chapel Hill, NC, 1996), p. 89. Löbe, Der Weg war lang, p. 91. Deak, Left-Wing Intellectuals, p. 83 Carl v. Ossietzky, ‘Deutschland ist ...’, Weltbühne, 6 November 1928. Hans-Harald Müller, ‘Politics and the war novel’, in Richard Dove and Stephen Lamb (eds.), German Writers and Politics, 1918–1939 (Basingstoke, 1992), pp. 105–6. For surveys on ‘war guilt’-related discussions and interpretations, see Michael Dreyer and Oliver Lembcke, Die deutsche Diskussion um die Kriegsschuldfrage 1918/19 (Berlin, 1993); Annika Mombauer, The Origins of the First World War: Controversies and Consensus (London, 2002), pp. 45–56. On the role of historical research in these debates, see Keith Wilson (ed.), Forging the Collective Memory: Government and International Historians Through Two World Wars (Oxford, 1996); Martin Kröger, ‘Zur Gründung des politischen Archivs des Auswärtigen Amts nach dem Ersten Weltkrieg’, Zeitschrift für Geschichtswissenschaft, vol. 56, no. 12 (2008), pp. 1024–34. Lütgemeier-Davin, Pazifismus, p. 126. On Foerster, see Herman Graml, ‘Friedrich Wilhelm Foerster, ein früher Anwalt deutsch-französischer Verständigung’, Revue d’Allemagne, vol. 38 (2008), pp. 325–38. Cited in entry for 24 June 1919, Kessler, Tagebücher, p. 192. Entry for 2 February 1920, ibid, p. 214. Helmut Donat, ‘Die radikalpazifistische Richtung in der Deutschen Friedensgesellschaft (1918–1933)’, Pazifismus in der Weimarer Republik, p. 30. Lehmann-Russbüldt, Der Kampf der DLM, p. 96 ‘Pont-Saint-Vincent. Ligue des Droits de l’Homme’, Etoile de l’Est, 23 October 1927. The Ligue’s secretary-general considered using the speaker in question

234

93. 94. 95. 96. 97. 98.

99. 100.

101. 102. 103.

104. 105. 106. 107.

108.

109. 110. 111. 112. 113.

Internationalism Reconfigured (Émile Chantriot of the peace association La Paix par le Droit) for other events in eastern France – see note Guernut to Jules Proudommeaux, 15 December 1927, in Fonds delta rés. 6: ‘Correspondence avec les membres du Comité Central: Jules Proudhommeaux’, BDIC. Beilecke, ‘Der Deutschlanddiskurs in den Cahiers des Droits de l’Homme’, pp. 48–52. Irvine, Between Justice and Politics, pp. 138. See also Ingram, ‘A la recherché d’une guerre gagnéé’. ‘Für eine Verständigung mit Frankreich’, demand 4 (in Grossmann, Ossietzky, p. 449) ‘An die beiden Demokratien’, repr. as annexe to Bock, ‘Heimatlose Republikaner’, pp. 94–5. Lütgmeier-Davin, Pazifismus, pp. 118, 208. Letter Arthur Ponsonby to Gerlach, 6 September 1920, in IPM/FSP/AHF: Alfred H. Fried Papers, Correspondence 1916–1921, League of Nations Archives. Entry for 2 February 1920 in Kessler, Tagebücher, p. 214. Letter Lehmann-Russbüldt (on behalf of BNV), to the Union of Democratic Control, August 1920, in IPM/FSP/AHF. Cf. the UDC-related periodical Foreign Affairs, vol. 1, no. 8 (February 1920) – not to be confused with the American publication of the same name. Letter Alfred Fried to Lehmann-Russbüldt, August 1920, in IPM/FSP/AHF. Letter Ponsonby to Gerlach, 6 September 1920, ibid. For a survey of recent literature dealing with the reparations question, see Gerald Feldman, ‘The reparations debate’, Diplomacy and Statecraft, vol. 16, no. 3 (2005), pp. 487–98. ‘An die Demokratien Deutschlands und Frankreichs!’, in Grossmann, Ossietzky, p. 335; Kessler, Tagebücher, p. 320. Deak, Left-Wing Intellectuals, p. 91 See ‘Die Jahrestagung der Deutschen Liga für Menschenrechte’, Die Menschenrechte, 31 January 1928. See also ‘Der deutsch-französische Konflikt’ (1924), in Rudolf Kuczynski, Deutschland und Frankreich: ihre Wirtschaft und ihre Politik. Neue Folge (Berlin, 1925) Patrick Cohrs, ‘The first “real” peace settlements after the First World War: Britain, the United States, and the Accords of London and Locarno, 1923– 1925’, Contemporary European History, vol. 12, no. 1 (2003), pp. 1–31. Wintzer, Deutschland und der Völkerbund, pp. 49–50. ‘Die Jahrestagung der DLM’, Die Menschenrechte, 31 January 1931. Wintzer, Deutschland und der Völkerbund, p. 338; cf. Gerlach, Ein Demokrat kommentiert Weimar, p. 89 See RKÜöO, no. 17-8 (‘An die Funktionäre’). Beilecke, ‘Der Deutschlanddiskurs in den Cahier des Droits de l’Homme’, p. 48.

