The social-democratic roots of global governance: Welfare internationalism from the 19th century to the United Nations

Introduction

In this article, we discuss the origins of welfare internationalism. The term ‘welfare internationalism’ is shorthand for the idea that public international organizations (IOs) should cater to the material needs of individuals, rather than solve conflicts among states. Over the 20th century, welfare internationalism was a very influential blueprint for building international institutions. It inspired the foundation of the International Labour Organization (ILO), the World Bank Group and the functional branches of the United Nations (UN) system, in particular, those concerned with humanitarian and development aid. Important elements of welfare internationalism can also be found in the European Union (EU), for instance, in its cohesion policy that aims at reducing disparities of living standards within and across member countries.

The assumption that IOs should be responsible for individual welfare raises some thorny issues of the practical-political kind. The material resources of IOs are notoriously limited and often insufficient to live up to the promises made in their mission statements. What is more, in practice, welfare internationalism often implies a redistribution of resources across borders. Such redistribution from wealthier to poorer areas of the globe is regularly called for — on moral, legal and political grounds — but proved hard to achieve in the past. The long-standing controversy over the size of official development assistance (ODA) can illustrate the point. At an aggregate level, it never even came close to the mark of 0.7% of developed countries’ gross domestic product (GDP) that was first envisaged in 1970.

Given these manifest practical difficulties, it is a highly interesting question to ask how welfare internationalism could ever become a widely supported justification for political internationalization, and a blueprint for global institutions. We do not wish to discuss this question in the typical terms of International Relations (IR) theory, for instance, by pitching rationalist accounts of international cooperation against social-constructivist ones. Instead, we adopt a genealogical perspective and ask how the rise of welfare internationalism was possible. We thus contribute to a growing body of literature that studies global governance in historical perspective (Barnett, 2011; Buzan and Lawson, 2015; Murphy, 2005; Plesch and Weiss, 2015, 2016; Reus-Smit, 2016). That literature is revitalizing the interdisciplinary dialogue between IR and international history, and it challenges many traditional views and tacit assumptions about the origins of global governance.

Regarding the rise of welfare internationalism, the dominant view is that the domestic welfare state was ‘writ large’ and lifted to the international sphere in the 1940s and that it found its first concrete manifestation in the post-war system of functional global organizations. This narrative comes in two varieties, both focused on the wartime bargain between the US and Great Britain about the shape of the post-war world order. The first variety emphasizes domestic developments in the US, where Roosevelt’s New Deal had strengthened welfarist ideas, along with great faith in the virtues of public management. The second variety gives more weight to the British influence. In the course of the transatlantic negotiations, the British side, and, in particular, John Maynard Keynes, managed to introduce a good dose of the welfarism and socio-economic planning that were en vogue domestically. Both narratives converge on the idea that crucial for the advent of welfare internationalism were projections of domestic ideas and institutions to the globe.

Historians of welfare internationalism thus rely heavily on ‘domestic analogies’, suggesting that welfarist ideas and institutions were transposed from the national to the international level by some American and British protagonists. In this article, we question the importance attached to the New Deal narrative and the wartime origins of welfare internationalism. We do not want to deny that domestic developments made Anglo-American negotiators in the 1940s susceptible to visions of a ‘welfare world’. However, we contend that this story is too narrowly focused on immediate factors, such as the wartime crises, and on shifts in political thought that permeated the US and the UK in the aftermath of the Great Depression. What is more, existing accounts also seem to suggest that the functional branches of the UN, starting with the short-lived UN Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA), were the first institutional incarnations of welfare internationalism. This is a misperception that marginalizes a number of 19th-century public unions, the functional branches of the League of Nations and, in particular, the ILO, which in the 1920s and 1930s, was a real hotbed of international welfarist theory and practice. Not least, welfare internationalism is often portrayed as a specific variety of liberal internationalism. This characterization sidelines some colonial and socialist legacies that also need to be acknowledged.

It is our purpose in this article to deliver a more complete and more nuanced account of how welfare internationalism took root. Buzan and Lawson (2015) recently recalled the importance of 19th-century history for understanding today’s political doctrines and ideologies. The 19th century ‘is the origin of global modernity, the structuring context of the contemporary international order’ (Reus-Smit, 2016: 423). This is also true for welfare internationalism. Going back so far helps us to recover the legacies of colonialism and imperialism and to realize that early manifestations of welfare internationalism pre-dated the domestic welfare state, rather than emulated it. In this article, we also place much emphasis on developments of the interwar period. Recent historical scholarship has shown to what remarkable extent the practices, concepts and ideals of the UN and its specialized agencies can be traced back to the first decades of the 20th century (Clavin, 2014: 267).

We contend that welfare internationalism must be understood as a melange of ideational ingredients of at least four different origins, none of which implied a domestic analogy as conventionally understood. One was a transfer of notions of professional colonial administration to the international sphere: expert-driven, rationalist in a utilitarian way and openly paternalistic. The second was a cosmopolitan interpretation of 19th-century public unions as caretakers of global public interests, understood as the interest of individuals rather than states. The third ingredient was European reform-oriented socialist traditions that had found an international institutional home in the ILO, guided by its charismatic founding director Albert Thomas. Fourth, welfare internationalism was influenced by forms of imperial humanitarianism — the belief that Western societies ought to limit the suffering of distant strangers. All these ideas, quite diverse in origin but also interconnected at many points, impacted the development of welfare internationalism. Taking these origins seriously casts welfare internationalism in a less virtuous light and exposes its paternalistic, technocratic and racist traits.

This article is organized as follows. In the next section, we discuss the concept of welfare internationalism and the domestic analogy, and we review the current state of the art. In the third section, we turn to the historical evidence. We first outline the often-neglected connection between colonialism and early proposals for international organization. We also discuss the influence of the labour movement and non-orthodox socialist thought on calls for welfare-oriented IOs. In the fourth section, we focus on the ILO and the functional branches of the League to document welfare internationalism ‘in action’ long before the Second World War. The fifth section is devoted to discussions of the emergent UN order that brought about two major rhetorical shifts in welfare internationalism: the language of human rights and the language of development. The sixth section briefly sums up our main thesis that the rise of welfare internationalism is ill-described as a projection of national ideas to the world scale.

