Pioneers in International Administration: A Prosopography of the Directors of the League of Nations Secretariat

Abstract

This article investigates interwar internationalism from the perspective of the highest personnel of the first large-scale international administration, the League of Nations Secretariat. It applies a prosopographical approach in order to map out the development of the composition of the group of the section directors of the Secretariat over time in terms of its social and cultural characteristics and career trajectories. The analysis of gender, age, nationality, as well as educational and professional backgrounds and careers after their service for the League’s Secretariat gives insight on how this group changed over time and what it tells us about interwar internationalism. I have three key findings to offer in this article: First, the Secretariat was far from being a static organization. On the contrary, the Secretariat’s directors developed in three generations each with distinct characteristics. Second, my analysis demonstrates a clear trend towards professionalization and growing maturity of the administration over time. Third, the careers of the directors show a clear pattern of continuity across the Second World War and beyond. Even though the careers continued in different organizational contexts, the majority of the directors remained closely connected to the world of internationalism of the League, the UN world and its surrounding organizations. On a methodological level, the article offers an example of how prosopographical analysis can be used to study international organizations.

The epistemic project of open diplomacy and the League of Nations: Co-evolution between diplomacy, PR and journalism

“…The scope for this research has been delimited to the formative period of the League from 1919 and into the mid-1920s. We understand this period as one of creation and establishment of structures, as it has also been described by Kahlert (2019) [2]. This periodisation is mirrored in the composition of the source material on publicity and press available from the Geneva archive, the bulk of which is dated to that period, with numbers decreasing as time progresses (cf.…”

“…Herzer, 2012; Meyen and Fiedler, 2011), and, concerning the League, in the discipline of history (cf. Kahlert, 2019). We employ what Stone calls a “multiple career-line analysis” (Stone, 1971, p. 46), concentrating accordingly on “common background characteristics” (Jones, 2001, p. 330): the professional careers, political, social and national contexts, of journalists and information officers.…”

“…2. Kahlert suggests 1927 as a key date (cf. Kahlert, 2019, p. 204); for the periodisation, cf. also Pfeil (1976).…”

International organizations and research methods: an introduction

“…This methodological perspective therefore might be very useful to study IO actors as a social space, connected to a set of national and supranational other spaces. There is indeed an increasing number of prosopographical studies contributing to the IO literature, especially on past (Tollardo 2014;Torsten 2019) and present IOs (i.e., Georgakakis 2010; Mourlon-Druol and Romero 2014) and international professional groups (i.e., Belém Lopes and Oliveira 2017).…”

A “careful study” on public opinion. An exemplary investigation of media monitoring through press clippings collections in the League of Nations’ Information and Mandates Sections

“…All four of these clipping collections originate from the 1930s and are kept among the files of the League Mandates Section in the League of Nations Archives at the UN Library in Geneva. By the early 1930s, the League administration, especially concerning LoNIS, had been reorganised significantly (Kahlert, 2019;Seidenfaden, 2019, pp. 85-86), taking the shape it would essentially keep until its dissolution in 1946.…”