Between the crisis of democracy and world parliament: the development of the Inter-Parliamentary Union in the 1920s

Abstract

The Great War created new challenges for the proponents of pre-1914 cosmopolitanism. This article explores this theme by studying the Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU), an international association of members of parliament active in the interwar period. The IPU is first taken as a case study to discuss the difficulty of clearly differentiating between national politicians and agents of international civil society during the years between the wars. The article then shows how pre-war liberal internationalists had to reorient after the First World War, and how socialists and nationalists brought new agendas to the realm of international cooperation at the non-governmental level. These new perspectives shaping the international system even led to far-reaching plans for a world parliament. However, the IPU's history also shows how domestic political polarization contributed to the failure of interwar internationalism.

Democratic Politics and the League of Nations: The Labour and Socialist International as a Protagonist of Interwar Internationalism

“…50 Their stance resembled the calls of liberal internationalists who considered the IPU as the potential nucleus of a world parliament. 51 Likewise, in his response to the Briand Memorandum, Zilliacus envisaged a division of labour between different international organisations: 'it should not be difficult to develop the League as the machinery for government action and the Inter-Parliamentary Union as the machinery for educating public opinion.' 52 These convergences should not obscure ongoing differences between labour and liberal internationalisms.…”