Welfare internationalism

In the academic literature, the term ‘welfare internationalism’ is widely used to capture a particular style of thinking about international relations (Kaufmann, 2012: ch. 4; Long, 1996; Ryan, 2000: ch. 6). This tradition goes back to Hidemi Suganami, who first employed the term in a systematic fashion. ‘Welfare internationalism’, Suganami (1989: 191) writes, ‘argues for strengthening those institutions which are designed to promote the welfare of individuals located in different states’. An inspiration for Suganami’s formulation seems to have been the work of the international lawyer, long-term international civil servant and Director General of the ILO during 1970–1973, C. Wilfred Jenks. During the 1950s and 1960s, Jenks described the emergence of a new kind of IO, marked by ‘the acceptance of a common responsibility for the common welfare’ (Jenks, 1963: 140). In a passage also quoted by Suganami, he says that this meant ‘to substitute the well-being of individual human lives for the mutual relations of states as the primary concern of international organization and international policy’ (Jenks, 1963: 7).

Jenks traced the welfarist turn in thinking about IOs back to three seminal authors from the first half of the 20th century: the British diplomat and League official James Arthur Salter; the South-African general, politician and imperialist Jan Smuts; and the founding Director General of the ILO Albert Thomas. According to Jenks, Smuts contributed the ‘conception of a world organization fulfilling for its member states functions previously discharged by great empires’, Salter the ‘conception of the interpenetration of international and national economic and financial policy’, and Thomas the ‘conception that the ultimate test of policy is its impact on individual human lives’ (Jenks, 1963: 8). We will discuss all of these arguments and the intellectual traditions for which they stand in more detail later.

Jenks and Suganami are in agreement that the key innovation of welfare internationalism was to imagine IOs as public agencies catering to the material needs of individuals. Welfare internationalism can thus be distinguished neatly from other internationalist doctrines, such as free trade or collective security. Welfare internationalism is still concerned with relations among states but describes the purposes of IOs differently: their main task is not the settlement of conflicts between states, but enhancing the living conditions of people. Unlike Jenks, however, Suganami (1989: 108–109) finds the rise of welfare internationalism to be an example of a ‘domestic analogy’. In a domestic analogy, the (proposed) solution of an international-level problem is found through an analogy with domestic-level experience (Suganami, 1986). Arguing by way of domestic analogy often leads to the conclusion that specific institutions of domestic society must be reproduced on a transnational scale (Bull, 1966: 35; Suganami, 1989: 27). Suganami argues that in the case of welfare internationalism, a domestic analogy provided the blueprint for a whole new generation of IOs, in particular, for the functional branches of the UN coordinated by its Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC). The domestic precedent of this global institution-building was the American New Deal (Suganami, 1989: 118–120).

Thus, Suganami not only introduced the concept of welfare internationalism to IR, but also linked it immediately to a powerful domestic analogy. He largely adopted the description of welfare internationalism from Jenks (who did not use that term) but not his account of its origins. When it comes to the origins of the welfarist side of the UN, the New Deal analogy is very common in the literature. A prominent point of reference is Inis Claude’s textbook Swords into Plowshares, first published in 1956 and, for decades, standard reading on international organization in the English-speaking world. Claude’s story about the advent of welfarist IOs revolves around the permutations of liberal internationalism. The League and the UN, Claude argues, stand for two different phases of liberal internationalist thought. While the Covenant of the League represented 19th-century individualism and laissez-faire, the UN Charter was informed by a ‘new liberalism’ that suggested more state interventions into the economy and a vastly expanded government apparatus to deal with welfare issues. Claude admits that, in practice, the League had already moved much further towards the second ideal than its founding documents suggested:

Nevertheless, it was a profoundly significant event in the history of international organization when the San Francisco Conference ratified the change from the minimalist conception of the function of multilateral agencies to a kind of international New Dealism, an adaptation of the welfare state philosophy to the realm of international affairs. (Claude, 1964: 71–72; see also Arrighi and Silver, 1999: 204–205)

Claude conjectures that the welfare orientation of the UN reflected a domestic shift in liberal political thought in the US. Like Suganami, he insinuates that the New Deal provided inspiration for a new global order. Other authors are more explicit and stipulate that the welfare orientation of the UN system was a direct and conscious projection of the American New Deal (Schurmann, 1974: 47–48). For Elizabeth Borgwardt, the intellectual history of welfare internationalism begins with the principles of the Atlantic Charter of 1941 and Franklin D. Roosevelt’s (FDR’s) vision of a new world order: ‘In their pragmatic and polyglot New Deal idiom’, she writes, ‘FDR and his experts attempted to project an activist regulatory state onto the wider world stage’ (Borgwardt, 2005: 70). In remarkably similar words, Michael Barnett (2011: 100) argues that American New Dealers ‘projected the New Deal onto the global stage’. Mark Mazower makes the same point by showing how central New Deal supporters were in US planning for the post-war settlement in general, and for humanitarian relief in particular (Mazower, 2012: 199–201). International lawyer Anne-Marie Burley (now Slaughter) argues more specifically that the independent administrative agencies that characterized the New Deal became the blueprint for the construction of new IOs (Burley, 1993).

Both the content of UN welfare policies and the organizational form of the functional international organization are thus traced back to American domestic experience of the 1930s and 1940s. The analogy is sticky and the metaphor of a ‘global New Deal’ still has its firm place in statements on possible futures of global governance and UN reform (Felice, 2010; The Telegraph, 2009; United Nations, 2011: 7, 68–85). On the other hand, not all historical accounts of the early UN converge on the New Deal story. Others point out that the wartime agreements on the shape of the new world order were not determined by the US alone, but a compromise between American and British positions (Gardner, 1956). The two countries had not only divergent material interests, but also different (though not irreconcilable) ideas about economic and financial policies. There was a clash between ‘the State Department’s unalloyed free trade position and the British wartime cabinet’s search for arrangements to secure postwar full employment and economic stabilization’ (Ikenberry, 1993: 157). The resultant choice for an ‘embedded liberalism’ (Ruggie, 1982) and welfarist agendas also reflected a good dose of British thinking. As Craig Murphy points out, John Maynard Keynes believed that strong states ought to share their wealth to reduce the drawbacks of industrialization in non-developed states. As in the domestic sphere, capitalism had to be tamed to be maintained. For Murphy, the idea that only a managed capitalism allows for the production of needed goods and a decent life for all provided the legitimation for the UN’s functional agencies (Murphy, 2005: 53).

