Abstract
This is a sophisticated, scholarly, and highly original study of the European contribution to the making of international trade policy and regulation in the 1920s. In the wake of the economic disintegration of the First World War new trade rules had become an urgent need if markets were to be restored and if ‘new’ states were successfully to replace former empires. Although the main lines of the League of Nations’ contributing to the world economy is now well known, this work adds an important and easily missed dimension to the League story by devoting itself specifically to the creation of rules for international trade. Here it lucidly traces this story back to pre-1914 global integration, and forward by showing the important linkages between what the League attempted in the 1920s and what the international trade policymakers, led by the United States, achieved after the Second World War with the emergence of GATT, and later the WTO. However rather than presenting a dry impersonal institutional history the author embodies the wider narrative in the careers of four key ‘institutional entrepreneurs’, one taken from Britain (Hubert Llewellyn Smith), one from France (Lucien Coquet), one from Germany (Bernhard Harms), and one from Austria (Richard Riedl). One suspects that other figures might have been chosen – indeed several candidates emerge in the pages of this book (Stoppani from Italy, Salter from Britain, Schüller for Austria, or Serruys from France?). Nevertheless, the quartet is well-chosen, and each speaks to an important dimension of trade policy formulation, especially as revealed through the lens of the World Economic Conference of 1927.
The most powerful figure among the four was undoubtedly Llewellyn Smith, an ‘incremental innovator’ whose important part in the working of the League of Nations is given detailed coverage for the first time. Better known for his time at the head of the Board of Trade, as a social reformer, and a wartime administrator, Smith in his capacity as leading member of the League's Economic Committee exemplifies the aspiration towards global economic governance according to the principles of free trade, suitably adjusted to allow for imperial preference (a process which would benefit from further clarification). Smith had been unenthusiastic about the calling of the World Economic Conference in 1927, and his fears were realized as it served mostly to reveal the obstacles to the restoration of pre-1914 free trade (so far as that existed in a largely protectionist era). Smith's commitment to a free global market, unsurprising for a Cobden Club prize winner, was shared by Bernard Harms, ironically perhaps, president of the Friedrich List society, for whom it offered the best way for Germany to recover its global economic power. Harms, a strong supporter of Stresemann's diplomacy, also saw the need to work with the United States, and later its philanthropic bodies, especially the Rockefeller Foundation, came in handy to help fund his multiple policy enterprises. These went back to the creation of the Institute for Sea Traffic and World Economy at Kiel in 1914 (grandiosely relocated in 1920 to the Kaiser's former yacht club turned luxury hotel) and a series of influential publications and policy interventions. In the wake of the World Economic Conference (which he observed from afar) he set out to create an ill-fated Economic Bibliography for the League but this proved the least successful of his career-long attempts at informational exchange.
While Harms and Smith both emphasized the need for global economic regulation, the author's remaining two protagonists were more narrowly focused on European trade. Lucien Coquet emerged in the 1920s as the pillar of the movement for a European Customs Union (Union Douanière Européenne), a far more circumscribed venture than that of Coudenhove-Kalergi's Pan-European movement. Coquet's endeavours went back to cultivating Franco-German business ties before 1914 but his post-war advocacy of a customs union was primarily to constrain the future economic power of Germany. Eventually his devotion to the cause of European integration found him seeking a place for France in Hitler's ‘New Order’. The final figure, Richard Riedl was, like Coquet, an advocate of regional unity in Europe on a multilateral basis but his goal was rather to use this to support German superiority in Central and Eastern Europe. Riedl was a central figure in the Vienna Chamber of Commerce, and in leading the Austrian National Committee of the International Chamber of Commerce, both bodies whose significance for thinking on international trade is now becoming far more fully understood. But while Riedl was a weighty informal contributor to the World Economic Conference and greatly assisted the economic work of the League, at the end of the day his primary goal was an Austrian-German customs union. He did much to make this an acceptable goal in League circles but ended his career as an Austrian Nazi supporter of Anschluss.
While the careers of these four men (few women operated in the same trade policy circles, although the author gamely uncovers some) are traced in great detail, they are also all bound together by the wider thematic narrative, the attempt to make up the deficiencies of the 1919 Peace Settlement by creating new norms and global rules for trade in the experiments of the 1920s before turning towards schemes of regional unity, and after 1929, imperial alternatives. While the debate on Europe after 1945 was to some extent influenced by the customs union schemes of the 1920s, the enduring legacy of the debates and policy ideas so well reconstructed here lay in the post-war GATT regime and extends to the WTO, of which the author gives a more positive account than it often receives. This book is based on a wealth of archival and printed primary sources, imaginatively deployed. It deserves to take its place among the key scholarly contributions to the wider revival of the historiography of the League of Nations while also providing an illuminating study of visions of European unity and of global trade policy.