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114. See e.g. Gerlach, Ein Demokrat kommentiert Weimar, p. 120. 115. See disarmament petitions in F delta rés. 798/128: ‘Société des Nations’, BDIC. On the disarmament campaign, see Thomas Davies, The Possibilities of Transnational Activism: The Campaign for Disarmament between the Two World Wars (Leiden, 2007). 116. ‘Für die Vereinigten Staaten von Europa’, Die Menschenrechte, 1 July 1926. 117. Basch, ‘Retour de’Allemagne’, La Volonté, 3 February 1930. 118. Idem, ‘Encore la Fédération européenne’, La Volonté, 20 July 1930. 119. Cecila Lynch, Beyond Appeasement: Interpreting Interwar Peace Movements in World Politics (Ithaca, NY, 1999). 120. Karl Holl, ‘Die Deutsche Demokratische Partei im Spannungsverhältnis zwischen Wehrpolitik und Pazifismus’, in Holl and Wolfram Wette (eds.), Pazifismus in der Weimarer Republik: Beiträge zur historischen Friedensforschung (Paderborn, 1981), pp. 135–48; cf. Lorrain, Des pacifistes français et allemands, pp. 216–8. 121. Gerlach even likened the SPD to the British Liberal and French Radical parties – see Gerlach, Ein Demokrat kommentiert Weimar, p. 61. 122. ‘Der Reichstag und die Pazifisten’, Die Menschenrechte, 20 April 1927. For a discussion of Social Democrats’ pre-1914 debates on peace and militarism, see Nicholas Stargardt, The German Idea of Militarism: Radical and Socialist Critics 1866-1914 (Cambridge, 1994). 123. Heinrich Ströbel, ‘Die Einheitsfront der Kommunisten und Nazis’, Das Andere Deutschland, 13 September 1930, featured in Helmut Donat and Lothar Wieland (eds.), Das Andere Deutschland. Unabhängige Zeitung für entschieden republikanische Politik. Eine Auswahl (1925–1933) (Bremen, 1980), pp. 218 ff. 124. Ossietzky, ‘Rechenschaft’, Weltbühne, 10 May 1932, as included in Rechenschaft, p. 198. 125. Richard Bessel, Germany after the First World War (Oxford, 1993), p. 283; Wette, ‘Von Kellog bis Hitler’, Pazifismus in der Weimarer Republik, p. 125. 126. On commemorations, see Jay Winter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning: the Great War in European Cultural History (Cambridge, 1995), pp. 8, 82–5; on the ‘myth of the war experience’, see Mosse, Fallen Soldiers. On German veterans, see Christopher Elliott, ‘The Kriegervereine and the Weimar Republic’, Journal of Contemporary History, vol. 10 (London, 1975), p. 124. 127. Christian Jansen, ‘Emil Julius Gumbel: ein Statistiker des Antimilitarismus’, in Dietrich Harth, Dietrich Schubert and Ronald Michael Schmidt (eds.), Pazifismus zwischen den Weltkriegen (Heidelberg, 1985), pp. 31–42; Alfred David Brenner, Emil J. Gumbel: Weimar German Pacifisit and Professor (Boston, MA, 2001), pp. 90–143. On right-wing academics and students in this period, see Kurt Sontheimer, Antidemokratisches Denken in der Weimarer Republik 1919–1933 (4th edn., Munich, 1994), pp. 118–23. 128. Richard Bessel, ‘The Great War in German memory: the soldiers of the First

236

129. 130. 131. 132.

133.

134. 135.

136.

137. 138.

139. 140. 141. 142. 143.

144. 145.

Internationalism Reconfigured World War, demobilization, and Weimar political culture’, German History, vol. 6, no. 1 (1988), p. 22. Lütgemeier-Davin, Pazifismus, p. 122 Müller, ‘Politics and the war novel’, p. 117 See Die Menschenrechte, 20 March 1931. Gerlach, Ein Demokrat kommentiert Weimar, p. 145; cf. nearly identical comments on p. 125. For a historical assessment, see Jean-François Sirinelli, ‘La France de l’entre-deux-guerres: un “trend” pacifiste?’, in Le pacifisme en Europe, p. 44. Antoine Prost, In the Wake of War: ‘Les Anciens Combattants’ and French Society (Oxford, 1990), p. 73. Discussing Mosse’s book Fallen Soldiers, Prost stresses the difference between the French and the German response to the war: Antoine Prost, ‘The impact of war on French and German political culture’, Historical Journal, vol. 37, no. 1 (1994), pp. 209–17. Jean-François Sirinelli, Génération intellectuelle: Khâgneux et Normaliens dans l’entre-deux-guerres (Paris, 1988). Emil Gumbel et al. (eds.), Deutschlands geheime Rüstungen (Berlin, 1925); Otto Lehmann-Russbüldt and Konrad Widerhold, Die deutsche Militärpolitik seit 1918 (Berlin, 1926). One example of a contentious article was ‘Die Gefahr der Stunde’ in Welt am Montag, 10 March 1924. For examples of proceedings against DLM members, see memorandum of RKÜöO, doc. 67, and letter of the Auswärtiges Amt, 29 November 1926, RK, doss. 511, doc. 311. For Britain’s role in arguing for Quidde’s release, see Carsten, Britain and the Weimar Republic, p. 223. ‘Windiges aus der Luftfahrt’, Weltbühne, 12 March 1929; the sentence against Ossietzky was pronounced on 23 November 1931. See e.g. letters by Victor Basch, of 17 and 28 January 1936, in Fonds delta rés. 798/55, ‘Ligue allemande’, BDIC. The award of the 1935 Nobel Peace Prize had been postponed to 1936, hence the nomination campaign in early 1936. Letter by Victor Basch to the Nobel Peace Prize Committee of the Norwegian parliament, 28 January 1936, in ibid. Der Montag, 11 May 1925; Der Deutsche, 15 May 1925; Berliner Lokalanzeiger, May 1925 (all featured in RKÜöO, no. 71ff). Gerlach, ‘Soll man nach Paris reisen?’. Kurt Grossmann, ‘Acht Jahre politische Justiz’, Die Menschenrechte, 31 May 1927. Ossietzky, ‘Die nationalistische Internationale’, Berliner Volks-Zeitung, 27 June 1920, as included in Ossietzky, Rechenschaft: Publizistik aus den Jahren 1933– 1937, ed. Bruno Frei (Frankfurt, 1984), pp. 29–30. See Die Menschenrechte, 31 August 1927. Basch, ‘A la Ligue allemande des Droits de l’Homme‘, La Volonté, 2 February 1930. See Otto Lehmann-Rußbüldt, Die blutige Internationale der Rüstungsindustrie (Berlin, 1933).