We do not deny that Keynesianism or the New Deal experience may have significantly shaped proposals for a peace settlement after the Second World War, and we concede that American and British elite views of global order were of paramount importance in this historical moment. Still, the emphasis placed on analogies with the New Deal or Britain’s managed economy is misleading in several respects. First, it insinuates that the functional agencies of the UN system were the first IOs to embody welfare internationalism. As we will show later, this means to ignore the pioneering role of the 19th-century public unions, the ILO and the functional branches of the League. Second, it suggests that the advent of welfare concerns in the international arena was an extrapolation from domestic experience and something like an ‘intra-liberal’ ideological innovation: as liberalism accommodated the welfare state in Britain and the US, the world followed suit. This fits neatly and elegantly into the popular narrative according to which the history of international governance is, by and large, a history of liberal internationalism. Our next section sheds doubt on this assumption.

From the colonies to IOs

The origins of welfare internationalism can be traced back to the 19th century and European preoccupations with the colonies abroad and the social question at home. Nineteenth-century thinkers had little use for domestic–international distinctions, and hence for domestic analogies as we understand them today. Rather, they argued along the lines of homologies that embraced racist hierarchies (Owens, 2015). In Britain, the 19th century was the heyday of imperialism as the rapid industrialization of the country profited from the forced deindustrialization of India and the exploitation of African labour (Buzan and Lawson, 2015: 1; Murphy, 2015: 191). At the same time, opposition began to form against exploitative forms of imperialism and calls for a more benevolent colonialism grew louder. Indeed, the history of welfare internationalism cannot be told without the idea of white men taking care of native populations in other parts of the world. Liberal political thought played a role in this, especially in its utilitarian variety.

Between 1780 and 1830, many British liberals began to support the conquest of non-European people and territories (Pitts, 2005: 2–3). It is also remarkable that seminal liberal theorists (and later also many pioneers of academic IR) easily moved between their roles as scholars and as officials involved in colonial administration. John Stuart Mill published philosophical essays and made a career in the British East India Company, which administered colonial territories on behalf of the British government. Jeremy Bentham closely followed imperial affairs even if he did not work in colonial administration. While Mill defended colonialism throughout his life, he did so with varying degrees of enthusiasm. Initially, around 1840, he conceived of colonization as both a solution to the social question in Britain and a means to advance the collective material interests of the human race (Bell, 2010).

For Mill, socio-economic development was a problem not of distribution, but of productivity. He developed a staunch belief in the power of disinterested expertise, which shaped his views on both colonial administration abroad and representative democracy (preferably guided by professional lawyers) at home. Bentham also praised the virtues of disinterested international legislation for the greatest happiness of all nations (Bentham, 2005 [1843]: 538), but Mill’s accounts are more detailed. For Mill, it was imperative that the officials of the East India Company were not subjected to political interference or misguided public opinion. Only then could they acquire professional knowledge of the country’s concerns and take care of its affairs for the best of the inhabitants (Mill, 2008: 462). Mill’s praise for the impartiality and competence of colonial officials should remind us of the fact that a professional civil service formed in India before it was (re-)exported to Britain (Buzan and Lawson, 2015: 4).

Utilitarian thought had an unintended but still lasting impact on liberal justifications of empire, which was its concern with the moral and material well-being of peoples who were considered unfit for self-government. The idea served to distinguish the ‘enlightened’ colonialism of the British Empire from the (allegedly) more exploitative practices of other states (Bell, 2011). The imperial humanitarianism of the 19th century was marked by support for a ‘sane’ imperialism and for the abolition of slavery. Later in the century, the utilitarian-humanitarian concern with the natives’ well-being became a widely shared and quasi-official justification of colonial rule (Rist, 2008: 49). This is evident in the concluding text of the Berlin Conference of 1884–1885, where European powers agreed on rules for the conquest of Africa. The text introduced the notion of ‘stages of development’ (which the League of Nations continued to use) and defined the ‘moral and material well-being’ of Africans as the purpose of colonial rule (League of Nations, 1924: 22(1); Rayogopal, 2003: 29, 54; Rist, 2008: 61).

Expert administration of foreign territories had a colonial history of which leading IO officials, such as Jenks or Julian Huxley, were still aware by the time the UN was founded (Cooke, 2003: 50; Jenks, 1943: 95–97; Rayogopal, 2003: 30–31). What is more, there were some striking biographical continuities. The South African Jan Smuts was a highly influential imperialist, involved in the negotiation of both the League Covenant and the UN Charter. As mentioned earlier, Smuts may be regarded as a pioneer of the welfarist perspective on IOs. Indeed, in 1918, Smuts called for a League of Nations to organize the international administration of newly independent countries and former colonies for the best of their populations, still unable to govern themselves. Smuts employed an ‘imperial analogy’ (and not a domestic analogy) when he envisaged the League of Nations as the natural ‘successor of the Empires’ (Smuts, 1918: 25).

The conspicuous continuities between imperialism and internationalism has received much scholarly attention in recent years. Mazower straightforwardly argues that reworked liberal justifications of imperialism provided the ideological foundations of both the League and the UN (Mazower, 2009: 34–53).

