Making Sense of the League of Nations Secretariat – Historiographical and Conceptual Reflections on Early International Public Administration

Abstract

This article reintroduces the League of Nations Secretariat as a fundamentally significant object of historical study. By drawing on key insights from three generations of historiography on the Secretariat, the authors explore how historians can use a Bourdieusian conceptual framework to study this first major international administrative body. Each generation of literature has emphasized one of three professional archetypes – the bureaucrat, the diplomat and the technocrat. Moving beyond these archetypes, and applying Antoine Vauchez's concept of ‘weak fields’ and the notions of import, brokering capacity and hybridity, we see how the professional templates that were being imported into the Secretariat were culturally specific (mainly to Britain and Northern Europe) and how they were merged and reinvented to secure the smooth running of a multilateral, multinational and multivalent organization given charge of a series of new functions, thus producing new, specific forms of expertise exclusive to the Secretariat. Accordingly, we capture both the complexities of what kind of professional cultures came to dominate the Secretariat and the novelty of some of the types of expertise it rested upon: an important step towards a deeper understanding of the characteristics and role of international public administration in international politics in the twentieth century.

The Death of Major International Organizations: When Institutional Stickiness is not Enough

“…The League is often portrayed as an inevitable casualty of WWII, but from an institutional perspective the story is more puzzling: it was kept alive during the war, but it was not revived and indeed dissolved once the war was over. While most contemporary historians point at continuities between the League and the postwar institutions ( Pedersen 2007 ;Clavin 2013 ;Gram-Skjoldager and Ikonomou 2019 ), it is striking that the logics of institutional stickiness do not seem to apply: the founders of the UN established a new organization instead of trying to reform the League and the remaining League officials were sidelined and had little agency to craft a resistance strategy. Several League assets were simply transferred to the UN.…”

Compensatory Layering and the Birth of the Multipurpose Multilateral IGO in the Americas

“…97.As Gram-Skjoldager and Ikonomou 2019, 423 note, the first histories were written by people who either advocated or worked in the league, exalting their achievements and excusing the league's failures. More recent scholarship reclaims an emphasis on bureaucratic agency in the evolution of the league's mandate and institutional form: Clavin 2013; Mazower 2012, 145; Pedersen 2015, 46–47.…”