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146. ‘An die beiden Demokratien’, p. 94. 147. ‘Zum 12. Jahrestag des Weltkrieges’, Die Menschenrechte, 1 August 1926. 148. ‘Bericht über die Jahresmitgliederversammlung’ and ‘Die neue Satzung der Deutschen Liga für Menschenrechte e.V.’, Die Menschenrechte, 3 May 1927. 149. See the documents in Fonds delta rés. 798/55–57, ‘Ligue allemande’, BDIC. As an example of its advocacy action, the Paris section asked the International Federation of Human Right Leagues to contact the High Commissioner for German Refugees, drawing attention to the plight of exiled intellectuals who found it difficult to find work – see letter 10 January 1934, Fonds delta rés. 798/55. 150. Eric Vial, ‘La Ligue française des Droits de l’Homme et la L.I.D.U., son homologue italien, organisation d’exile antifasciste dans l’entre-deux-guerres’, Le Mouvement Social, no. 183 (1998), pp. 119–34.

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Notes on Contributors

239

NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Frank Beyersdorf is writing his doctoral dissertation at Mannheim University, working on the international regulation of information and telecommunication from 1919 to 1948. He was a member of the Graduate Programme ‘Formations of the Global’ and is currently Visiting Fellow at the Institute of European History in Mainz. Patricia Clavin is a Fellow and Tutor in History at Jesus College, Oxford and a Lecturer in Modern History at the University of Oxford. She is also Research Director of the Modern European History Research Centre in Oxford. Her publications include The Failure of Economic Diplomacy: Britain, France, Germany and the United States, 1931–1936 (London 1996), The Great Depression in Europe, 1929–1939 (London, 2000) and, as editor, a themed issue of the journal Contemporary European History (2005) on ‘Transnational Communities in European History, 1920–1960’. She is currently writing a history of the League of Nations for Oxford University Press. Stefan Couperus is a postdoctoral researcher at Utrecht University, where he also teaches political history. His book De machinerie van de stad Stadsbestuur als idee en praktijk, Nederland en Amsterdam 1900–1940 (based on his doctoral thesis at the University of Groningen) was published by Aksant in 2009. As part of Utrecht University’s ‘Alternatives to Parliamentary Democracy’ project, he is working on a European history of representative advisory and regulatory agencies in the period 1880–1940. Yann Decorzant is Maître Assistant (Lecturer) at the Department of Economic History of Geneva University. His doctorate at Geneva examined

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‘The League of Nations at the birth of a conception of the international economic regulation’. He was previously a Junior Visiting Research Scholar at the Modern European History Research Centre at the University of Oxford. Daniel Laqua is Lecturer in European History at Northumbria University in Newcastle upon Tyne. He previously worked as a Teaching Fellow at University College London (UCL), where he wrote his doctoral thesis on ‘European Internationalism(s): Brussels as a Centre for Transnational Cooperation, 1880–1930’. Helen McCarthy is Lecturer in History at Queen Mary, University of London. She completed her Ph.D. at the Institute of Historical Research in 2008, after which she held a Junior Research Fellowship at St John’s College, Cambridge. Her doctoral research explored the dynamics of the popular League of Nations movement in Britain between the wars. She has published a number of articles on this topic along with her other areas of interest, which include voluntarism and the gendered nature of British political culture. Amalia Ribi is an ESRC Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Oxford. She has previously been a Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Heidelberg, a Junior Research Associate at Oxford’s Modern European History Research Centre, and a doctoral student at Lincoln College, Oxford. Her monograph Humanitarian Imperialism: A History of Anti-Slavery Activism, 1880–1940 is forthcoming with Oxford University Press. Katharina Rietzler is a Teaching Fellow at University College London (UCL). Her Ph.D., also at UCL, was on American philanthropic networks and the ‘scientific’ study of international relations in the interwar years. She has published articles on these topics in the journal Historical Research and the Bulletin of the German Historical Institute in Washington. Marie Sandell holds a Ph.D. in modern international history from Royal Holloway, University of London, where she has worked as a Teaching Fellow in Twentieth Century non-Western World History. She is currently teaching twentieth-century history for the External System of the University of

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London. Her first book, The Rise of Women’s International Activism: Identity and Sisterhood Between the World Wars, will be published by I.B.Tauris in 2011. Waqar Zaidi is a Visiting Researcher at Imperial College London, where he wrote a doctoral thesis on liberal internationalists’ proposals for the internationalisation of aviation and for the international control of atomic energy between 1920 and 1950. His published work includes articles in the Journal of Contemporary History, and in Technology and Culture.

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Index

243

INDEX

Aberdeen, Lady 167, 169 Abolitionism see anti-slavery Abyssinia Ethiopia Abyssinia Crisis xiv, 106–7 Academy of International Law, The Hague 48, 53 Addams, Jane 161–3 Adler, Friedrich 137 Ador, Gustave 118, 122 L’Administration Locale (periodical) 80 Africa R.L. Buell’s study on colonial Africa 47 League of Nations Mandates 98, 100 slavery in Africa 93, 95, 101–5 women’s movement and Africa 164, 167 Air League of the British Empire 36 All-Asian Women’s Conference 175 Allen, Clifford 30, 200 Allied Supreme Council 139 American National Committee for Intellectual Cooperation 54–5 L’Ami du Peuple (periodical) 215 Amsterdam 71–7, 80, 82–3, 118–9, 199, 122, 127– 8, 212 Angell, Norman 25 Anti-Orloog Raad 212 Anti-Slavery and Ethiopia 101–3, 106–7

Anti-Slavery (continued) and the League of Nations (general references) 93–4, 96–7, 101–103 and the Mandates system 94, 97–8, 103 international measures before World War I 95–6 Slavery Convention 103–6 Anti-Slavery Society see British AntiSlavery and Aborigines Society Archdale, Helen 197 Armaments armaments in international politics 20–1, 24, 27, 30, 34, 36, 196 disarmament 4, 22, 30–3, 191, 199, 222 German armaments 225–6 Asia International Relations Clubs 54 Asian local government 79 women’s organisations in Asia 162–5, 175 Associated Press 141 Association française pour la Société des Nations 193, 212 Association pour la Paix par le Droit 210 Attolico, Bernardo 117, 125 Australia 161, 164 Austria bonds 139–149