Imperial legacies pervaded socialist international thought, too. This is apparent in the benevolent paternalism that characterized Fabianism, the reform-oriented strand of British socialism that also influenced the rise of welfare internationalism. Mill already suggested that the social problem of the future would concern the reconciliation of liberty with a fair distribution of the world’s raw materials and ‘equal participation of all in the benefits of combined labour’ (Mill, 1882: 232), and Fabianism continued to address similar themes (Long, 2005). Fabianism is hard to pin down as a political doctrine but is marked by trust in the state, in Parliament and in the good intentions of experts. Of all the British socialist movements, it was the most empire-friendly (Claeys, 2010; Porter, 1984; Schneider, 1973). George Bernard Shaw, a leading Fabian, stipulated that ‘civilization must follow the flag’ and advocated a sort of welfare-oriented colonialism (Shaw, 1900: 54–55). John A. Hobson’s (1902) famous book Imperialism rejected an exploitive imperialism only to call for the sane government of the so-called lower races in analogy to parent–child relations. His vocabulary of ‘child races’ reflected contemporary scientific standards (Vitalis, 2016: 46–54). A question dividing British left-liberals and socialists alike was whether the British Empire should be maintained or whether an IO ought to be entrusted with the rational rule of all European colonies. Norman Angell argued that one had to avoid the disintegration of the Empire as long as one could not guarantee that the colonies were properly ruled (Ceadel, 2009: 361). H.N. Brailsford opposed imperialism but, still in 1945, supported international socialist planning of African economies, ‘with the good of the inhabitants as its guiding principle’ (Lamb, 2011: 488).

The intimate connection between colonialism, welfarism and programmatic thought about international institutions is discernible in the biographies of two eminent early scholars of IOs, Leonard Woolf and Paul Reinsch. Before turning to publishing, the Englishman Woolf had been an ambitious colonial administrator in Sri Lanka (Glendinning, 2006: 100–110; Wilson, 2008; Woolf, 1997 [1962], 2005 [1913]). He later became a fierce critic of exploitive imperialism but, similar to Hobson, still searched for a ‘sane imperialism’ during the First World War, when the Fabian society entrusted him with writing a report on ‘international government’ (Woolf, 1916; see also Hobson, 2012: 176; Wilson, 2003). For Woolf, that concept had two sides: the settlement of inter-state disputes and the creation of ‘machinery’ to work on common interest with transboundary dimensions. This machinery was not a centrally plotted construction, but ‘a spontaneous growth to meet international needs’ (Woolf, 1916: 155). Woolf (1916: 354) found that ‘[t]he most vital interests of human beings are hardly ever national, almost always international’. He insisted that international government had to be for the common people and denounced situations in which industry and pressure groups exploited their privileged access to governmental circles to outflank mass interests (Woolf, 1916: 249–50, 296–307, 334).

It is well visible here how, in the early 20th century, socialist concerns with individual needs intersected with colonial legacies to form the transnational ‘welfarist perspective’ that underpinned the first treatises on international government. A paternalist attitude, somewhat characteristic of Fabian socialism, pervades the pages of Woolf’s book. As Woolf (1916: 124) writes:

Man in national or international masses is not yet an orderly or a reasonable animal. He is an animal of passion and prejudice. … It is no good building him a brand new, beautiful international institution. The human institutions really used by him are secreted by him much in the same way as some small, repulsive insects secrete a building around themselves.

Woolf’s discomforting analogy may have been accidental but it illustrates how he imagined the relationship between the knowledgeable designers of institutions and the ignorance at the receiving end. The political intelligentsia had to trick the masses into a new form of government that was good for them and that corresponded to the needs of modern times — the rule of benevolent expert administrators.

The only useful book that Woolf reportedly found in London’s libraries when writing International Government was a study by Paul S. Reinsch on the international public unions of the 19th century (Woolf, 1963: 187, n. 1). Reinsch was an American student of colonial administration who had turned to the study of international politics and organizations (Reinsch, 1905). Two aspects of his work are interesting for our purposes. First, Reinsch’s intellectual trajectory equally documents continuities between thinking about colonial and international governance (Klabbers, 2014). Reinsch argued that under the tutelage of white people, Africa should be able to develop economic efficiency and a modern infrastructure. He also questioned racial equality until it become inappropriate to do so around 1911 (Vitalis, 2016: 52). Second, and in view of the achievements of the white race, Reinsch’s approach to the study of ‘international public unions’ (as IOs were called back then) centres on welfare gains. Even if he acknowledged the essentially intergovernmental character of these bodies, he identified with a ‘humanitarian’ perspective and placed himself in the liberal tradition with its ‘believers in a rationalist policy’ (Reinsch, 1911: 8). The purpose of international cooperation was to secure advantages for individuals: ‘Relying merely upon the capacities and resources contained within its national territory, it can not offer to those dependent upon it the protection and the advantages which as citizens of the modern world they have a right to demand’ (Reinsch, 1909: 12). Public unions with limited tasks had cropped up to tackle problems of transnational reach that no state could resolve any more on its own and that stood in the way of realizing welfare gains. The increasing complexity of the technical tasks required the collaboration of expert advisors and expert diplomats.

What Reinsch advanced here was a cosmopolitan reading of 19th-century public unions as transnational organizations catering to the common good of a (Eurocentrically defined) international society made of individuals. Reinsch’s early theory of functional international cooperation also reproduced technocratic images of expert administrators as welfare managers. In Reinsch’s work, as in Woolf’s, we see welfare internationalism in the making. His major points of reference were colonial and early international administrations, but not a domestic ‘welfare state’, which in the first decade of the 20th century was in its infancy. It should also be noted that many early internationalists and civil servants found references to the state and its institutions anachronistic (Langrod, 1968: 24, 142).

Despite the importance of these imperial and colonial legacies, the early history of welfare internationalism would nevertheless be incomplete without reference to the social question in the industrialized countries and the political forces advocating reform. As we will show in the next section, the labour movement had its share in the transposition of welfare concerns to the international level. The most striking achievement in that respect was the foundation of the ILO.

Interwar welfarism: The ILO and the League of Nations

The ILO was created in the aftermath of the First World War with the Paris peace treaties, and it was the first IO to begin its work in Geneva. Its founding director, the French socialist Albert Thomas, once called the ILO the ‘bastard child’ of a liaison between the League of Nations and the proletariat (Thomas, 1948: 20; see also Baccaro and Mele, 2012: 196; O’Brien, 2002: 146). Jouannet (2012: 177) identifies the creation of the ILO as a turning point in the doctrinal history of international law because it was the long-awaited IO devoted to working-class interests. Calls for an IO dealing with labour legislation can be traced back to the 19th century and were made by social reformers such as Robert Owen (1771–1853), trade unions and socialist parties (Davis, 2014). An institutional predecessor of the ILO was the International Association for Labour Legislation (IALL) (founded in 1900), a non-governmental expert organization that advocated for the prohibition of night work for women (Rodgers et al., 2009: 4). The IALL’s influence remained limited, however, as it was unable to implement the labour standards it discussed.

