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

Introduction

Over the last century, the international political scene has become increasingly organized. More than 5000 international organizations now regulate global and regional political, economic and technical affairs. As a consequence, the twentieth century also witnessed how international executive power in the form of international administrative bodies came to constitute an increasingly important feature of world politics. ¹ Historical research on the origins, development and diversity of international bureaucracy, however, remains patchy. ²

The League of Nations became the first international intergovernmental organization to develop a large-scale bureaucracy. Set up after the First World War to ‘promote international co-operation and to achieve international peace and security’, ³ 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. ⁴ The creation of an administration of more than 700 people from around 40 different countries ⁵ 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’. ⁶ By setting out on this journey, the League Secretariat came to exercise a long-term effect on how international administration developed throughout the twentieth century; it became an important reference point in discussions about the new international institutions created after the Second World War ⁷ and a large number of League staff went to work for these organizations: 200 employees were transferred to the United Nations (UN), while political economists like Jean Monnet and Per Jacobsson offer prominent examples of League staff who went to work in sectoral economic and monetary institutions like the European Coal and Steel Community and the International Monetary Fund. ⁸

In recent years, the multifarious activities of the League and their place in broader trends in twentieth-century history such as decolonization, economic regulation and international health have formed the object of path-breaking studies, documenting how the organization changed many formerly purely technical or domestic matters into being part and parcel of the international diplomatic realm. ⁹ These recent, predominantly transnational, works, however, rarely engage with the creation, setup and functioning of the Secretariat per se, making the accounts and memoirs of its former employees the most recent literature that exists on the matter. ¹⁰ A new research project, ‘The Invention of International Bureaucracy: The League of Nations and the Creation of International Public Administration, c. 1920– 1960’ aims to remedy this situation and rethinks and reintroduces the League of Nations Secretariat as an object of study. This article offers some fundamental, conceptual and historical insights from this project. The authors draw upon key insights from the historiography on the Secretariat to propose a Bourdieusian conceptual framework which historians might apply to study it as a whole. This first step towards the systematic mapping of the Secretariat's characteristics, organization and practice, we contend, should also be seen as a starting point for understanding the development of international bureaucracy in the twentieth century more generally. ¹¹

The article is divided into two main parts. In the first part, covering the first four sections, we review the existing literature on the League of Nations with the above-mentioned analytical point in mind. While researchers so far have refrained from explicitly conceptualizing and defining the League Secretariat, accounts of the League nonetheless contain certain implicit assumptions about the League's central administrative body that highlight key characteristics of its make-up and purpose. In this first part of the article, we will demonstrate how accounts of the Secretariat so far have variably viewed the Secretariat as a public administration, diplomatic organization and/or technocratic network. In the second part of the article, we move beyond these perspectives. Showing that they are complementary rather than mutually exclusive modes of understanding the Secretariat, we demonstrate how the League's administration might perhaps best be approached and understood as a transnational field interlinking and overlapping with fields of national diplomatic organizations, bureaucratic bodies and transnational NGOs, as well as the broader institutional context of the League. Thinking about the Secretariat in these terms, we argue, allows us to combine, contextualize and develop the three existing perspectives into a more nuanced and dynamic understanding of the institutional innovation that was the League Secretariat.

The Internationalists – the Secretariat as Bureaucracy

Roughly speaking, the literature on the League and its institutions can be divided into three ‘generations’. The first wave of literature emerged during the interwar years and continued into the 1940s and 1950s. It was written by authors who were or had been active in, or closely associated with, the League. Whether autobiographical ¹² or in the form of institutional narratives of the Secretariat's history, ¹³ this literature shares three important features. Firstly, it is transnational in that the various works, produced by authors from many different national backgrounds, present a relatively coherent narrative. These works are written from the viewpoint of an ‘international community’ and sympathize with the principles and purposes of the League, of which the authors consider themselves to be part. ¹⁴ Secondly, it forms a very emotional literature and is often driven by a wish to make sense of personal life stories that had been deeply entangled with the League's internationalist project as well as a desire to defend the achievements and legacy of the organization. As the first chronicler and former member of the League Secretariat, Egon Ranshofen-Wertheimer tellingly expressed it in the introduction to his account of the Secretariat:

All through the ten years spent in the Secretariat I watched with passionate interest the inner working of this unique machinery, ever anxious to find out what made it tick and to understand its mechanism. This study is an attempt to transform this personal experience into an objective picture. ¹⁵

On the one hand, it has stressed the similarities with national public administration, underlining its neutral, professional and meritocratic qualities, characteristic of Max Weber's ideal typical bureaucratic system. The Secretariat's first chronicler, Egon Ranshofen-Wertheimer, stressed how the Secretariat consisted of a set of clearly divided work functions in a hierarchical organizational structure, with the Secretary-General, deputy Secretaries-General and section leaders instructing the lower echelons of the organization. Further, he pointed out how an oath of loyalty and impartiality was sworn by all members of staff and how an immaculate system of staff regulations, procedures for promotion, wages and pensions regulated their careers. ¹⁸