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Austria (continued) finances (general references) 137, 143 involvement in transnational networks 5, 77, 220 League of Nations relations with Austria xiii, 139–42, 147–9 situation after World War I 137–8 stabilisation (financial) xiii, xv, 135–50 Austrian Loan Commission 136, 143–8 Austrian Press Bureau 141 Avenol, Joseph 126 Aviation 18, 29–32, 36–7, 40 Babcock, Earle 56 Baldwin, Stanley 194 Bank of England 138, 142–4, 146–8 Bankers, private and central (general references) 118–22, 126, 136, 139, 142, 144–50 Bartlett, Vernon 141, 144 Basch, Victor 214–6, 219, 222, 225–6 Basel 80 Bauer, Otto 137 BBC 34, 195 Beaumont, Caitriona 163 Belgium 72, 77, 79–80, 117–8, 139, 142, 148, 213 Berlin 7, 54, 95, 165, 211, 217, 220 Berlin Africa Conference (1885) 95 Berliner Tageblatt (periodical) 220 Bernstein, Eduard 223 Bessel, Richard 224 Blackett, Basil 125 Bock, Hans Manfred 211 Bolshevism 128, 137, 150 Boston 73, 75–6 Boudreau, Frank 50 Boy Scouts International 196 Boyden, Roland 122 Brand, Robert Henry 122

Branting, Hjalmar 217 Briand, Aristide 8, 217 British Anti-Slavery and Aborigines Protection Society and the League of Nations xiii, 98–9, 101–3, 107 and the Pan-African Congress 100 history before World War I 95–6 relations with the Bureau International pour la Défense des Indigènes 94, 99–101, 105 response to Slavery Convention 105 British Universities League of Nations Society 54 Brussels 55, 73–5, 78, 80–1, 83–4, 95, 100, 104, 119–29 Brussels Anti-Slavery Conference (1889/1890) 95 Brussels International Finance Conference (1920) participants / delegates 119, 121, 123–4, 127 preparations 120–1 results / significance 122, 125, 128 Ter Meulen scheme 138 Buell, Raymond Leslie 128 Buisson, Ferdinand 213–6 Bulgaria 77, 150 Bund Neues Vaterland see Deutsche Liga für Menschenrechte Bureau International pour la Défense des Indigènes xiii, xv, 94, 99–101, 105 Bureau of International Research, Harvard and Radcliffe College 47 Bureau of Social Hygiene 47 Burns, Cecil Delisle 28 Business networks / entrepreneurial networks xiii, 34 Butler, Harold 55 Callahan, Michael 97 Canada 9, 161

Index Carlsberg Foundation 49 Carnegie Chairs 53–4 Carnegie Corporation 54 Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and academic/scholarly institutions 48, 51, 53–4, 58 and the League of Nations 7, 52, 56 grants 48 key protagonists 22, 46 links to peace movement xv, 46, 48, 55, 213 Carnegie Endowment for the Advancement of Teaching 55 Cassel, Gustav 118–9 Catlin, G.E.G. 32 Caudwell, Christopher 37 Ceadel, Martin 215 Cecil, Robert 104–5, 119, 145, 193–4, 199 Chapman Catt, Carrie 170 Chatham House see Royal Institute of International Affairs Chicago 81, 172 China 161, 168, 171–2, 174, 198 Chong, Lo 174 Christian Social Party (Austria) 137 Christiana 165, 168 Christianity / churches 75–6, 93, 95–6, 142, 168, 171, 189, 192, 194, 196–7, 199, 202, 213 Church and World (publication) 196 Churchill, Winston 21 Civil servants (national and international) 4, 17, 98, 115, 117, 123–7, 138, 140 Claparède, René 99, 100, 105, Clémentel, Étienne 117 Cohrs, Patrick 221 Colijn, Hendrik 83 Colonialism / colonial policies 47, 93–107, 148, 163, 166, 174–5 , 188, 190, 203

245

Columbia University 46, 51 Comité d’Entente des Grandes Associations Internationales 56 Communications 7, 17–20, 24–9, 34–7, 187, 189 Communism 5–6, 37, 118, 169, 216, 218, 224 Congo 96, 99 Congrès International des Sciences Administratives see International Institute of Administrative Sciences Constantinople 199 Corbett Ashby, Margery 171, 197 Cosmopolitanism 8, 19, 20, 198 Coudenhove-Kalergi, Richard 222 Council on Foreign Relations 47–9, 53–4 Courtney, Kathleen 197 Cowdray, Lord 193 Crowdy, Rachel 190 Cuba 81, 165 Cultural lag (concept) 24–9 Cunningham, Valentine 37 Cuno, Wilhelm 214 Czechoslovakia 77, 138–9 Darley, Henry 101–2 Davies, David 20–2, 29, 30, 32, 193 Dawes Plan 150 Denmark 49, 74 Derso, Alois xi Deutsche Demokratische Partei 223 Deutsche Friedensgesellschaft 210–1, 217–8, 224 Deutsche Hochschule für Politik (Berlin) 54 Deutsche Liga für Menschenrechte and Britain 212, 217, 219–20 and Poland 217 cooperation with Ligue des Droits de l’Homme 212–6, 219, 222, 226–7