The progress towards the ILO was mainly related to British politics. During the First World War, the British government became more responsive to labour issues, anxious to prevent a radicalization of the working class and to secure support for the war effort. In 1917, Prime Minister David Lloyd George established the Ministry of Labour, whose staff became involved in the drafting of the ILO Constitution (Haas, 1964: 143–144). The ILO’s original mission is enshrined in the preamble of its Constitution, which stipulates that ‘universal and lasting peace can be established only if it is based upon social justice’. Labour-related injustice and deprivation may ‘produce unrest so great that the peace and harmony of the world are imperilled; and an improvement of those conditions is urgently required’ (International Labour Organization, 1919). Somewhat unusual for the preamble of an international treaty, it mentions concrete examples of how to pursue these goals. It reads like a reform socialist wish list, containing, inter alia, a reduction of working hours, the provision of an ‘adequate living wage’, equal pay for equal work, health insurance, pension schemes and much more.

Thus, peace among states and social justice among individuals were combined into the twin purposes of an IO that remained accountable to governments while working for their citizens. Organized labour secured a unique tripartite design of the ILO’s executive bodies, which allows for the representation of worker, employer and governmental interests side by side. These interest groups continued to promote different interpretations of the ILO’s scope and purpose after 1919. Decisive for the evolution of the organization’s ideology and self-understanding was Albert Thomas (1878–1932), however, its strenuous Director General. He is such a central figure for the evolution of welfare internationalism that his thinking deserves some closer scrutiny. Thomas had been active for many years in French politics before he was elected to his international post. As a reform-oriented socialist, he advocated parliamentary democracy and emphasized the virtues of a self-organization of the working class (Fine, 1977: 546–547; Schaper, 1959). His domestic political vision was to transform socialist movements into respectable political parties able to win majorities. Thomas did not shy away from pragmatic alliances with bourgeois parties if that seemed necessary to conquer power.

During the First World War, Thomas supported the French government and became its Minister of Munitions in 1916. This wartime experience furthered his enthusiasm for a planned economy, and he continued to promote working-class participation in public planning at the expense of radical political action. Thomas had a small circle of loyal French followers who continued working for him at the ILO. He prefaced much of the academic literature about the ILO and encouraged his officials to write the first ILO histories to explain the organization’s purposes to academic and wider public audiences. He thus endorsed a ‘scholarship of legitimation’ (Van Daele, 2010: 19). Thomas was described as a charismatic and energetic person, an exceptional orator with a unique ability to address very different audiences (Phelan, 1936: 114, 250). Ideologically, the welfare internationalism of Albert Thomas was informed by the French conception of social democracy, as promoted by Jean Jaurès (1859–1914). Jaurès was a philosopher, peace activist and politician, assassinated at the outbreak of the First World War by a nationalist fanatic. Thomas shared, in particular, Jaurès’s belief in education as an important precondition for the development of the democratic capacities of workers (Berman, 2010: 33; Phelan, 1936: 65). Like Arthur Fontaine, another French social democrat and advocate of the ILO, Thomas emphasized that workers were citizens with a right to education (Phelan, 1936: 68). For Thomas, this required that they were literate when they completed school and that they enjoyed sufficient leisure time to follow political affairs.

Thomas believed that member governments lacked a proper vision of future international social policy when they created the ILO as a bureau responsible for drafting labour conventions whose ratification would then depend on their favour (Haas, 1964: 143). Thomas, by contrast, aimed at turning the ILO into a ‘living organism’, an independent research institution and hub for transnational cooperation among socialist parties, trade unions and public opinion in general (Phelan, 1936: 241; Schaper, 1959: 216–217). He was an outspoken opponent of detached technocracies, advancing a more political and independent interpretation of the ILO’s role. The ‘common man’ had to understand that the ILO was achieving something for him (Thomas, 1948: 16). Thomas envisaged a broad social reform programme for the ILO that went clearly beyond labour standards and working conditions. For instance, he sponsored independent ILO research into unemployment in 1920 to convince member states of the need for unemployment insurance (Phelan, 1931: 235). An adherent of planning and coordination, Thomas argued that only the impartial staff of the ILO were able to manage the transnational social effects of national public policies.

When Thomas campaigned for the eight-hour day, he even invented a history of the idea, dating it back to Thomas Aquinas, to bolster the socialist demand (Thomas, 1948: 53–55). His campaign remained difficult, however, not least because socialist parties lost elections, as the British Labour Party did in 1924 (Fine, 1977: 555; Rodgers et al., 2009: 4). For Thomas, the ILO had to lead the march from a political to a social conception of democracy on a global scale (Thomas, 1948: 149). Thomas and other ILO officials believed that European labour standards defined what the inhabitants of the colonies ought to aspire to (Rayogopal, 2003: 53). Under his leadership, the organization adopted 16 conventions and 18 recommendations relating to social-democratic pet issues within the first two years of its existence (International Labour Organization, no date). Although few of the conventions were ratified, Thomas continued to see the ILO as an engine of social progress and a guardian of peace (Thomas, 1948: 10). It should be stressed that Thomas, of course, was not alone in trying to shape the ILO agenda. German ILO officials, such as Andreas Griesner, pursued ILO conventions in analogy to the so-called German model. They argued that the German example particularly suited the ILO’s tripartite structure because it included employers and employees in social policy legislation. Griesner referred much to the German Sickness Insurance Law of the 1880s and secured its influence upon ILO social security conventions such as the Sickness Insurance convention of 1927 (Kott, 2010: 187).

