Organizing the 20th-Century World

International Organizations and the Emergence of International Public Administration, 1920-1960s

Karen Gram-Skjoldager, Haakon Andreas Ikonomou, Torsten Kahlert

• Publisher: Bloomsbury Academic
• Year: 2020
• ISBN:
  9781350134591
• Edition: 1
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: European History
• Index: History

International Organizations play a pivotal role on the modern global stage and have done, this book argues, since the beginning of the 20th century. This volume offers the first historical exploration into the formative years of international public administrations, covering the birth of the League of Nations and the emergence of the second generation that still shape international politics today such as the UN, NATO and OECD. Centring on Europe, where the multilaterization of international relations played out more intensely in the mid-20th century than in other parts of the world, it demonstrates a broad range of historiographical and methodological approaches to institutions in international history. The book argues that after several 'turns' (cultural, linguistic, material, transnational), international history is now better equipped to restate its core questions of policy and power with a view to their institutional dimensions. Making use of new approaches in the field, this book develops an understanding of the specific powers and roles of IO-administrations by delving into their institutional make-up.

1

Introduction

Karen Gram-Skjoldager, Haakon A. Ikonomou and Torsten Kahlert

Since the beginning of the twentieth century, more than 5,000 international organizations (IOs) have been created to deal with an ever-expanding range of political, economic and technical issues.¹ All of these international organizations depend on permanent international administrations inhabited by civil servants, preparing and implementing policies and securing institutional continuity. As a consequence, the twentieth century has witnessed how international executive power in the form of international administrative bodies has come to constitute an increasingly important feature of world politics. While indispensable to international life, these international bureaucrats have also become the object of political criticism for their lack of efficiency and the opaque, undemocratic power they (allegedly) wield.²

This volume offers the first historical exploration of the genealogy and anatomy of international public administrations. Focusing on the foundational period of international organizations from the 1920s to the 1960s, it covers the birth of the League of Nations and the emergence of the second-generation international organizations that still shape international politics today (the UN, NATO, OEEC/OECD, the European Coal and Steel Community/EU). Geographically, the book centres on European and Atlantic international organizations, reflecting the fact that the multilateralization of international relations in the mid-twentieth century played out more intensely in Europe and the Western hemisphere than in other regions of the world.

Equally important, the volume demonstrates a broad range of historiographical traditions and methodological approaches to the study of institutions in international history. It is our assumption that after several ‘turns’ (cultural, linguistic, material, transnational), international history is now better equipped to restate its core questions of policy and power with a view to their institutional dimensions. Making use of the new approaches that have emerged in the field over the past several decades, we wish to develop a new understanding of the specific powers and roles of international organization administrations by delving into their institutional make-up, leadership, procedures and human composition. Such elements have been neglected, often with the implicit assumption that the same dynamics that exist in domestic politics or the old diplomacy of monarchs and emperors can be transplanted to the complex international environment emerging in the twentieth century. We contend that the anatomy of these institutions varied and changed over time and that policy-making processes and transnational exchanges of ideas cannot be treated analytically separate from their institutional contexts and the social worlds they represent.

Towards a Connected History of International Public Administrations

Since the 2000s, historians have abandoned the assumption that international organizations were mere arenas for interstate competition and bargaining and have become increasingly interested in the history, role and significance of these organizations in their own right.³

Over the last fifteen years, the ‘transnational turn’ brought the historical role of international organizations, transnational actors and expertise into focus.⁴ Exploring networks of expertise, knowledge and power, historians have uncovered the influence of transnationally organized scientists, lawyers, colonial administrators, engineers, economists and other professional and political groups in shaping interwar and post-war politics.⁵

A strand of this literature has sought to connect the first ‘experiment’ of international organization in the League of Nations, with the many ‘second generation’ IOs created in the 1940s and 1950s. A key example of this approach is Patricia Clavin’s groundbreaking work on the League’s economic and financial cooperation.⁶ A more recent example is Simon Jackson and Alanna O’Malley’s multi-authored volume on The Institution of International Order. From the League of Nations to the United Nations. Likewise, European integration studies in recent years have increasingly focused on its deeper historical foundations and attempted to connect the advances in organizations from the late nineteenth century with inter- and post-war international institutional developments.⁷ This volume draws inspiration from these studies and explores the development of international organization and administration as a gradual, continuous development that transcended the caesura of the Second World War.

