Having for long been a field of study reserved for political scientists and international relations specialists, international organisations are now attracting growing interest among historians. 1 This increased interest can be explained by the movement to “globalise” the discipline both in terms of its themes and its practices. While no single, accepted definition of global history exists, the majority of authors agree that a “universal” definition of the global should be rejected 2 and instead global history should be seen as an invitation to explore the connections, circulations, and cross-fertilisations that have so often been neglected within the framework of national case studies. 3 International organisations and associations are particularly fertile areas of study in this regard: they represent spaces in which one can reveal the existence of networks of relationships and systems of circulation (régimes circulatoires) and explore the connections between the local, the national, and the global and, indeed, the process of internationalisation itself. 4
To this end, it is important, however, to move beyond the debate between realists and functionalists which has dominated the study of international organisations , the crux of the argument being whether international organisations can be considered as international actors in their own right. 5 The emergence and development of international organisations in the second half of the nineteenth century in Europe were, in fact, contemporaneous to the spread of the nation-state model and the nationalisation of European societies . 6 The dissolution of empires on the European continent after the First World War and the accompanying proliferation of nation-states made it necessary, according to the realists, to create permanent institutions capable of regulating conflicts. International organisations, they argue, were structurally dependent on the states that both financed them and set the rules of their functioning and thus became powerless spectators to the balance of power between states. This fact, realists claim, is demonstrated by the “failure” of the League of Nations (LoN ) in the face of the imperialist ambitions of certain states and, more recently, by the powerlessness of the UN.
This pessimistic observation is based on an understanding of the international organisation as a diplomatic forum dominated by state and national interests. However, if one examines the organisations “from the inside” then one discovers a social space populated by a diverse array of actors: diplomats, of course, but also functionaries and experts whose identity was defined not only by their national origin but also by their participation in a number of international and national networks. By examining their activities and their trajectories, one can demonstrate how these actors participated in the international circulation of knowledge and expertise. 7 These circulations highlight the existence of international networks, of course, but they were only possible thanks to the existence of specific groups and milieus within different national and/or local societies. It is at the intersection of these different levels that international organisations become sites where “the international” is produced. As such, international organisations are, I would argue, not so much actors in global governance as they are sites of internationalisation.
Studying this “mechanism of internationalisation” requires a methodological shift. Besides the study of grand plenary conferences, moments which favoured national antagonisms, it is important to re-evaluate the work of the secretariats, commissions, and technical agencies and to make use of documents or archives produced by the functionaries and experts who worked in them. Using archival documents in preference to the profusion of official documents published by international organisations has two main advantages: it tells us about the gradual and often conflict-ridden processes that lay behind internationalisation and it allows us to pinpoint the diverse actors involved in this process.
When viewed from the perspective of their secretariats and expert committees, international organisations are revealed as spaces structured by the relations between individuals and groups of actors. But these relationships only make sense if we carefully contextualise them within the shifting geographical, institutional, and historical spaces in which they took place. The personnel files of functionaries and experts conserved in the archives of the International Labour Office or of the League of Nations (other organisations do not always grant access to such files) are, in this respect, a valuable resource. They provide information on the social and cultural profiles of the functionaries and experts and on the networks to which they belonged. This allows us to understand how a professional group is made up and how this group, at the intersection between different national social scenes and spaces, could develop and disseminate an international normativity.
In this article, the heuristic advantages of this methodological approach will be demonstrated on the basis of research undertaken in the archives of the International Labour Organisation (henceforth ILO ). I will proceed in four stages. Firstly, I will address the question of the truly international character of the ILO, studying it as a site where numerous non-governmental , liberal Western European networks coalesced. 8 I will then approach the nature of international organisation through the national/international dialectic, demonstrating, by using the German example, that it was on the basis of national expertise that international normativity was developed. Following this German example, I will then study how the German Third Reich developed its own alternative, brown internationalism, developing a social imperialism , and how it conflicted with liberal internationalism. Finally, in contrast to Nazi imperialism, I will look at the mechanisms through which the liberal social normativity was exported to “peripheral” spaces and, in the process, re-appropriated. For each of these points I will highlight the decisive role of the International Labour Office (henceforth Office)—or permanent secretariat—by examining the correspondence and reports produced by its functionaries and experts. 9
From Reformist Networks to the Transnational Space of Social Reform
Reconstructing the origins of international organisations allows us to go beyond an “idealist” standpoint and to understand the processes and social and political networks that allowed the former to emerge. In different fields, the decades before and after First World War, and around the pivotal date of 1900 and the Paris Universal Exhibition, were a crucial moment in the gradual institutionalisation of these networks. 10 The field of social reform provides a good illustration of this process. In major industrial countries, reformist networks 11 were formed at the end of the nineteenth century by representatives holding public office, professors, employers, and trade unionists. They gave rise to diverse international associations, 12 among them the International Association for Labour Legislation (henceforth IALL), founded in 1900. The latter brought together social reformers and experts on social questions, who were organised into national associations that were powerful in Germany, the United States, and France but weaker in Great Britain. From 1901 onwards, this association had a library and a permanent secretariat, under the leadership of the Austrian economist Stefan Bauer , in the Swiss city of Basel. 13 This centre became the seedbed for what would subsequently become the International Labour Organisation. 14 Several individuals embodied the continuity between the old current of social reform, particularly the International Association for Labour Legislation, and the new international organisation. The director of the new organisation, Albert Thomas , a French social reformer, was himself a member of the French branch of the IALL. Sophy Sanger , an eminent member of the British branch, took charge of the legislative section of the ILO, becoming the only female head of section. She was assisted in the task by Eduard Schluep and Edouard Thommen , who had both been employed by the IALL in Basel.
The creation of the ILO took place, however, in the specific context of the peace settlement established after the First World War. The statutes of the new international organisation were defined by Part XIII of the Treaty of Versailles, its objective expressed in the following terms: “universal peace…can be established only if it is based on social justice”, which in turn had to be rooted in “sentiments of justice and hum...