Such (self-)descriptions of the ILO as an essentially social-democratic force in world politics were clearly at odds with Marxism and its revolutionary internationalism. An indication of Thomas’s successes in ideology-building may be Lenin’s dictum that workers would have to choose between Moscow and Geneva (Phelan, 1936: 184). Lenin, who also opposed the League, was appalled by the ILO’s social-democratic profile. While Marxism taught that labour was only a commodity under capitalism, Thomas argued that rightly regulated and organized labour could be a source of personal well-being, and that employer–worker cooperation was an important means to ensure efficiency and social harmony under capitalism (Fine, 1977: 561; Rodgers et al., 2009: 7). The fact that Thomas was suggested as potential successor to Eric Drummond as Secretary-General of the League testifies to the wide acceptability of his views (Phelan, 1936: 237).

Even without Thomas at the helm, the League shifted more and more towards activities in the social and economic field over the years. From the beginning, the organization had three distinct but compatible purposes: to implement the peace settlement negotiated in Paris; to set up a system of collective security for future crises; and to enhance cooperation in socio-economic, scientific and technical fields (Schuman, 1937: 200–202). Until recently, the socio-economic activities of the League had received relatively little attention, though the organization was arguably more successful there than in the security field. ‘International solidarity’ legitimated the complex machinery of the League in fields of low political salience, which often also involved representatives of countries that had not formally joined it (Clavin, 2013). A certain post-war turn to welfarist and humanitarian principles is evident in the fact that states then tried to monopolize the hitherto private organization of humanitarian aid. States agreed on the creation of institutions such as the High Commissioner for Refugees (in 1921) or the International Relief Union (in 1927). The latter sought to provide relief in case of natural disasters so that its mandate overlapped with the one of the International Committee of the Red Cross (Barnett, 2011: 90).

Many of the international civil servants who worked for the League contributed to the diffusion of welfare internationalism in the interwar period. Of crucial importance was the British diplomat James Arthur Salter, one of the most influential and well-connected figures in interwar Geneva, whose role is just being rediscovered (Aster, 2016). Salter formulated a liberal and somewhat technocratic interpretation of welfare internationalism when he served as the first head of the Economic and Financial Section (EFS) of the League of Nations Secretariat until 1930. His institutional ideals were the inter-allied councils of wartime cooperation among the Western allies. He promoted these inter-administrative executive structures as institutional blueprints for global IOs over the 1920s and 1930s (Salter, 1921, 1933a). He pursued a ‘transgovernmental’ form of cooperation in economic and technical fields, enabling deliberation among national experts in advisory bodies whose recommendations would be implemented directly through member-state ministries (Holthaus and Steffek, 2016: 132). Salter envisioned such independent advisory bodies not only for IOs, but also for governance reform at home, that is, in Britain and its (former) colonies (Salter, 1931, 1940: 7–9). This may count as an example of an ‘international analogy’ — national institutions being modelled after international ones.

The EFS of the League accommodated welfarist principles with the aim of preserving the capitalist economic order (Clavin, 2008: 344). Salter found that the problems of economic organization and world peace were intertwined and argued that governments who wanted to overcome international anarchy needed to introduce international planning mechanisms. For Salter, the economic causes of war were most urgent problems, but he put more emphasis on international interdependence and the unequal distribution of wealth among states than on labour-related injustice (Salter, 1925: 20). In the early 1930s, Salter returned to Britain and tried to convince British policymakers and the public to accept that national welfare depended on the development of an international technocracy (Salter, 1933a, 1933b). He also idealized the figure of the unbiased international expert working for the common good that we outlined earlier (Salter, 1928: 179–180). The wider public ought to be educated to recognize that international problems required international governance (Salter, 1932a). Making a contribution to this effort, in 1932, Salter deployed his vision of ‘Geneva 1957’. It described a League of Nations that had successfully eliminated war while international economic governance institutions, including representatives of labour, employers and governments, jointly secured world prosperity (Salter, 1932b: 200–203).

However, Salter soon witnessed how the democratic governments of Britain, France and the US failed to cope with the Great Depression and how the World Economic Conference (in 1933) was doomed to fail when President Roosevelt rejected a common currency stabilization. In the aftermath of that conference, ambitious welfarist plans, including ILO proposals for a joint European unemployment insurance scheme, were put on hold (Runciman, 2013: 76–108). Although Salter is largely forgotten today, his ideas were influential in the interwar years. They were picked up by academics who studied the functional branches of the League and developed what became known as the functionalist approach to international organization (Greaves, 1931; Mitrany, 1975: 17).

Functionalism was first formulated as a coherent, welfarist approach to international organization by David Mitrany, a Romanian scholar and journalist. Mitrany’s (1933) programmatic book The Progress of International Government was influenced by British new liberalism and Fabian socialism but also by practical experiences with the ILO and the functional branches of the League. Mitrany’s theoretical argument is not of the domestic analogy kind because Mitrany seeks to overcome the state, rather than reproducing it globally. What functionalism calls for is ‘transnational cooperation without state-like structures in issue areas that are functionally vital to the lives of citizens’ (Steffek, 2015: 25). Mitrany’s work is also interesting with regard to the connection between IOs and the American New Deal experience. He praised the Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA), a New Deal project, as he saw the similarity to his own schemes and the transnational river basin authorities that had existed since the 19th century (Mitrany, 1943, 1946). The TVA’s authority cut across traditional territorial borderlines to achieve socio-economic progress. The somewhat belated adoption of social-democratic and interventionist policies in the New Deal also created a window of opportunity for the expansion of IOs with welfare concerns. Under Roosevelt’s leadership, the US, still reluctant to join global IOs in the League years, became prepared to endorse a project of IOs tailored to welfare tasks (recall that the US joined the ILO only in 1934 when Roosevelt had taken office). In many ways, the US followed a universal trend towards welfare policies and public planning rather than setting it.