On the other hand, this early historiography was also critically aware that the Secretariat was different from national public administration in at least two important ways. Firstly, the multinational make-up of its staff created problems with national dependencies unknown in a domestic political context. In the more triumphant narratives, nationality and national loyalties were seen as an inherent vice, which could and should be suppressed and overtaken by a purely international mind-set. ¹⁹ The more level-headed reports produced during the Second World War, with a new or revived world organization in mind, saw multinationalism and national loyalties as a sine qua non for its legitimacy as an organization composed of member states. At the same time, however, they also stressed this as a challenge to be carefully dealt with – something that had become blatantly clear with the problems created by Italian and German Secretariat staff. ²⁰

The other element that set the Secretariat apart from national public administrations, according to this literature, was that it held a structurally different position in relation to the political institutions surrounding it. As Egon Ranshofen-Wertheimer pointed out in his 1945 study of this ‘great experiment’ in international administration:

International and national administration stand in a different relation to their policy-shaping organs. National administration is part of the executive branch of government and is under [the] permanent control of the legislative branch of government. The international Secretariat on the other hand is the only permanent element in international organization. Its policy-shaping organs are not legislatures but diplomatic bodies. ²¹

Neo-realism and Diplomatic History – the Secretariat between Bureaucracy and Diplomacy

From the 1960s, interest in the League of Nations waned, and to the extent that mainstream diplomatic history took an interest in the organization, it took the form of analytical post mortems that attempted to document and explain the League's inability to prevent the Second World War. ²⁴ Accordingly, the main literature with an interest in the League's leadership and organization was a small and highly specialized biographical genre dealing with the Secretaries-General of the League. These historians commonly analysed the Secretaries-General in a genealogy of Secretaries-General of twentieth-century international organizations. Written in the same ‘soft realism’ tradition ²⁵ that dominated mainstream diplomatic history at the time, it considered the League of Nations as a stage upon which national actors fought for their interests and wielded their power. Therefore the Secretariat was habitually portrayed in one of two ways. On the one hand, there was often an implicit assumption that the Secretariat was a ‘regular’ apolitical, Weberian bureaucratic entity, similar to national public administration. In this way, it resembled the views held by the first League chroniclers. As opposed to their focus on the potentials and legacies of the Secretariat, however, the second generation tended to stress its lack of political importance and the strict supervision under which it was placed by its political masters, condemning it to be – as Eric Hobsbawm nonchalantly put it – merely ‘an institution for collecting statistics’. ²⁶ On the other hand, the League Secretariat also figures in this literature as a diplomatic unit which was attributed importance through the proficiency and role of the Secretaries-General as classical diplomatic actors and their management of international political crises and relations with dominant member states.

A prominent example of these two approaches, and how they were often combined, is James Barros's biography of Sir Eric Drummond, the League's first Secretary-General (1919–1933), who was in many ways the personification of the League's diplomatic function. Barros maps out how Drummond was deeply involved in diplomatic negotiations to settle the many small and large political problems left unresolved by the peace treaties as well as the negotiations on Germany's accession to the League and the Manchurian Crisis. He concluded that although a skilled diplomat, Drummond's autonomy was so limited that his influence in the diplomatic realm was virtually insignificant. Barros, who also wrote a biography on the second Secretary-General Joseph Avenol, saw the League as a playing field of national interests, where important members of the Secretariat ‘were treated by their respective governments as if they were their diplomatic agents overseas’. ²⁷

When assessing the literature on the Secretariat's diplomatic activities, it is worth noting that it deals solely with the Secretariat's more classical diplomatic activities and institutional units. The League of Nations was created at a time when the new internationalist visions of world organization, of which the League itself formed an integral part, challenged the concept of diplomacy itself. Assuming that old secretive diplomatic practices had been at the heart of the escalations which had led to the First World War, there was a strong push for a shift toward a new, open diplomacy, which was conducted in public and involved public opinion. As a consequence, central features of the League's work included persistently publishing and circulating information about its achievements, working with civil society organizations and associations to build legitimacy and seeking to replace – or at least supplement – classical diplomatic negotiations with a ‘new technique of frequent and regular meetings of the statesmen themselves rather than their diplomatic officers’. ²⁸

The literature that approaches the Secretariat from a diplomatic viewpoint tends to overlook these open and public dimensions of its diplomacy and focus instead on the Secretariat's bilateral, discrete and ‘traditional’ diplomatic relations with member states, particularly the major states who held seats in the League Council. Further, it is characteristic that it does not consider the institutional aspects of the League's diplomatic activities. The League Secretariat was divided into a number of sections organized around different policy areas, ranging from economy and minority issues to health and transport. Focusing on the role and influence of the Secretary-General, the diplomatic history literature implicitly touches on the activities of the Political Section – described by Ranshofen-Wertheimer as ‘the diplomatic service of the Secretariat’, which was entrusted with questions relating to disputes between States and relations between non-member states and the League; political disputes affecting one of its member states; and questions relative to the admission and withdrawal of member states. ²⁹ Even so, this literature does not investigate the institutional setup and dynamics of this section or help us explore which other parts of the organization might be embedded in and supporting this diplomatic logic (we shall return to this point below).