246

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Deutsche Liga (continued) and the post-war order 218–23 foundation 210 membership 210–1, 223 rifts 211–2 and German politics 223–6 Deutsche Liga für Völkerbund 212, 216, 221 Deutsche Staatspartei 223–4 Dickinson, G. Lowes 21 Dickinson, Willoughby 199 Disarmament 4, 21–2, 30–1, 33, 191, 199, 222 Disarmament Conference (1932) 30, 191, 199 Dogliani, Patrizia 71 Dotation Carnegie 53–5 Drummond, Eric 7, 83, 102, 192 Du Bois, W.E.B. 100 Dunn, Lynne 52 Dusseldorf 80 Dutt, R. Palme 37 East and West 161, 163–4, 171, 174, 176 École des Hautes Études Internationales (Paris) 48 École Normale Supérieure 225 Economic and Financial Organisation of the League of Nations xiii, 4, 5, 9, 11, 115–6, 124–9, 139, 149 Education 32–3, 47–8, 52, 79, 163, 165, 167–9, 189–90, 193, 195, 218 Egypt 165, 167–8, 171, 174–5 Einstein, Albert 210–1, 214 Eisner, Kurt 223 Ekrem, Selma 173 Empire colonialism; British Empire Erdmenger, Katharina 136 Eritrea 106 L’Esprit International (periodical) 54 Essential News (periodical) 31 Estonia 5, 150

Ethiopia xiv, 101, 102, 106, 107 European integration xi, 222–3 Ewen, Shane 68 Expertise xiii, 3–5, 10–1, 33, 49–54, 74–5, 77, 85, 106, 115–7, 121–2, 125–6, 136, 190 Fabian Society 18, 32, 212 Federal Council of Churches (USA) 142 Federal Reserve Bank (USA) 142 Fédération Interalliée des Anciens Combattants (FIDACS) 197 Feminism women’s movement Finland 77 Flandreau, Marc 136 Fleuriau, Aimé de 122 Foerster, Friedrich Wilhelm 219 Forced labour xiii, 97, 105–6 Foreign Affairs (periodical) 33 Fosdick, Raymond B. xv, 6, 25, 27, 45–7, 50, 55 Foundations see Carnegie Endowment for International Peace; Laura Spelman Rockefeller Fund; philanthropy; Rockefeller Foundation France and internationalism / international movements 29, 30, 36, 72, 74, 77–9, 95–6 and the League of Nations xi, 55–6, 102– 3, 113, 141, 143, 193 debate on war guilt 213–4, 219 economic / financial questions 102, 117–20, 126, 137, 138–9, 143–4, 146–8 foreign policy (general) 122, 138, 142, 213–4 government 30, 55–6, 120, 213–4 pacifism 211–2, 225 see also Franco-German Relations; Ligue des Droits de l’Homme

Index Franco-German relations 36, 74, 78, 211, 213–6, 218 Franckenstein, Georg von 143, 145 Freund, Hugo 223 Freymuth, Arnold 223 Fried, Alfred H. 48, 220 Friedenswarte, Die (periodical) 48 Garnett, Maxwell 199 Gaspari, Oscar 72 Geddes, Patrick 73 Geneva 9, 10, 26, 30, 48, 51–2 , 54–6, 58, 81–4, 94, 97, 99–103, 105–7, 115, 122, 124–5, 136–7, 139, 141, 144, 147, 149, 168, 170, 190–1, 194, 197, 199, 223, 227 Geneva Convention on the Care of the Wounded in War 190 Geneva Disarmament Conference see Disarmament Conference Geneva Research Center 54, 58 Genoa Conference (1922) 138–9 Gerlach, Hellmut von xv, 211–7, 219–20, 223–6 German Municipal Union 83 German Peace Cartel 211, 213–4 Germany (general references) and internationalism 8, 68, 74–5, 77–8, 79, 83, 166 and the League of Nations 221–2 foreign policy / international relations 119–20, 138–9, 214; see also Franco-German relations former colonies 94, 98 German military 30, 225 German reparations reparations National Socialist Germany 3, 71, 200 politics in Weimar Germany 210–1, 223–6 Reichstag 198, 213, 214, 218, 221–3

247

Ghent 70, 76 Gibbon, Gwilym 78 Gildersleeve, Virginia 171–2 Girl Guides 56, 206 Gladstone, Lady 199, 200 Graduate Institute of International Studies 26, 48, 51 Grant, Kevin 94 Great Britain anti-slavery see British Anti-Slavery and Aborigines Protection Society British Empire 36, 80, 93, 196, 200–3; see also colonialism financial and commercial policies 102, 117–9, 137, 147 Foreign Office / diplomats 7, 49, 101–4, 107, 150, 191, 195 Government 125 liberal internationalism/ League advocacy 18–38, 188, 193–7, 199–203 Members of Parliament 20, 192–3, 199 Ministry of Health 78, 80 municipal reform 74, 77–81, 84–5 national identity / prestige 94, 150, 199–203 pacifist campaigns 211, 217, 220, 223 public opinion / media 141, 188, 194–5, 197, 202 Treasury 140–4 women’s movement 168, 172 Great Depression 10,127, 150 Greaves, H.R.G. 20 Greenwood, Arthur 25 Griffin, Jonathan 30, 34 Grimshaw, Harold 103–4 Grossman, Kurt 226 Groves, P.R.C. 36–7 Gruppe Revolutionärer Pazifisten 211 Guernut, Henri 214, 219, 225 Gumbel, Emil 215, 225

248

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Haiti 175 Hantos, Elémer 127 Harberler, Gottfried 5 Harding, Warren G. 145 Harris, Alice 96, 99 Harris, George Montagu 79 Harris, John 93, 96–107 Harvard University 47, 98 Havas 141 Headway (periodical) 193–6, 199–201 Health Organisation of the League of Nations 7, 50 Heer, Henri 126 Heldring, E. 76 Henderson, Arthur 192 Herriot, Edouard 213, 222 Hilferding, Rudolf 137 Hiller, Kurt 211, 219 Hinder, Eleanor 161–2, 172 Hobson, J.A. 18–9 Hoover, Herbert 118 Hughes, Charles E. 145 Hungary 137–138, 150 Illustrierte Weltvereins-Zeitung (periodical) 75 Imperial Conference (London, 1930) 202 Imperialism see colonialism Independent Social Democratic Party (USPD) 223 Ingram, Norman 219 Institut français 53 Institut für Auswärtige Politik (Hamburg) 48 Intellectual Cooperation Organisation of the League of Nations 51, 54–5, 57 International Alliance of Women for Suffrage and Equal Citizenship conferences / congresses 164, 170–1, 174 foundation 162 membership 165, 169