A new vocabulary for welfare internationalism: Human rights and development

After the Great Depression and the failure of the League in the Manchurian and Abyssinian crises, many saw the future of a global IO in the socio-economic field (Sweetser, 1940). In the summer of 1939, shortly before the Second World War broke out, the League issued the so-called ‘Bruce report’, a reflection on possible futures of the organization named after its chief drafter, Australia’s ex-Prime Minister Stanley Bruce (League of Nations, 1939; see Dubin, 1983; Ghébali, 1970). The report praised the achievements of the League in socio-economic and technical fields and suggested a further recalibration of its agenda, shifting the emphasis from conflict resolution to welfare. ‘There has never been a time’, the drafters wrote, ‘when international action for the promotion of economic and social welfare was more vitally necessary than it is at the present moment’ (League of Nations, 1939: 7). All governments, the drafters stated, tried to promote the welfare of their citizens, but to do so effectively, they needed to pool their knowledge and experiences.

The most consequential proposal of the report was that the League’s economic and social activities should be bundled in a new Central Committee for Economic and Social Questions, which, in the end, became the Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC) of the UN (Murphy, 1994: 17; Rofe, 2015: 25–27; Russell, 1958: 307). The report suggested that this body was to have a mixed membership of 24 governmental delegates and up to eight independent experts (League of Nations, 1939: 20). The idea of mixed membership was not implemented in ECOSOC, but Bruce’s advice that the welfare functions of international government needed strengthening was heeded.

The Bruce report reflected an intuition common in the 1930s and early 1940s, a feeling that international cooperation in welfare-related matters was essential for world peace but also for Western democracy to succeed. The welfarist agenda gained numerous supporters. American League official Frank G. Boudreau, a public health specialist, proposed building on the League’s experiences to solve the ‘world’s social and economic problems when the war is over’ (Boudreau, 1945: 85). John Boyd Orr, who was to become the First Director General of the UN Food and Agriculture Organisation, emphasized scientific advances and envisaged technicians to plan the global rise of living standards (Orr and Cole, 1945). Not least, the ILO also tried to seize the opportunity and secure a future role in global governance.

In 1941, Edward Joseph Phelan took over as Acting Director-General, an Irishman who had been among the drafters of the ILO Constitution and served the organization for some 30 years. Together with Jenks, Phelan drafted the 1944 Declaration of Philadelphia, which reasserted and expanded the ILO’s welfarist doctrine. The declaration contained two major innovations. First, it couched the traditional social-democratic reform agenda in the language of human rights, stipulating that all human beings ‘have the right to pursue both their material well-being and their spiritual development in conditions of freedom and dignity, of economic security and equal opportunity’ (International Labour Organization, 1944: art. II a). By adopting the language of human rights and a broad notion of socio-economic development, the document enlarged the ILO’s social-democratic welfarist programme. Jenks supported the new language of rights because it made it easier to address problems of poverty and illiteracy in the global South (Rajagopal, 2003: 30–31). That promised an enhanced role for the ILO in decolonization. Second, the declaration stipulated a responsibility of the ILO to ‘examine all international economic and financial policies’, thus grossly enlarging its agenda (International Labour Organization, 1944: art. II d).

Phelan and Jenks thus wanted to turn the ILO into a hub for the coordination of all UN socio-economic activities and post-war reconstruction, a ‘master agency’ among the functional organizations of the UN (Haas, 1964: 155). They hoped for American support in this matter. When addressing an ILO audience in 1941, Roosevelt used rather uncommon Lincoln quotes to support ‘uniting all working people, of all nations’ (Roosevelt, 1941). Yet, his support waned when resistance to such a central role for the ILO mounted in the war coalition. The great powers, in particular, the Soviet Union, did not want the ILO to interfere in their domestic affairs and Phelan was not even invited to the Dumbarton Oaks and San Francisco Conferences (Goethem, 2016). The Philadelphia Declaration, with its new language of human rights, was incorporated into the ILO’s constitution in 1946, but the ambition to turn the ILO into the centre of global welfare activities was frustrated.

Parallel to human rights, the term ‘underdevelopment’ entered the vocabulary of international governance. ILO functionary William Benson coined it in 1942 and the corresponding division of ‘developed’ and ‘underdeveloped’ countries was soon adopted in the UN. Article 55 of the UN Charter flags ‘higher standards of living, full employment, and conditions of social and economic progress and development’ as tasks for the organization (Rist, 2008: 72–74). The idea of underdevelopment implied that progress would not occur naturally in the global South and that international action had to foster it. Whereas earlier reform-socialist proposals were geared to the needs of the working class in industrialized countries, the inhabitants of the global South now became the main addressees of international social policies. Critics interpret developmentalism as a return to the colonial policies and liberal legitimations of empire that had originally given rise to welfare internationalism (Chandler, 2010: 70).

To summarize, the evidence presented in the last sections shows that throughout the first half of the 20th century, welfare internationalism had been one of the most powerful justifications given for establishing IOs. By the time of the Second World War, it had become a veritable ideology of functional, depoliticized international governance, and it was promoted by many individuals working for international institutions. International civil servant-turned-scholar Robert Cox observed that the Secretaries General and senior international civil servants were important ideational architects, especially in the early days of the respective IOs (Cox, 1968: 314). To legitimate the competences of IOs, they generated arguments that were popularized by professionals who worked for IOs and/or wrote about them. International civil servants were highly aware of their ability to shape the public image of their organization and the interpretation of often rather vague founding treaties (Phelan, 1933: 307–314). For many of them, state action had ceased to be a promising strategy of problem-solving as international action became imperative.

Promoters of welfare internationalism addressed a broad audience that included the governments of member states, IO staff and the wider public. Historians rightly point out that one should conceive of these early and, in some sense, ‘experimental’ practices as critical precursors to the more elaborate institutional self-legitimation of post-1945 IOs (Clavin, 2014). Although the boundaries between academic, political and public debates were fluent at that time and ideas floated from theorists and pamphleteers to policymakers, the discourses about international cooperation remained elitist. They constitute what some have called the ‘ideology’ of IOs (Cox, 1968: 314; Thérien, 2012, 2015).