The Transnational Turn – the Secretariat and Technocratic Networks

The most recent – and largest – literature that touches on the League Secretariat has emerged since the early 2000s and forms part of a broader transnational turn in international history. Approaching the League and its institutional infrastructure from various other historiographical fields such as economic history, British imperial history, health or human rights history, this body of well-researched historical enquiries share some common methodological traits and perspectives. Firstly, most studies within this tradition take a limited interest in the institutional infrastructure of the League because they approach the organization from a perspective of networks and ideas rather than institutions. ³⁰ As Patricia Clavin puts it in her study of the League's economic and financial policy, the League is viewed as ‘a site where a plurality of views about global and regional coordination and cooperation were generated …’. ³¹ Secondly, authors of this persuasion often focus on particular aspects of the League Secretariat's work – such as economy, health, mandates or minorities – as part of a broader network of actors operating within that particular policy area. Thirdly, and typical of much transnational literature, it tends to avoid or downplay the power politics, traditional diplomacy, nation states and ‘national interest’ that took centre stage in previous diplomatic history literature. To some extent, this literature revives the first-generation literature as it reinterprets the League from being a ‘failure’ to being a ‘father’ or ‘teacher’ to many of today's international organizations, norms and practices. In contrast to the first-generation scholarship, however, doing so does not entail explicitly exploring the League Secretariat, its characteristics or role in the evolution of an international order. ³² Rather, the most recent studies of the League direct our attention towards the technocrats who dealt with the League's technical, economic and humanitarian activities, situating these as part of broader transnational networks of expertise and activism. ³³

In this way, the third-generation literature highlights a fundamentally new type of international professional, largely overlooked in earlier research. It is a key characteristic of the diplomats at the centre of the second-generation literature that they represent something other than themselves. Diplomats become essentially self-effacing, as they promote the positions and ideas of their governments or – in the case of the League – organization. ³⁴ Likewise, in a bureaucratic system it matters less which bureaucrat sits behind the desk, for a functionary who disagrees with a political decision should nonetheless ‘carry it out as if it corresponded to his innermost convictions’. ³⁵ For these reasons diplomats and bureaucrats are usually trained generalists who have the capacity to serve in almost any position within their organization with a minimum of trouble. What the most recent literature demonstrates to us is that among the Secretariat's officials there were many who did not fit that bill. A large proportion of the Secretariat's staff were recruited because of their expertise and experience in a particular field, be it health, economy, finance or infrastructure – they were experts or technocrats. ³⁶ Wolfram Kaiser and Johan Schot were among the first to distinguish clearly between diplomats and bureaucrats on the one hand and technocrats on the other in the context of international organizations. In Writing the Rules for Europe: Experts, Cartels, and International Organizations [2014] the two authors ‘… demonstrate that these experts developed a specific technocratic framing and practice of managing transnational and international relations – something we [Kaiser and Schot] call technocratic internationalism’. ³⁷ These international technocrats, in Kaiser and Schot's analysis, responded to what they considered the need for practical cooperation resulting from the rapidly growing transnational flow of people, goods and information and believed that the depoliticization of transnational challenges, by turning them into technical problems, offered the key to achieving lasting results – contributing to the transformation of nineteenth-century nationalism into twentieth-century internationalism. ³⁸ In pointing to technocracy as a new, distinct style of international governance and to the technocrat as an individual who exercised authority along these lines, Kaiser and Schot highlight a key element of interwar, international governance. Much of the recent literature on the League takes a particular interest in these types of experts. ³⁹ The third-generation literature shows us that in the technical parts of the Secretariat, experts and expertise held the upper hand in setting professional norms and practices and defining the organization's relations with the broader political environment in which it operated.

The Secretariat: Bureaucracy, Diplomacy and Technocracy

Though the literature on the League Secretariat remains small and scattered, we can see how the existing scholarship brings us a long way: the first generation of writers – the internationalists-cum-bureaucrats – has highlighted the League Secretariat's fundamental character as an administrative organization characterized by a pervasive bureaucratic logic. While highlighting the Secretariat's hierarchical organization with specified lines of instruction and responsibility, division of labour, advancement based on merits, and the rule of written procedure, these authors also have a keen eye for what set the Secretariat apart from national bureaucracies, most notably its relative political independence from the tensions and complications that arose from its multinational setup.

The second generation of writers has added the diplomatic functions to our understanding of the Secretariat. However, with their clear focus on the role and influence of the Secretary-General, it still remains to be understood which parts of the organization were embedded in and supported this diplomatic logic; this is particularly true for the heavily politicized regulatory activities of the Minorities, Mandates and Disarmament Sections.