International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation see League of Nations International Council of Women conferences / congresses 165–6, 174 and the international women’s movement 162 membership 165, 167, 169 International Federation for Housing and Town Planning 70, 76–7, 81, 84–5 International Federation of Human Rights Leagues 212, 222 International Federation of League of Nations Societies 192, 194, 198–9, 201–2 International Federation of University Women conferences / congresses 166, 168, 172 foundation 163 membership 165–7, 169, 172 International Fellowship of Reconciliation 213 International Financial Conference Brussels see International Finance Conference International Institute of Administrative Sciences 70, 72, 81, 84–5 International Institute of Intellectual Cooperation see League of Nations International Labour Conference 7 International Labour Organisation xii, 6, 7, 54, 100, 103–6, 190 International law (general references) 17, 20, 28, 35, 46, 48, 209, 211 International Office of Public Health 28, 56 International Organisation of Secondary School Teachers 56 International Peace Bureau 192, 212–4,

Index International police force (concept) 29, 30 International Relations Clubs 54, 58 International Studies Conference 52, 53, 57 International Telegraph Union (Telegraphic Union) 116, 189 International Union of Local Authorities and Britain 78–81, 84–5 and the League of Nations 77, 81–5 before World War I 69–70 congresses 70–1, 74, 77–8, 81 , 84 conceptions of municipal reform 70–6, 78, 82 International Woman Suffrage Alliance see International Alliance of Women for Suffrage and Citizenship Internationale Arbeiterhilfe 216 Internationalism (terminology) xii, 5–6 Inter-Parliamentary Union (also Interparliamentary Union) xi, 192 Irvine, William 219 Ishimoto, Shidzue 172–3 Isolationism 24, 35, 53, 58 Italo-Ethiopian War 106 Italy xiii, 72, 74–5, 96, 102, 106–7, 117–8, 124, 141–3, 146–8, 226 J.P. Morgan & Co. 138, 142–5, 147–9 Jacobs, Aletta 162 Jacobson, Per 124 Japan 68, 161, 165, 168–72, 198 Jodai, Tano 171 Joint Peace Council (Vienna) 212 Joint Purchasing Commission 117 Jungdeutscher Orden 223 Karnebeek, Herman 77 Karwai, Michi 168 Kelen, Emery xi, xv Kellogg-Briand Pact xii

249

Kessler, Harry Graf (Count) 212, 214, 216, 219, 221, 223 Keynes, John Maynard 118 Koopmans, Tjalling 5 Kuczyinski, Robert 215, 221 Kuehl, Warren 52 Kuisel, Richard 115 Kyffhäuserbund 224 La Fontaine, Henri 55, 72, 78 Labour Party (Great Britain) 30–1, 192, 217 Lahore 175 Lamont, Thomas W. 142–147 Lang, Cosmo 197 Lange, Christian xi Langevin, Paul 214 Laqueur, Walter 211 Latin America 9, 148, 162–5, 169 Laura Spelman Rockefeller Memorial 45–8, 51, Lavigerie, Cardinal 95 Layton, Walter 124 League of Municipalities / League of Socialist Municipalities / League of Cities xiii, 71–2, 74–6, 83–4 League of Nations Advisory Committees 11, 120, 190 Communication and Transit Section 125 Council 55, 120, 122, 139–40, 145, 149, 214, 221 Covenant 10, 56, 93, 96–7, 201, 221 Economic and Finance/Financial Section 33, 52, 83, 124–5, 143 Economic Committee 82–3, 85, 115, 125–6 Financial Committee 135, 137–41, 145–6, 149 General Assembly xi, 101–2, 222 German accession to the League 221–2

250

Internationalism Reconfigured

High Commissioner to Vienna 136, 140–3, 145–7 Information Section xv, 140–1, 145, 149 (International) Committee on Intellectual Cooperation 55–6, 190, 195 International Institute of Intellectual Cooperation 49, 55–7 Interwar debates on its nature / structure / direction 6, 27, 52–3, 74–7, 84, 100, 221 Joint Provisional Economic and Financial Committee 82, 139 Mandates Section xii, 97–8, 101, 103, 106 Permanent Mandates Commission 97–8, 100–2 Secretariat 32, 50, 83, 97, 115, 124–5, 128, 141, 143, 147, 190 Secretary General 4, 6, 7, 83, 102, 192 Technical Organisations of the League see Economic and Financial Organisation; Health Organisation; Intellectual Cooperation Organisation League of Nations Association (USA) 46, 53 League of Nations Non-Partisan Association (USA) 193 League of Nations Union (Great Britain) xiv, xv, 30, 96, 135, 188, 193–203 League of Socialist Communes (Italy) 72 Lefebure, Victor 21 Lega Italiana dei Diritti dell‘Uomo 226 Lehmann-Russbüldt (LehmannRußbüldt), Otto 210, 217–9, 222, 226 Leipzig 75, 77 Leith, Gordon 145

Levi, Paul 223 Ligue des Droits de l’Homme contacts with Deutsche Liga für Menschenrechte 212–6 debates on war guilt role in French society 209, 213 Ligue internationale des combattants de la paix 211 Lithuania 77 Llewellyn Smith, Hubert 125–6 Lloyd George, David 118, 138 Lloyds Bank 119 Löbe, Paul 214, 218 Local Government Abroad (periodical) 80 Local Government Administration (periodical) 80 Locarno Treaties xii, 216, 221 London 33, 48, 71, 80, 100, 104, 107, 117, 119, 122, 124–8, 136–8, 141–4, 146–50, 164, 168, 193, 196, 202, 227 London School of Economics and Political Science 48 Loveday, Alexander 11, 124 Lugard, Frederick 102–4 Luisi, Paulina 171 Lütgemeier-Davin, Reinhold 218 Lutz, Bertha 164 Luxembourg 212 ‘Machine Age’ 22–4 Macmillan, W.M. 107 Madariaga, Salvador de 31–2 Mandates (system) xii, 94, 97-8, 102–3, 106, 190 Mantoux, Paul 26 Maritime Transport Executive 117 Martin, Hubert 196 Marvin, F.S. 200 McClure, Wallace 127 McGill University 33 Menard-Dorian, Mme 213