What are we to make of the connection between the New Deal, Keynesianism and welfare internationalism? Roosevelt’s New Dealers certainly helped set the nascent UN on a welfarist track in the 1940s, with the congenial cooperation of a British delegation led (when it came to economic and financial matters) by Keynes:

From the outset the Americans and the British believed that there was a connection between future world peace and economic development, so that a consensual agreement on the UN’s responsibility for welfare existed in principle and was also expressed in the relevant passages of the UN Charter. (Kaufmann, 2012: 109)

That conviction was visible in the first joint statement of war aims, the Atlantic Charter of 1941. Its fifth principle, suggested by the British side, stated that the two nations ‘desire to bring about the fullest collaboration between all nations in the economic field with the object of securing, for all, improved labor standards, economic advancement and social security’ (Atlantic Charter, 1941). The creation of UNRRA in 1943 was an equally strong symbol of the Allies’ commitment to humanitarian aid and to a welfarist post-war international order (Barnett, 2011: 110). Barnett explains, however, that the New Dealers in the newly created IOs did not draw directly on domestic experiences, but rather drew on wartime cooperation and European reconstruction when they turned to developmentalism (Barnett, 2011: 122). We should also be careful not to overstate the amount of support that the New Deal enjoyed in the American foreign policy elite (Plesch, 2011: 8–9). Also, not least, an exclusive focus on American and British actors in the negotiation of the post-war order marginalizes contributions from the global South that also pushed for global welfarist policies (Helleiner, 2014; Steffek, 2006).

Our suggestion is to shift the focus away from the wartime negotiations and the question of who contributed what to the foundation of the UN. Our evidence shows that, as a blueprint for creating IOs, welfare internationalism was firmly established in transnational elites by the time Roosevelt came to power and Keynes rose to fame. In the light of this evidence, the suggestion that the UN system was directly built on ideas and institutional blueprints originating from Britain or the US is untenable. The domestic analogy is misleading us here. Rather, we should follow the historical trajectory indicated by Jenks and take international-level precedents seriously (Plesch and Weiss, 2016: 8). Keynesian economics and the American New Deal were an expression of a much broader, global trend towards a managed economy, social engineering, public planning and big infrastructure projects. National welfare and social security programmes mushroomed all over the world during the 1930s and 1940s, including in Japan, India and China, and the ILO was a driving force behind this development (Hu, 2015: 38–41). Kiran Klaus Patel concluded in a recent study that ‘the New Deal shared more with processes in other parts of the world than is normally recognized’ (Patel, 2016: 300; see also Schivelbusch, 2006). The turn to welfare policies was a truly global trend with many facets. Both the American New Deal and the new global welfare IOs were products of a transnational trajectory that had begun long before.

Conclusion

In this article, we traced the origins of welfare internationalism, which is the idea that IOs should cater to the needs of individuals rather than solve conflicts among states. We argued against the notion that the shift of welfare tasks to IOs in the 1940s was simply a projection of the British welfare state or the American New Deal to the global scale. In order to understand the emergence of welfare internationalism, we ought to look back to the formative phase of international governance in the early 20th century, when a new transnational elite of politicians, academics and international civil servants tried to make sense of the goals, competences and policies of the newly founded IOs to an audience of international staff, state representatives and civil society elites.

Shifting away from the alleged domestic-level precedents, it becomes apparent that welfare internationalists came from many different countries and ideological quarters, and that their thinking often escaped statist imaginaries. Nineteenth-century liberals and humanitarian imperialists introduced notions of professional colonial administration to the new context of intergovernmental organizations. The resultant conception of international governance was expert-driven, rationalist in a utilitarian way and quite paternalistic. In analogy to parent–child relations, but without making domestic–foreign distinctions, defenders of an ‘enlightened imperialism’ had imagined professional civil servants as taking care of native populations. These idealized figures morphed into international expert administrators finding the ‘best solutions’ in the global public interest. Here, colonial history dovetailed with a cosmopolitan interpretation of 19th-century public unions as guardians of the interest of individuals or civil society organizations, but not states. Welfare internationalism was also inspired by European reform-oriented socialist traditions, such as British Fabianism, French syndicalism and social democracy. They delivered the idea that the social question and the problem of war were intertwined and that, consequently, abolishing war required socio-economic progress all over the world. Not least, humanitarian traditions of relief to distant strangers were congenial to the project of welfare-oriented IOs. These various strands of thought were pulled together in the interwar years, which seem to have been a crucial period for the synthesizing of political arguments and agendas, as Confortini (2012) has recently shown for the women’s peace movement.

In the case of welfare internationalism, the diverse ingredients mixed with the foundation of the League of Nations and the ILO. They were then reworked by senior international civil servants who aimed at popularizing such ‘international experiments’ of global welfare provision. Here, we find the origins of some self-legitimation strategies that today’s IOs still use. Our account highlighted the importance of political entrepreneurs, that is, directors or high-ranking civil servants of IOs who advanced and redefined the mission and purposes of their organizations. They turned welfare internationalism into a malleable ideology of international organization, which, over time, underwent major shifts in terminology. The ILO version of welfare internationalism was most visible in the early years of this organization and the incessant work of its activist Director General, Albert Thomas. The advent of human rights and (under)development discourses in the 1940s marked a major change in the terminology of welfare internationalism and shifted the focus from Europe to the global South.

Such terminological innovations did not displace the original raison d’être of welfare-oriented IOs, but couched their mission in a new vocabulary. Despite the changes in terminology, welfare internationalism had a stable core: the orientation of international governance towards individuals and their material needs. It also linked the problem of peace among states to finding answers to two fundamental political challenges of the early 20th century: the colonial question and the social question. Alleviation of poverty and social welfare thus became acknowledged as pressing tasks of international and not just domestic governance. As a social-democratic reform programme, welfare internationalism also (at least rhetorically) reconciled the interests of the working class with capitalism and political internationalization. In our view, welfare internationalism is therefore best understood as a variant of social-democratic thought, marked by trust in public institutions, progress and expertise.

Our evidence shows that the rise of welfare internationalism is ill-described as a projection of national ideas and institutions to the world scale. Rather, IOs geared to the welfare of individuals developed in parallel with domestic institutions. These developments should be understood as two sides of the same coin, rather than as domestic-level original and international-level copy. Some ideas, in particular, social-democratic solutions to the social question, inspired domestic- and international-level developments simultaneously, without any level taking precedence over the other. The domestic welfare state and welfare internationalism developed hand in hand.