The third and still thriving generation of researchers has directed our attention from the bureaucratic and diplomatic elements of the Secretariat towards the technical, ‘outer’ parts of the organization and the emerging technical expertise. In pointing to technocracy as a new, distinct style of international governance and to the technocrat as an individual that exercised authority along these lines, Kaiser and Schot have highlighted a key element of interwar international governance. This kind of governance grew in prominence as the League's diplomatic currency fell. As Vincent Lagendijk puts it:

Reform proposals like the influential 1939 Bruce Report aimed to place the expert driven technical work at the core of a new League of Nations. The underlying technocratic internationalism – an allegedly non-political and scientific approach to addressing common problems – was regarded as an alternative to more traditional diplomatic methods. ⁴⁰

It is evident from the outline above that the understandings of the League Secretariat as either a bureaucratic, diplomatic or technocratic institution are not mutually exclusive but rather supplement each other and enhance our understanding of the totality of the Secretariat's operations by highlighting different key characteristics of its make-up and purpose. Combining what the different generations have highlighted, we gain an overall picture of the Secretariat as an institution generally governed by bureaucratic principles, while largely following either a diplomatic or technocratic logic within this bureaucratic framework (see Figure 1). OPEN IN VIEWER

What is needed, at this point, is a conceptual framework that can combine and integrate these existing conceptualizations; that enables us to cover the parts of the Secretariat that do not fall squarely within any of these archetypical categories, and that situates the League Secretariat in its broader institutional and political contexts. In the following section, we propose that one way of doing so and structuring an analysis of this complex organization is to turn to Pierre Bourdieu's concept of fields.

The Secretariat as a Weak Field

In this section, we aim to demonstrate that Bourdieu's sociological terminology is particularly helpful for historical analysis of complex and connected institutions such as the League Secretariat. There are three reasons why this is the case. First, it makes it possible to map a political unit such as the Secretariat as a ‘space … of practical knowledge on which diverse and often ‘unconventional’ agencies position themselves and therefore shape international politics’. ⁴² Second, it is helpful because such relational sociology connects the social space (field) and the ‘system of lasting, transposable dispositions’ (habitus) through practice, which historians can trace at the intersection between biographical data and the paper trail of the Secretariat. ⁴³ Third, as Antoine Vauchez argues, the field analysis might prove particularly relevant to international politics, because one needs to ‘consider power beyond the political and administrative sites of command and to consider the wider set of competing institutions, professions, and resources in which power (forms of domination and types of legitimacy) is defined and actually operates’. ⁴⁴ This is because in international affairs there is no one state holding the monopoly of legitimate symbolic violence, operating at the nexus of several fields, organizing their reach and interaction through its definitional power, or meta-capital. ⁴⁵ International affairs are, so Vauchez argues, anchored in these more structured and defined national fields, but constitute a so-called ‘weak’ field characterized by limited political autonomy and weakly differentiated social structures. It is also interstitial (between objects) and interwoven with bordering fields, and therefore essentially transnational. Yet, it is populated by specific institutions and transnational actors ‘competing upon a commonly valued type of symbolic capital’. ⁴⁶

By applying this perspective to the League Secretariat, we are directed to three analytical focal points that are crucial in order to understand the social world of the Secretariat. Firstly, it directs our attention to the issue of import. The concept of the transnational weak field suggests that the forms of capital specific to the field, which the actors try to amass and profit from, are often ‘imported’ from bordering and more structured fields. In the case of the League Secretariat, models of bureaucratic organization, diplomatic norms and technical expertise were imported and appropriated as part of the organizational build-up of the Secretariat. This means that exploring what kind of bureaucratic, diplomatic and technocratic expertise prevailed, where it ‘came from’, how it was institutionalized in the Secretariat, and how it defined what was considered ‘good currency’ within the institution, is crucial to our understanding of the Secretariat, particularly in the early years of its existence.

The matter of import, would, for instance, direct our attention to how Britain's role as the League's most influential member state was reflected in the wholesale import of the Foreign Office as an organizational model for the Secretariat, which was only significantly altered when Joseph Avenol became Secretary-General in 1933 and implemented key elements of the French administrative tradition. ⁴⁷ The functional, rather than national, division of sections within the Secretariat, and the emphasis on thorough written procedure, pragmatism, neutrality and personal responsibility, were all traits reminiscent of the Foreign Office, and the first Secretary-General, Sir Eric Drummond, was himself a Foreign Office man. ⁴⁸

However, this import of resources and norms did not only take place as deliberate political and strategic decisions by Drummond and other leading members of the Secretariat, but also through the professional habitus of the hundreds of diplomats, civil servants and experts recruited from various national settings to work in the League. Upon arrival in the Secretariat, its personnel had already been educated and socialized within different professional and national traditions – or, paraphrasing Vauchez, even if the Secretariat was emerging as a new and independent institutional unit, the nation states remained in control of the ‘production of the producers’ of professional norms and practices within the new weak field due to their control over educational systems. Therefore, looking at the intake, composition and development of League staff is a key element when trying to understand the professional norms that came to define the Secretariat. Studying staff movements is possible not least because of the so-called LONSEA database (www.lonsea.de) which contains basic data on all League employees and which in combination with the League's personnel files allows us to chart, at an aggregate level, which types of nationality, education and work experience opened the door to the Secretariat and fostered a successful international civil service career. ⁴⁹