Index Menschenrechte, Die (periodical) 216 Mesopotamia 98 Mexico 119, 167 Middle East 162–5 Miers, Suzanne 94 Miller, Carol 163 Mommsen, Hans 218 ‘Money Doctors’ 136, 138, 143, 148, 149 Monnet, Jean 117, 120, 122, 125, 128 Monnickendam, Martin 84 Moore, John Bassett 35 Morel, Edmund D. 96, 220 Morgan, Grenfell & Co. 142 Morgan, J.P. (bank) see J.P. Morgan & Co. Morgan, John Pierpont 118, 129, 148 Mosse, George 218 Motta, Giuseppe xi Mulert, Oscar 83 Munich 71 Municipal administration see International Union of Local Authorities Municipal reform (scholarly perspectives) 67–8 Murnane, Frank 145 Murray Butler, Nicholas 46 Murray, Gilbert 193–5 Mussolini, Benito 143, 146 National Association for the Advancement of Colored Peoples 100 National Committees for Intellectual Cooperation 54- 5 National Federation of Women’s Institutes (Great Britain) 195 National Union of Italian Municipalities 72 Nationalism 18, 20, 25, 28, 37–8, 105, 176, 189, 200–1, 214–5, 217–8, 223–4, 226

251

Netherlands 5, 72, 74, 76–9, 82–4, 118, 121, 139, 144, 146–148, 162, 212 New Commonwealth Society 30, 33 New Republic (periodical) 148 New York 46–7, 75, 98, 142, 145–7, 149–50 New York Times 119, 122 New York Trust Co. 145 New Zealand 102, 161, 164 Next Five Years Group 30 Nicaragua 175 Nicolai, Georg Friedrich 210, 219 Niemeyer, Otto E. 140–1, 144, 146 Nixon, Frank H. 140, 143 Nobel Peace Prize xi, 25, 216, 220, 225 Noel-Baker, Philip 21 No-More-War demonstrations 211, 214, 226 Non-governmental organisations (general) 2, 8, 6, 55–8, 69, 81, 100, 162, 165 Norman, Montagu 142, 144–5, 147–9 Nurkse, Ragnar 5 Oplinter, Wouters d’ 121 Orwell, George 37 Ossietzky, Carl von 211, 214, 218, 224–6 Otlet, Paul 55, 72–3, 78 Ottoman Empire 94, 98 Oxford University 49, 193 Pacific Affairs (periodical) 161 Pacifism and feminism 162, 168, 211–13 and municipal reform 76 and World War I 35, 209, 211, 219–20 Armament 30, 191, 222, 225–6 Britain 220 connections to philanthropy xv, 46–8, 55, 213

252

Internationalism Reconfigured

Pacifism (continued) peace movements xiv, 209–13 see also Deutsche Liga für Menschenrechte; Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom Painlevé, Paul 213 Palestine 98, 164–5, 167, 172 Pan-African Congress 100 Pan-American Union 81–2 Pan-European Movement xi, 222 Pan-German Party (Austria) 137 Pan-Pacific Women’s Conference / Association 161–2, 169 Paris Peace Conference 6, 49, 94, 98, 136, 190, 198 Pax International 161, 175 Payre, Renaud 71, 73 Peace Ballot xiv, 196, 199 Peace Letter campaign 217 Peace movement pacifism Peace Pledge Union 211, 218 Pelt, Adriaan (Adrian) xv, 83, 140–2, 144, 147 Permanent Court of International Justice 35, 214 Philanthropy and expertise 49–52 and national interests 52–4, 58 and the League of Nations xiii, 54–8 and the public 53–4, 58 humanitarianism 99 internationalism 46–7 the study of international relations 47–9 Piétri, Nicole 136 Pigou, Arthur 129 Poland 77, 167, 217 Ponsonby, Arthur 217, 220 Potter, Pitman B. 19, 189, 191, 193, 196 Prague 53, 171 Press 76, 19, 140–1, 144–5, 147, 215, 217

Princeton University 46 Pritchett, Henry 55 Prost, Antoine 225 Puricelli plan 10 Quidde, Ludwig 216, 218, 223 Radikaldemokratische Partei 224 Randall, John Herman 26–7, 32 Rapallo 139 Rappard, William 26, 97–8, 101, 103, 106 Rathenau, Walther 221 Red Cross 99, 118 Reichsbanner 218, 223 Reichsbund der Kriegsbeschädigten 217 Reinsch, Paul S. 19 Remarque, Erich Maria 224–5 Renner, Karl 137 Reparation Commission 120, 124 Reparations 120, 124, 135, 138–9, 220–1 Republicans (USA) 138 Republikanische Partei 224 Reuters 141 Rhineland 175, 222 Riesenberger, Dieter 216 Rockefeller family 47, 52 Rockefeller Foundation and international relations 9, 27, 45 and the League of Nations 52, 55–7 funding for research 47–8, 51, 54 protagonists 46–7 Rockefeller Jr., John D. 47, 54–5 Rome 143, 146–7, 170, 174 Root, Elihu 46, 55 Rosental, Paul-André 3 Rotary International 76, 194–5 Royal Institute of International Affairs 36, 48–9 Rublee, Georges 117 Ruhr crisis 142, 144, 212–5, 222

