The League of Nations and East Asia—what do you associate this with? Most probably the Manchurian Crisis; the impact of which was overwhelming. At the same time, it should be noted that there was a lot more to the League of Nations and East Asia than the Crisis. This book uncovers the League’s works in East Asia in social, economic and humanitarian fields, and examines their impact on the international relations in the region.
After the calamities of the First World War, the League of Nations was established to prevent further international conflict. As the United States did not become its member, the League’s influence was limited. It failed in its primary objective and could not prevent the Second World War, so that it was reviled and neglected for a very long time.
In the twenty-first century, however, interest in the League of Nations has revived and is flourishing. One of the reasons is that it is now recognized that the League was more than a collective security arrangement. The League had a very wide spectrum of economic, social and other technical activities, and it accomplished quite a lot in these fields. It laid ‘the foundation for the institutions of global governance we have today’.1 For example, Patricia Clavin has shown the growing importance of the League’s undertakings in economics in her Securing the World Economy. She has also shown the continuity of people and their works into the period of the United Nations.2
Remarkably, such works of the League were not limited to Europe. Sunil S. Amrith’s Decolonizing International Health shows that the League collected information on diseases in South and Southeast Asia.3 The League also sent missions to Asia to investigate the trafficking in opium and the situation of women and children. Based on the information it collected, it endeavoured to solve these problems, or at least to mitigate them.
Despite its efforts and achievements, the League’s social and technical works in East Asia have fallen into almost complete oblivion. Existing studies on the League of Nations mainly analyse its works in Europe. Although Europe was indeed at the centre of the League’s attention and activities, the founding fathers of the League aimed to make it more global and universal. Europe could not leave other parts of the world completely outside the system. East Asia was also included in it. The region was by no means free from the impact of the League of Nations.
Susan Pedersen is another person who has led the study of the League of Nations. In her extensive review of the previous studies on the League of Nations published in 2007, she divided the League’s works into three categories. Her major work on the League, The Guardians, has examined the work of the Permanent Mandate Commission, and has shown that the imperial order was gradually transformed through the apparatus and the publicity that the mandates system brought into being.4 In the introduction of The Guardians, Pedersen introduced the work of William Rappard, Swiss director of the Mandate Section of the League Secretariat.
Rappard’s work is based on his lecture given in the United States in 1925. He started by elucidating ‘Three Leagues in One’. Those three were a League to outlaw war, a League to execute the peace treaties, and a League to promote international co-operation. The first, outlawing war, is related to the primary objective of the League. The second is related to the mandates systems and the minorities question. The third covers a wide field. When the League was established, issues in this third group were considered marginal. Only Article 23 out of the twenty-six articles touched upon them. There were, however, those who considered that ‘the main purpose of the League, the prevention of war, could perhaps be more readily and more effectively served by the consolidation of peace’. The international co-operation was for the purpose of consolidating peace, and this third League expanded over time. It came to cover various activities. Rappard wrote in 1925, ‘[i]ts activities – economic, social, political, hygienic, intellectual, moral – are so extraordinarily varied that it is not easy even to classify them.’5 David Mitrany, a political scientist, had these operations and people making them work in mind when he crafted his functionalist theory.6
This book concerns this third category: the League to promote international co-operation. It extends the analysis of the League of Nations to East Asia, examining its social and humanitarian works, which have been neglected. As it was impossible to separate those works from existing economic agreements made by the countries, this book also touches upon economic issues.
Even when historians included East Asia in their analyses of the League of Nations, they hitherto tended to focus on the moment of crisis, namely the Manchurian Crisis. Nobody denies its significance, but more light should be shed on the League of Nations and East Asia, and on various aspects. Otherwise, our understanding of the period remains too simple and superficial. The League’s social and other technical works are significant as such. In addition, they were closely related to the development in international relations in the region. Rappard was quite optimistic in 1925. He considered those technical works non-political. However, Edward Hallett Carr wrote in his The Twenty Years’ Crisis as follows:
When states co-operate with one another to maintain postal or transport services, or to prevent the spread of epidemics or suppress the traffic in drugs, these activities are described as ‘non-political’ or ‘technical’. But as soon as an issue arises which involves, or is thought to involve, the power of one state in relation to another, the matter at once becomes ‘political’.7
As Carr pointed out, technical works often turned out to be highly political. They were also related to the rise and fall of power and authority of countries. Still, just as East Asia has remained in the shadows in the previous studies of the League of Nations, the League has been almost completely overlooked in the study of the international history of East Asia, except its involvement in the Manchurian Crisis. The works by Ian Nish and Thomas Burkman are superb, but neither of them takes social and other technical issues into consideration.8 This book is at the intersection of the study of the League and that of the international history of East Asia, and aims to advance both.
More specifically, this book takes up several issues which the League tackled in East Asia: namely the control of trafficking in opium, and technical co-operation with China. The control of the traffic in drugs was directly mentioned by Carr in the above quote. It was also one of the most difficult problems for Japan in the League.9 Technical co-operation with China developed from the works in the field of health, which was also mentioned by Carr. It later developed into a wide-ranging project. This book also deals with the issue of assisting Russian women refugees in China, because this, as well as the control of opium trafficking, developed from the work based on Article 23 (c) of the League’s Covenant . In addition, the same individuals such as Dame Rachel Crowdy (1884–1964) were involved in the two issues. Crowdy was the highest-ranking woman in the League Secretariat, and was the chief of the Social Questions and Opium Traffic Section. She also offered a link between the League and voluntary organizations.10 After she left the League, she visited Japan and Manchuria twice, in 1931 and 1934.
This book argues that the League achieved quite a lot in the field of social and technical works; and that those works came to challenge the existing imperial order in East and Southeast Asia, although to do so was by no means the intention of the founding fathers of the League. One point to be remembered is that, different from Europe, the First World War did not change East Asia very much. Empires firmly remained in the region. Britain and France, the mainstays of the League of Nations, were empires with considerable interests in East and Southeast Asia. In her study on the Institute of Pacific Relations, Tomoko Akami has pointed out that the Great Powers which promoted internationalism in the inter-war period were at the same time empires.11 In addition to Britain and France, the Netherlands ruled the Dutch East Indies, while Macao was the colony of Portugal. Japan was also an empire, and it maintained various interests in China. Furthermore, China itself had an imperial face, although its semi-colonial status in the inter-war period is usually emphasized. The Republic of China inherited the territory of Qing which was a land-based empire. Qing had conquered Xinjiang in the eighteenth century and ruled the indigenes in Yunnan. I regard this international order consisti...