While work on this is still ongoing, a few key insights already stand out. The hiring and composition of staff in the League's early years confirms the preference for British and French professional practices apparent in the League's organizational setup. As one 1921-study revealed, Great Britain contributed 9.16 per cent of the League budget while receiving 36 per cent of the salaries paid; France, contributing the same amount, held 20 per cent of the positions. ⁵⁰ This was not only a matter of language skills, but the import of skill-sets that Drummond deemed indispensable to the institution, and which he thought had been perfected in the British and French educational institutions and bureaucracies. ⁵¹ A similar picture emerges if we look at the first generation of Directors and chiefs of sections (nine in total in 1921): two were French, two British, one Norwegian and one Dutch (with very similar bureaucratic cultures to Britain). The Swiss Director, William Rappard, was a Harvard University graduate and thoroughly Americanized, while Ludwik Rajchman (Polish) and Salvador de Madariaga (Spanish) were both educated in France and Britain. ⁵² Though multinational in its setup, the Secretariat mainly invited and attracted staff with North/Western European and American educational backgrounds.

From this starting point, two major trends unfolded. On the one hand, a significant internationalization of the League staff took place as the number of nationalities represented in the Secretariat grew from 15 in 1920 to 43 in 1938. ⁵³ The same trend is evident in the leadership of the Secretariat: in 1928 the first South American Director, Juan Antonio Buero, was appointed, and by the late 1930s 15 different nationalities had held the position of Director. ⁵⁴ In tandem with this development, we note a certain homogenization of the professional profiles that could access the Secretariat. Thus, a distinct diversity can be noted in the first generation of Directors and Under-Secretaries-General entering the Secretariat (13 persons in total) ⁵⁵ that was not in evidence for later generations; these ‘founding fathers’ of the Secretariat counted among their number former diplomats, lawyers, economists and even a historian, Paul Mantoux. Two were journalists, and as Emil Seidenfaden has shown, it was of great significance that the first director of the Information Section, Pierre Comert, was a trained journalist, and not a diplomat, as this would shape both the form and functions of the section, making it a pioneer in international public diplomacy. ⁵⁶ Equally, it is both revealing and defining that the first director of the Health Section, Ludwik Rajchman, was a physician and bacteriologist by training and the first chief of the Opium Traffic and Social Questions Section, Dame Rachel Crowdy, was a nurse and social reformer. In both of these less obviously political, technical sections, highly specialized expertise was sought out, and particularly Rajchman had a relatively free hand to recruit staff based almost exclusively on technical expertise and educational background, thus reproducing this emphasis on area-specific expertise within the section. ⁵⁷ Thus, we see how the dominant role of experts in the technical sections, already noted in the literature, was present from the very beginning of the Secretariat's existence. From the mid-1920s, leadership recruitment to the sections in the Secretariat became ever more streamlined as new Directors increasingly held university degrees in law and professional experience from the diplomatic services. ⁵⁸ This homogenization of imported professional qualities reflected the professionalization and stabilization of the Secretariat as a bureaucratic organization.

Just as important as studying this import of professional dispositions and practices, however, is tracing how they merged and which professional institutional culture prevailed. A recurring theme in the early literature on the League is the strong esprit de corps among the staff of the Secretariat, suggesting that the various professional dispositions and norms merged into a coherent institutional culture that also spanned the functional and hierarchical divisions between diplomats, bureaucrats and technocrats. Often, this is depicted as a fleeting and ubiquitous mind-set among the officials, ⁵⁹ but it was, in fact, gradually institutionalized as a professional ethos through the development and revisions of staff regulations from 1920 onwards, and through office circulars, which regulated the day-to-day affairs of the League staff, reports on annual increments which evaluated the professional qualities of every League employee, and general discussions within the Appointments Committee of the Secretariat. The staff regulations demanded loyalty to the international cause; the reports on annual increments systematically emphasized efficiency, flexibility and self-sufficiency; while Drummond, as head of the Appointments Committee, often stressed the candidate's pragmatic mind-set and efficiency in drafting text. ⁶⁰ Indeed, the first-generation literature and the information emanating from the League itself promoted these traits of loyalty to the spirit of the Covenant and the imagery of a smooth, flexible and effective modern bureaucratic machinery. ⁶¹