The book also speaks to the trend, promoted by researchers like Akira Iriye and Mark Mazower, that places the League of Nations and post-war international organizations in the broader nineteenth- and twentieth-century genealogy of internationalism, i.e. the beliefs and practices that sought to promote a more peaceful, secure international order through the strengthening of international mechanisms and institutions, without questioning the notion of nation states and national sovereignty as building blocks of the international order.⁸ Historical literature on internationalism has flourished in recent years, and scholars have explored internationalist actors and practices in almost any imaginable policy field,⁹ emphasizing the interlinking webs of people and ideas and exploring the cultural and ideational significance of IOs as hubs of internationalist endeavours.¹⁰ This has allowed historians to usefully break down the analytical barriers between imperial, international and national politics to study them as part of a complex twentieth-century development producing a multitude of different and entangled forms of internationalisms.¹¹ As Martin Geyer and Johannes Paulmann have distinguished so eminently in their exploration of the term,¹² historians explore internationalism as both ideology and process (often not distinguishing between the two). This conceptual width is tied to an analytical ambition to see nineteenth- and early twentieth-century internationalism as the beginning of globalization processes and an emerging international society that are still shaping the world today.¹³

While the transnational scholarship on internationalism and IOs has been particularly successful in uncovering and tracing nodes of power and knowledge in twentieth-century global governance,¹⁴ it has rarely engaged with the international public administrations and their set-up and functioning per se. Rather, institutions are often left as not very well-defined hubs, nodal points or arenas, that tie together and distribute knowledge and ideas between different transnational networks. Thus, the literature rarely explains how international administrative frameworks facilitated, suppressed or sustained certain networks, behaviours or knowledge regimes over time.¹⁵ Moreover, it does not explore the distinct practices, roles and powers that the international public administrations themselves developed across the twentieth century, making them into significant actors and distinct social entities with their own sets of professional norms and practices. This volume grounds both the ‘process’ and ‘ideology’ of internationalism and the ‘power’ and ‘expertise’ of transnational networks in a third, greatly underappreciated feature of the trajectory of global governance, namely bureaucratic organization and international administration and the role it has come to play in these processes.

A relatively recent historical scholarship, focusing explicitly on international public administrations, has begun to do just that, by tracing the roots and role of international administrations back to the late nineteenth century and into the post-war era.¹⁶ This body of work has also developed and applied new analytical tools to analyse the illusive powers of international bureaucrats. Thus, Gram-Skjoldager and Ikonomou have used Pierre Bourdieu’s concept of fields to understand how different professional capitals gained hold in different parts of the League of Nations Secretariat and how the secretariat developed a shared normative system that integrated and mediated between these. Scholars like Katja Seidel, Emmanuel Mourlon Druol, Elisabetta Tollardo, Vera Fritz, Benjamin Auberer and Torsten Kahlert have used prosopography and group biographies to pry open the black box of singular international administrations and institutions and analyse generational changes, gender composition, networks and epistemic communities, and professional and educational backgrounds of the multinational staff.¹⁷ Linda Risso has recently operationalized the work of Quentin Skinner to study the first secretary-general of NATO, Lord Ismay, as an ‘innovative ideologist’.¹⁸ Still, as this scholarship is in its infancy, it often focuses on piecing together how single IO administrations came into being and functioned. Aiming to break down the barriers between single IO studies, the present volume explores administrative traits such as leadership, composition, networks, and governance styles across several IOs in the period from the 1920s to the 1960s, explicitly connecting interwar and post-war developments and downplaying 1945 as a caesura in the development of international public administration.

The Sattelzeit of International Public Administrations

The period between the early 1920s and the late 1960s can be understood both as a foundational period in the genealogy of international public administrations and in a longer perspective as a sort of Sattelzeit of far-reaching transformations in international relations, away from the Metternichian diplomacy and imperial scrambles of the nineteenth century and towards the infrastructure of global governance that we know today.¹⁹ The first international intergovernmental organization to develop a large-scale bureaucracy was the League of Nations. Set up after the First World War to ‘promote international co-operation and to achieve international peace and security’,²⁰ it covered a wide range of policy areas – from collective security over national minority protection to the promotion of transnational governance in areas as diverse as infrastructure, health, economy and finance.²¹ With no precedents to build on, the creation of an administration of more than 700 people from around forty different countries²² to manage these diverse international activities was, as one former employee summarized it, ‘a uniquely adventurous journey into unexplored territory […] with no familiar landmarks, mapped charts or itineraries to direct the traveller’.²³ By setting out on this journey, the League Secretariat came to have a long-term impact on how international administration developed throughout the twentieth century as it became an important reference point in discussions about the new international institutions created after the Second World War.²⁴ Indeed, a large number of League staff went to work for these organizations: the majority of the League officials who continued their careers in the post-war multilateral landscape were transferred to the UN, and political economists like Jean Monnet and Per Jacobsson are prominent examples of League staff who went to work in sectoral economic and monetary institutions like the European Coal and Steel Community (ECSC) and the International Monetary Fund (IMF).²⁵