Index Ruml, Beardsley 51–2 Rupp, Leila 162–4, 173 Sahlbom, Naima 173 Salter, Arthur xv, 33, 83, 117, 122, 124–5, 128,137, 140, 142–4, 146 San Remo 120 San Sebastian 120 Sangnier, Marc 212, 216 Saunier, Pierre-Yves 68, 71 Scandinavian countries 68, 79, 144, 168 Schoenaich, Paul Freiherr von 215, 223–4 Schücking, Walter 211 Schwann, Hans 217 Scott, James Brown 46 Scouts 196 Seipel, Ignaz 137, 139, 141 Seller, Jeffrey 68 Sellier, Henri 72, 78 Serruys, Daniel xi Seville 71 Shaarawi, Huda 171, 174 Sharp, Dyce 101–2 Shotwell, James T. 22–4, 33–4 Siegfried, André 122 Sirinelli, Jean-Francois 225 Slavery see anti-slavery; forced labour Slavery Convention 103–7 Social Democratic Party (Austria) 137, 140, 144, 147 Social Democratic Party (Germany) 211, 223–4 Social Science Research Council (USA) 51 Socialism and socialists 38, 67, 71–3, 75, 78, 82, 84, 137, 147, 170, 210, 213, 223 Socialist Party of America 75 Società Antischiavista d’Italia 95 Société Antiesclavagiste de France 95

253

Société d’études documentaires et critiques sur la guerre 219 Sociological Review (periodical) 75 Somalia 106 Sorbonne 198 South Africa 126, 164, 167, 172, 198 South America Latin America Soviet Union 139, 169 (and Russia: 119, ) Sozialistische Arbeiterpartei 224 Spaight, James M. 36 Spain 31, 74, 139, 148 Speyer & Co. 145 Spurgeon, Caroline 167 Städtetag 78 Steel-Maitland, Arthur 101, 105 Stöcker, Helene 211 Stowe, Harriet Beecher 1 Strakosch, Henry 126, 140 Stresemann, Gustav 83, 214 Ströbel, Heinrich 223–4 Strong, Benjamin 142, 144 Supreme Economic Council 117–9 Sweden 77, 144, 148, 173, 214 Swiss League for the Protection of Indigenous Peoples 99 Switzerland xi, 77, 79, 94, 98–100, 118, 122, 126, 139, 144, 146–8, 164 Syria 98, 165 Tablettes Documentaires (periodical) 74 Tag, Der (periodical) 215 Tardieu, André 30 Tariffs xi, 34, 222 Tarrow, Sidney 8 Technological change see communications; warfare; machine age; aviation Temperance 161 Temple, William 197 Temporary Slavery Commission 103, 106

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Internationalism Reconfigured

Ter Meulen, C.E. 138, 144, 146 Thelan, David 3 Thomas, Albert 6, 8 Tibal, André 53–4 Times (London) 36, 119 Tinbergen, Jan 5 Toller, Ernst 211 Transnational (terminology) xii, 1–2, 188 Transnational history xiv, xv, 2–5, 9 Tribune (periodical) 37 Tucholsky, Kurt 211, 216 Turkey 119, 165, 169, 173, 199 Union des Associations Internationales 55 Union Internationale des Villes see International Union of Local Authorities Union Nationale des Combattants 225 Union of Democratic Control 220 United States of America African-Americans 100, 107 Austrian finances 137, 142, 144–50 Brussels Financial Conference 119–20, 122 economic cooperation during World War I 116–8 foundations see philanthropy humanitarianism 95–6 international law 35, 53 liberal internationalists 18–38 local government 79–82 pacifism 212 relations with the League of Nations 6–11, 24, 51–2, 55, 58, 138, 142, 144–5 Senate 52, 83 social change 18, 24, 51, 68, 75 State Department 7, 46, 53 studies / theories of international relations 2, 17, 19, 25–28, 35, 189, 198

USA (continued) support for the League of Nations 20, 55, 192–3, 198 US banks see bankers; J.P. Morgan women’s movement 161–2 , 165, 167, 175 Universal Peace Congresses 192, 212–3, 215, 222 Universal Postal Union 28, 116, 189 Upmark, Eva 174 Van Acker, Wouter 73 Vassar-Smith, Richard V. 119, 129 Verraux, Martial-Justin 215 Versailles Treaty 218–21, 224–5 Vinck, Emile 72, 74, 76–8, 80–3 Vissering, Gerard 119, 121 Vlugt, Willem de 77 Voluntary associations (general references) xiv, 188, 190–2, 194, 199 Wall Street Journal 144 Wallenberg, Marcus 120,122 Wambaugh, Sarah 47 War guilt 218–9 War Resisters League 211 War Resisters’ International 212 Warburg, Paul M. 118 Warfare, nature of 20–22, 27, 29, 30, 36–7 Wells, H.G. 27, 38 Welt am Montag (periodical) 211 Weltbühne (periodical) 211, 218, 221, 225 West, Paul 122 Wheat Executive 117 White Slavery 47, 94, 190 White, Charles Bouck 75–7, 81, 85 White, Lyman 198 Wibaut, Floor 72, 74–85 Wilson, Woodrow 46, 96, 194 Wirth, Joseph 221

Index Women’s Advisory Committee of the League of Nations Union 197 Women’s International League for Peace and Freedom conferences / congresses 168, 171, 174 foundation 162, 213 membership 165, 169, 213 political stances 162, 169–70, 175 Women’s movement and the League of Nations 165–6, 168, 188–9, 192–3 encounters at international congresses 170–5 expansion 161–2, 164–70, 175–6 legacy of war 161, 166 structure of women’s organisations 165 up to 1919 161–3 women’s suffrage 162, 165, 168, 170, 174 Woolf, Leonard 18, 189 World Alliance for Promoting Friendship through the Churches 197, 213 World Council of Churches 197 World Economic Conference (1927) xi, 82–3 World Unity Foundation 27 World War I xi, xiv, 9, 20–3, 27, 29, 31–3, 35, 46, 49, 69, 73, 95, 99, 115–6, 135–6, 161–3, 188–90, 198, 209, 220, 223, 227 World War II and internationalism 3, 8–11, 127 Yale University 119 Yang, Grace 162, 168, 172 Young Plan 150, 224 Young Women’s Christian Association 168–9 Yugoslavia 77

Zimmermann, Alfred 136, 140–3, 145–7 Zimmern, Alfred 25, 49, 50

255

256

Internationalism Reconfigured