This brings us to the second feature that the ‘weak field’ approach invites us to consider: the brokering capacity of the League Secretariat. The Secretariat as a field gained both its legitimacy and influence through its ‘brokering capacity’ in-between other fields. This is most obvious in relation to its member states; as indicated by the growing internationalization of the League staff touched on above, it is impossible to understand the professional culture of the Secretariat without including the issue of nationality. The Secretariat always sought to strike a balance between legitimacy through national representation and autonomy through meritocratic ideals, and staff were, in practice, expected to play a dual role: that of the independent bureaucrat or expert working on behalf of the international society and that of the diplomat, linking the League to a specific national hinterland and being a token of a given state's investment in the world organization, through her/his presence. This balancing act sat at the centre of the Secretariat's ‘professional institutional culture’ and was rewarded or sanctioned continuously within the Appointments Committee of the Secretariat where new members of staff were appointed. ⁶² The multinational setup of the Secretariat was not only a symbolic exercise that documented member states’ relative status and support for the organization, but was also used in very concrete ways by the League Secretariat when carrying out its work. We know, for instance, that several of the more political sections of the Secretariat took on a proactive brokering role in the implementation of the Treaty of Lausanne, resettling the borders of Turkey after the Treaty of Sevres had collapsed with the disastrous Greco-Turkish war of 1919–22. Officials of the Political and the Minorities Sections shuttled between the Mixed Commission overseeing the population exchange, various refugee and humanitarian organizations, the Secretary-General and Council, and the Greek and Turkish Governments, acting as diplomatic intermediates. ⁶³ Revealingly, the League – initially ascribed a rather marginal role in the implementation and monitoring of the Lausanne Treaty and, quite specifically, the exchange policy – anticipated that it would, nonetheless, take on a brokering role. ⁶⁴ On a more generalized level, then, the ‘weak’ fields prism lends analytical clout to the argument made by Glenda Sluga, Patricia Clavin and others that nationalism and internationalism should be understood as mutually constitutive in the context of international organizations. ⁶⁵

One of the League Secretariat's most fundamental traits, however, was that it served as a nodal point not only between states, but also between other international actors such as the League of Nations Union, women's organizations, peace movements and philanthropic organizations such as the Rockefeller Foundation. Exploring brokering practices across and between territories, states, League institutions, organizations and networks allows us to connect the classical diplomatic approach and the, by now traditional, transnational analysis of the League with a more profound understanding of the significance of the institutional setup and administrative culture of the Secretariat.

In this light, the Secretariat's balancing of absolute autonomy through the insistence on the Secretary-General's unlimited authority in staffing matters and a deep integration of state interests through an ever-present emphasis on staff nationality in questions of recruitment – highlighted above – was perhaps the most important element of maintaining brokering capacity. ⁶⁶ But it was not the only one. The professional culture of the Secretariat, in its many shades and variations, combined with its global reach and mission, allowed it to engage with and influence other fields as well. While this is a topic in which more research is needed, we may assume that the Secretariat's brokering activities played out in different ways across different policy areas. Thus, maintaining external relations meant something very different at the top level of Under-Secretaries and in the Political Section where nurturing diplomatic relations with member state governments was a key priority and a section such as the Social Questions and Opium Traffic Section where building alliances with experts and activists in women's organizations and associations made up a large part of the section's work. If we were to point to one section, in particular, which engaged with a wide range of different state and non-state stakeholders on a vast geographical scale, we may take a closer look at the Health Section. Early in its life, this section was chiefly engaged in the work against epidemics in Eastern Europe, broader health issues in Asia, and public health issues in Africa. From the 1930s onwards, the focus shifted to rural hygiene, nutrition and housing and working conditions in Eastern Europe and Asia. ⁶⁷ Director Ludwik Rajchman proved particularly eager to expand to the Far East and successfully pushed for the creation in 1925 of an ‘Eastern Bureau’ in Singapore as an epidemiological centre. This was only the beginning of a series of projects in Asia. In 1926, Peking began transmitting data to Geneva, and by 1928, China's Ministry of Health set up an international advisory council of three with Rajchman as one of the members. This prompted collaboration on public health in port cities, anti-cholera vaccination, national public health organization, and the education of Chinese medical and public health officers (for instance, by 1933, 25 fellowships in public health related matters had been funded by the LNHO). Indeed, Rajchman became so involved that he asked to serve ‘as “technical agent” to coordinate all League of Nations assistance to China while being paid by the Chinese government’. ⁶⁸ Accordingly, the technocratic, expert-driven Health Section functioned as an information service and acted as a link between national health administrations and the various new international organs, including the Rockefeller Foundation, which funded a substantial part of its activities. Moreover, it offered technical assistance to governments in need and advised the Assembly and the Health Council on all international public health questions. ⁶⁹

As we have shown above, however, the brokering practices of the Health Section were in no way unique. While the third-generation literature has, implicitly, touched upon the brokering capacity of the more technocratic parts of the Secretariat, this is a perspective that is relevant to the entirety of the Secretariat. It is likely that what hitherto has been conceived of as something specific for the predominantly technocratic sections, is better understood as a general characteristic of the Secretariat, to be found in other forms, most likely imbued with more classical diplomatic traits, across other sections. Exploring how different forms of brokering formed part of the League Secretariat's activities across its different fields of activities is a key element of understanding the Secretariat's activities.

