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Joseph Maiolo and Laura Robson, "The League of Nations" (Cambridge UP, 2025)
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- [00:00]
A
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- [01:07]
B
Welcome to the podcast. Thanks for coming today, Joe and Laura. Joe Mayolo is Professor of International History at King's College London. And Laura Robson is Professor of Global affairs and History at Yale University. Today we are discussing their co authored book, the League of Nations. So welcome to you both.
- [01:27]
C
Thanks so much for having us.
- [01:29]
D
Yes, thank you.
- [01:30]
B
I thought we might jump straight into a intervention and argument that I found particularly thought provoking, which was on disarmament. So the way that many people, including myself, are taught about disarmament in a history textbook is that it was all about peace and it was all about preventing war and conflict. And you turned that on its head and you say it was about anything but peace and it was in fact about producing such a preponderant kind of disparity that there would be no reason to kind of fight. Could you just say a bit about that argument and how you understand peace and whatever the opposite of it is in the context of disarmament?
- [02:19]
D
Well, disarmament is one component of a larger project centered on the League. It's about reconceptualizing war and pushing to the margin the possibilities of total war. So let me explain particularly that part of it, and I think a lot of historians miss this. And it's work that draws on my book about the arms race in the 1930s. Total war. In other words, the organization of entire state societies and empires for war undermines a particular vision of the global economy, of parliamentary rule, of how societies are organized. And again, when you get to 1930s, that threat, that is not simply sort of an Axis threat of war, but it's also a threat of totalitarian war, as contemporaries often put it, but never discuss it. Now, if we jump back to the end of the First World War and projects centered on the League, revolving around reconceptualizing war, law of war and disarmament, what you get are a series of components that in a sense are trying to make the world safe for a particular vision of wielding violence. Wielding violence, what my colleague David Etchington would call liberal militarism, sort of a high tech wars against disruptive forces, forces threatening global capitalism or a particular international order. So it's a very narrow vision of war waged by societies that are basically have elite armed forces for that purpose. If you want to look at particular components of disarmament, you break disarmament down. I think, for example, the most successful series of treaties revolved around naval armaments. So 1922 Washington, 1927 treaty, 1930 treaty, and then the attempts at 1936 for another treaty. Those were the most successful disarmament treaties. But when you understand that they weren't really about disarming, they were really about preserving a particular hierarchy of global naval power that left the main victors of the First World War at the top. I think you get to understand what sort of system of reconceptualizing war, reconceptualizing the armaments balance, and understanding what kinds of wars the liberal powers would wish to wage in future. Those all those pieces begin to come together. And of course that has continuities with the post1945 world and the 1990s world that we can just perhaps discuss later.
- [04:57]
C
I think too that the other thing about disarmament and the nature of warfare is that it left intact the possibility for other kinds of violence. Right. That claims of the promotion of peace and security in terms of outlawing and making less likely forms of total war left in place the possibility of things like imperial policing, imperial security, which were extremely violent, as we know, during this period, and were broadly legitimized, justified and maintained through the use of this kind of system and the claims that it was making. So I think that that's an important piece of this argument about the use of violence and the redefinition of war as well, and that it fits into the, you know, the broader argument, the book, which is that the League's function was to construct, promote and maintain highly inequitable forms of global power in material terms as well as political terms. And that is a model that they applied to the question of weaponry and armaments, but also to other realms of politics as they were constructing this global order.
- [06:08]
D
Yeah, sorry. Just to add to what Laura said, of course, in recent years, the 1928 Kellogg Briond Pact is kind of being held up as this, you know, outlying war. They were outlying war. We actually dig into the negotiation of the pact. But what's happening was what precisely what Laura was talking about was, sure, we're outlawing interstate war, or at least war between the major victors of the First World War. What we're not outlawing is the wielding of force in colonial spaces. And by the way, the British Empire defined those spaces as even spaces between parts of the British Empire, which effectively gave them sort of a writ to wage war anywhere United States, it was the Western Hemisphere, and the French always assumed that they would be able to wage unlimited war, unlimited colonial war interventions or policing actions in their empire. And that's precisely what happened. And what's really interesting is that when the Japanese government signed the pact, or agreed to sign the pact, they also understood that it exempted them from the sort of imperial policing they wish to exercise on the Asian mainland.