These international organizations – that we label the ‘second generation’ – were all created in the post-war years as part of a US-led construction of a global order in the Western image. At the same time, they are radically different organizations with very different starting points: the UN – with its many special agencies – was the direct descendant of the League of Nations.²⁶ Yet it would take on a very different role due to two transformative processes: first, the presence of two superpowers and the divisions of the Cold War, which acted as a catalyst for fierce competition and stalemates, expert-driven policy-making and the reformation of the UN system – developments that affected all of the IOs under scrutiny in this volume.²⁷ Second, the process of decolonization and the emergence of new actors and forces in the Global South – a development that completely altered the state system and challenged both the American/Western dominance and the East-West dichotomy, particularly within the UN system.²⁸ The OEEC was a new, and at first regional, organization, set up to distribute Marshall Aid²⁹ and would later develop into the OECD, the custodian of Western capitalism and one of the most influential producers of global socio-economic knowledge paradigms.³⁰ NATO, meanwhile, was a new Atlantic security organization forced into existence by Cold War tensions. Not initially imagined with a large civilian administration, it developed a fully fledged and highly specialized secretariat from 1952 onwards.³¹ Last, the ECSC, and later the EC, was imagined as a conscious break with conventional international administrations and would gain unique powers due to the ideological thrust of the project, the supranational elements of the institutions and the legal prerogatives they would get at their disposal.³²

Nonetheless, as this volume shows, the administrations of these international organizations intertwine, overlap, compete and connect in various ways, making them highly suitable for a connected and comparative set of studies.³³ In focusing on these organizations, the volume highlights Europe and the Atlantic world as a hub for multilateralism and supranationalism in the mid-twentieth century and takes a particular interest in how international organization bureaucracies changed as Europe shifted from being a region defined by multinational and global empires to one structured around the nation state. Europe as a region played a decreasing role in global affairs as the twentieth century marched on. Yet, as the main battleground of two World Wars and the initial seat of the Cold War, it remained a focal point of innovative international governance and ultimately transformed large parts of its territory into what is arguably the most radical attempt at international organization to date: the EU. The issue of how European administrative models and practices travelled to other parts of the globe as decolonization spurred new regional forms of cooperation in Africa, Asia and South America is a topic that is highly deserving of academic investigation but lies beyond the scope of this volume (cf. also this introduction below).

By the end of the 1960s, the structural conditions as well as the core characteristics of these international public administrations changed. For once, they had all moved past their early formative years and reached a level of maturity, routinization and proficiency so far unseen in international politics. This can be witnessed, for instance, in the merger of the ECSC, EURATOM and EEC into the European Community, and the transition of the OEEC into the OECD – just as the post-war era, dominated by the Keynesian socio-economic paradigm and demand-side economics, marked by strong faith in (government) planning, rational scientific methods and technocratic solutions – was overtaken by the tumultuous and globalizing 1970s.³⁴ This is where our edited volume concludes, with the building blocks of the institutional order we know today established; as the first generations of post-war international civil servants were retiring; and with the economic, social and political paradigms they had helped to articulate and uphold coming under increasingly intense criticism and scrutiny. This volume, in other words, tells the story of the early formative phase of international public administration centred on Europe and the United States.

Dissecting International Public Administrations – Four Perspectives

Based on the historiographical outline above, we may formulate three aims for the current volume: first, to break down the barriers between research on various internationa...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Halftitle Page
• Title Page
• Contents 
• List of Figures
• List of Contributors
• 1 Introduction
• Part I: Populating Administrations
• Part II: Learning and Norms
• Part III: Legitimacy and Legitimization
• Part IV: Leadership and Administration
• Notes
• References
• Index
• Imprint