Lastly, the concept of a transnational weak field directs analytical attention to the hybrid roles held by the personnel of the Secretariat. When Vauchez discusses hybridity in relation to transnational fields, he does so in order to highlight how new, less rigorous or clear-cut professional profiles emerged that could be transferred and made relevant across the field – or in the context of the Secretariat, across different sections and policy areas. ⁷⁰ A specific case could be that of Thanassis Aghnides, a diplomat with a legal degree, who saw himself as working either in the Legal or Social Section, but would within the first three years of the League Secretariat work in the Minorities, Disarmament and Political Sections. ⁷¹ Indeed, several of the examples above can be read in this light: the first generation of League officials and the early recruitment of Scandinavian employees are both testimonies to a low degree of differentiation.

While this proved true of the early years of the League Secretariat, however, the initial fluidity, as already hinted at, was soon replaced by a distinct – though still less rigid – differentiation on the transnational level. Within the first decade of its existence, the League Secretariat saw the emergence of new and specific kinds of hybridity, which merged different professional qualities imported to the Secretariat with a particular set of national profiles and on-the-job training to create new specific forms of transnational expertise. Thus, while lack of differentiation first created fluid hybridity, akin to what Vauchez describes, it was with time replaced by differentiated hybrid roles geared towards transnational practices and problematiques.

We want to demonstrate the potential of thinking about the Secretariat in terms of these two processes – the initial fluid hybridity and the creation of new, distinct hybrid roles – by taking a closer look at the Minorities Section. Given that the section dealt with the political contested and complex legal regulation of national minorities regimes and therefore represented a new, previously unknown function in international politics, we may assume that it could not rely on the import of pre-existing professional templates from the national level.

We explore the Minorities Section using the LONSEA database (www.lonsea.de) in combination with League personnel files, which allow us to systematically map staff education in individual sections, such as the Minorities Section, and circulation between sections, which allows us to assess the extent to which sector-specific expertise was valued and rewarded in various parts of the organization and how it was weighed against other qualities such as generalist knowledge, leadership skills and nationality.

Turning to the Minorities Section, we first note that during its existence, 23 members of section and Directors passed through. Their educational background was relatively homogenous. Of the 23, 12 came from different national foreign services and nine were jurists or had legal training. Five officials had both legal training and were diplomats, making 15 out of 23 higher officials either a jurist, a diplomat, or both. ⁷² The rest were two political scientists, one economist, three with other backgrounds (army, theology and classics), while two are unknown (though we know one served in the British Army during the First World War). Even more strikingly, five out of five Directors were diplomats, three of them also holding a degree in law. ⁷³

The concentration of jurists and diplomats is explained by the type of work the section did – the most important of which was the overseeing of the Minorities Treaties signed by the new Central and Eastern European states, securing certain religious, educational and linguistic rights for national minorities. It entailed the application and monitoring of abstract and novel legal principles and treaty obligations to a patchwork of ethnic, religious and political groupings across several newly formed states in which all major Western powers had, often contradicting, interests. ⁷⁴ The first, long-standing, Director of the Section, Norwegian diplomat and trained lawyer Erik Colban, combined ‘bureaucratic procedure and active diplomatic relations’ to set up ‘an international agency in protecting rights’. ⁷⁵ At the heart of this arrangement lay a petition system, whereby minorities – as individuals or organizations – could send complaints or grievances to the League, which set up a committee system to govern how the Council would investigate petitions. The Minorities Section was entrusted with weeding out petitions by deciding in a preliminary manner on their ‘receivability’. ⁷⁶ Colban travelled extensively on diplomatic missions to the various countries concerned, meeting with representatives of governments, petitioners and other persons interested in the minorities question. By the end of 1924, for instance, Colban and members of the section ‘had travelled to Belgrade, Sofia, Bucharest, Transylvania, Athens, Bulgaria, Budapest, Vienna, and Prague multiple times, and Colban was spending around six months each year abroad’. ⁷⁷ Thus, the work was neither purely legal, nor purely political, and it entailed, particularly on the Director's part, a strong degree of diplomatic finesse.

If we turn to where else in the Secretariat these 23 officials worked, we may note that ten only worked for the Minorities Section, three each also worked for the Disarmament Section or in Internal Administrative Sections, two each for the Mandates and Political Sections, and one each for the Social and Opium, Economic, Health, Information and Legal Sections respectively. Two officials went on to become Deputy Secretaries General. Thus, officials in the Minorities Section circulated relatively often to other sections dealing with political issues (seven), less often to technical sections (three), and even less to general sections (two, excluding internal administration). Accordingly, we may note that a certain type of official was particularly suitable in the political-diplomatic sections of the Secretariat, but also that many working within the Minorities Section never moved, indicating that they attained specific knowledge and expertise that was difficult to replace. This was certainly the case when Colban was transferred to become Director of the Disarmament Section in 1927. After long discussions, a candidate from the outside, Manuel Aguirre de Cárcer, was appointed, only to be found ill-suited for the job and replaced by long-standing Member of Section Pablo de Azcárate in 1930. ⁷⁸ The appointment thus confirmed what the Staff Regulations of 1922 had already indicated: internal candidates were to be given priority over external candidates. This shows that working in the Secretariat meant building a particular and very valuable form of expertise that could not easily be replaced with outside qualifications. ⁷⁹