- [07:16]
B
So I'm hearing about this importance of shifting concepts of war and violence to understand how disarmament actually worked and what it was for. But is there still a role for the concept of peace to understand either disarmament or other aspects of the League? Or would you say it's better if we kind of suspend that as a focus of historical analysis and interpretation?
- [07:40]
D
Sorry, are you asking me whether we should sort of drop peace as a category of historical analysis?
- [07:47]
B
Yeah, I suppose traditionally, disarmament and other aspects of the peace were very much tied of the League were tied to this idea of a peace project. And understandably, you're pushing against the naivete of kind of a tight correlation between them. But I'm wondering what space there is left to analyze peace as either an aim or a kind of entry point into what the League was doing or tried to do.
- [08:16]
D
Yeah, almost. Another deserves another book. But I would put that is in the following way. In the same way you can see war being reconceptualized and redefined almost to define it out of existence, but still allowing all sorts of forms of political violence. The same is true of peace. That peace. When historians talk about peace and the establishment of peace, we really ought to be asking, well, peace for the benefit of which powers, which categories of people? That's what we should be asking. It's not that the concept is useless, it's just that it should be historicized as any other concept that we use and understood as something that is pretty fungible as an idea, right? And peace, simply as some sort of goal that's sort of a Platonic ideal is kind of just doesn't make sense historically. You might talk about, in terms of international. The history of international relations, this sort of Paul Schroeder's concept of sort of like great power management and a generalized peace between the great powers. I still think that's. And I've written about that separately, not in this book, but I still think that's a useful idea in terms of understanding the frequency of great wars or periods of. Like in the 19th century, of absence of great wars in Europe. But beyond that, I think we ought to just be thinking about historicizing peace and interrogating it like we would any other historical concept.
- [09:47]
C
It's interesting because I think that, you know, we assume, as Joe suggests, that peace has a kind of stable meaning across spaces and across time. That of course, it really doesn't. But the other thing to note, I think, is that when the League itself makes use of the term peace, they often pair it with the term security. They say peace and security, that those are joint terms in thinking about the kind of world order that the League is designed to produce. And security is a much more particular term because it does suggest that there is an object of that security. Right? And in this case, the object of that security is the permanent global supremacy of the imperial powers. To the extent that peace serves that end, I think that the League is interested in it. You know, to the extent that kind of maybe. Maybe calm or the lack of disorder is another term that comes up frequently when the League is kind of talking about its own work. That's something that we explore in the book as well, this question of order and disorder. But I think that security is maybe a more accurate way of understanding what the League was for because precisely because it can be assigned to particular global interests much more easily. So, you know, when we think about the League as promoting peace, I think it is a disingenuous claim in many respects, because what they are suggesting actually is the production of a world that will be safe for particular kinds of political and economic interests, not A world that is, for instance, devoid of violence, particularly in colonial spaces. That's something that is not of. Not of particular interest to the League. In fact, I would say quite the opposite. Violence is quite useful to their project in a number of respects and at a number of moments. So I do think we should be broadly skeptical of these claims about peace and that it's more useful, more valuable, more telling to focus in on the concept of security and order.
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B
How specific to the League would you say is this kind of weaponization of peace versus how much is there? How much would you say, kind of as a broader analytical claim, that there is an incompatibility between intergovernmental organizations that where great powers will weaponize, for example, peace movements and the way that civil society actors pushed a concept of peace for their own purpose. I'm thinking, for example, about this very large sub portion of the League of Nations archives where it's correspondence with peace movements, civil society actors. The impression I got after reading your book about these files, only some of which I've read, is that a lot of it was about lip service, a lot of it was about kind of public relations. And so the question is, how specific do you think it was about the League and the context of the interwar period versus just kind of structural incompatibility between national governments theoretically entering into dialogue with civil society partners, but actually just weaponizing them.