Azcárate's expertise, however, was not the only reason for his appointment as Director. It also stemmed from the fact that Secretary-General Drummond had promised the Spanish Government ‘that they should have a Director in the Secretariat’. ⁸⁰ Taking into account the nationality of employees, as argued elsewhere, ⁸¹ was a way to secure support and legitimacy among Member States, but it was also capital in itself. In this respect, it is worth noting that the Minorities Section had one English, zero French, zero German, and zero Central or Eastern European officials. Instead, we find a predominance of Scandinavian officials – three Norwegian and three Danish – of which three served as Director, covering 14 of the League's 26 years of existence. A first study of why this was the case ⁸² shows that the Secretariat deemed Danes and Norwegians as particularly suited to deal with the new and politically contested regimes of sovereignty and rights. ⁸³ These included Mandates and Minorities where Great Powers and Continental Powers had vested and conflicting interests. In these regards Scandinavians stood out for the quality of their national administrations, their governments’ policies of neutrality, ⁸⁴ and their knowledge of particular European issues (which often put them ahead of, say, South American candidates). ⁸⁵ Within the Minorities Section it seems evident that the Great Powers maintained a certain distance so as to not delegitimize the Section's position as a ‘neutral’ broker. Within the Mandate Section the picture was more ambiguous. As a discussion between Italian Member of Section Vito Catastini and Swiss Director William Rappard over the possible transfer of Danish Member of Section T. B. Friis reveals, coming from a non-mandatory power with limited colonial administrative experience like Denmark could either be interpreted negatively as ‘inexperience’ or positively as ‘neutrality’. ⁸⁶

Mapping the higher officials of the Minorities Section, we see that a complex blend of qualities was required and that while these qualities were transferable to other political sections, the requirements of the section ‘created’ a new hybrid role tailored to the work in question. The role of the officials was a hybrid between the traditional diplomat, though often negotiations were at the sub-state level, and a legal counsellor, while the qualities inherent in the official's nationality also played a major part. Both the import of particular forms of professional capital and the functionally specific ‘brokering capacity’ of the Minorities Section helped create this hybrid role, which, with time, created a specific expertise within the section, not easily replaced, but seemingly more easily transferred. It seems reasonable to hypothesize that the picture would look very different in a section such as the Health Section where medical technocratic expertise was predominant; here we should expect frequent personnel exchanges with other transnational expert bodies and a low degree of circulation of staff to other sections in the League. Likewise, in the Legal Section, where a very advanced and highly specialized international legal expertise was required, we might expect long careers in the section, a low degree of exchange with other sections and a high staff turnover between the section and MFA legal services. In order to understand the overall ecology of the League Secretariat, similar mappings of all its sections are therefore required. This will allow us not only to combine and develop more nuanced understandings of the bureaucratic, diplomatic and technocratic functions of the Secretariat so far highlighted in the scholarship; it may also open our eyes to the many new and subtle hybrid forms of professional expertise and authority that emerged in the first international public administration.

Conclusion

In one of the earliest comprehensive works on the League of Nations – meant to be the first of three momentous volumes on its organization, results and opportunities on the way to an organized world society – Charles Howard-Ellis ⁸⁷ wrote a rather insightful passage about the qualities required of those inhabiting the League Secretariat:

The survey of its nature and work just given shows that the Secretariat is indeed a unique institution, and the ideal Secretariat official would have to show a unique combination of qualities. He must be somewhat of a reformer, in the sense that he is part of a machine that stands for a new idea. At the same time he must be a civil servant who realizes that he is working for all the governments members of the League [sic]. He must be a diplomat, in the sense of knowing how to deal with representatives of ‘foreign’ governments, and with men and women of different nations on sometimes very ticklish and delicate problems of international relations. He must often be a highly trained specialist either in law, public health, finance, or some other subject, and nearly always a bit of a linguist. ⁸⁸

In this article, we have demonstrated how each generation of literature has emphasized one of these three professional archetypes – the bureaucrat, the diplomat and the technocrat – and we have argued that these archetypes, and where they were to be found in the organization, are important ingredients for a new analysis of the Secretariat. However, applying Vauchez's concept of ‘weak fields’ and the notions of import, brokering capacity and hybridity we have also shown how the professional templates that were being imported 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 charged with a series of new functions, thus producing new, specific forms of expertise exclusive to the Secretariat.

Applying the weak-field approach accordingly offers the potential to capture both the complexities behind the professional cultures that came to dominate the Secretariat and the novelty of some of the types of expertise it rested upon. In this way, the article also represents an important step towards a deeper understanding of the characteristics and role of international public administration in international politics over the past 100 years.