- [13:03]
D
I'll jump in and pass over to pass to Laura in a moment. But I mean, I've also been through a lot of those files in relation to the raw materials discussions at the League and what implications that had for peace and so on. I think peace is a very again, and as Laura puts it, peace and security, or just simply peace. The image of the white dove or the statues at the peace monument that the League sponsored at the New York World's Fair and so on. These are powerful mobilizing instruments. And when we think about Geneva as a center for creating a kind of power, tapping into that civil society, surge of energy, if you like, is powerful. It works. And it did work. And it brought on board, I suppose, you know, talk about the peace movement in the United States, across Europe, it brought in masses of work. I'm just trying to remember the name of the historian who just wrote a piece about sort of the British Dominions or Australia and the League of Nations, and he sort of spoke about precisely how it sort of linked in with sort of a white settler kind of conception of the globe through the League represents sort of a defense of that. Now that's not to say whether that was what it was doing alone, but that's the way they perceived it. So I think we should be just cautious about sort of saying, look how popular the League was, and look at how this wonderful all these civil societies groups were, which some books in the last two decades have looked at this dimension and sort of said, it's wonderful. League is doing something great. I'm not sure. Are you as skeptical as I am, Laura?
- [14:48]
C
So I would say, first of all that we need to be specific and historicize the peace movements themselves as well, which also have a very wide range of goals, of approaches. Many of them fit as comfortably into the imperial universe as the League itself does. And so I think that being particular about the kinds of claims that they're making and the kinds of definitions of peace that they envision is important as well. But I would also say that one of the things that's novel about the League of Nations is not so much the specificity of the vision of world order that it brings to the table, which is basically a 19th century vision in many respects, but the introduction of these kinds of broad claims of altruistic impulses and rationales for promoting these particular visions of world order. So I think that when we talk about, you know, collaboration or kind of negotiation with peace organizations that are pacifist, for instance, or that are promoting peace, whatever, whatever that might mean in the individual case, I think, you know, that's a League strategy that fits in with its simultaneous appeal to concepts like humanitarianism, concepts like security, these ideas. That this is essentially something that operates in an altruistic universe is key to how the League operates. And it points out, this is kind of another key argument of the book, which is that one of the goals of that kind of language is to move the actions of the League out of the realm of the political, where they can be challenged by various sorts of movements from, you know, know, from all sorts of directions and into the realm of the humanitarian on the one hand and the technocratic on the other. And those two actually go together in many respects and suggest a kind of neutrality, an altruistic form of neutrality to this enterprise that we are arguing, you know, is. Is largely illusory. So I do think that we, you know, we need to be careful in particular in thinking about, you know, not just what the specifics of these organizations are, but also kind of what is the League's rationale, rhetoric, how is it deliberately kind of producing a narrative around what it's doing and what is that narrative For I think one of the things that we're arguing is that part of what that narrative is for is to remove these conversations from political realms so that they cannot be challenged by popular will. And in that way, the League is a fundamentally anti democratic institution in the way that many international organizations have been and continue to be. And so I think that that's a key argument of the book and something that historians have kind of, you know, sometimes recognized, but not understood as a kind of major aspect of the operation of this institution.
- [17:49]
B
The way you were talking about the way the League transmuted these kind of principles into humanitarian or other forms of altruistic seeming agendas. I mean, it reminds me of one of the examples that's most fresh on my mind is the population transfer between Greece and Turkey in the early 1920s, which you discuss extensively and especially in the early parts of the book. And that brings me to a question about the way you decided to write the book and structure it. Most accounts of international organizations, especially the League, talk about war and peace, which we have already approached. And of course you are also focused on those questions and interstate conflict. But you begin with ordering people as an activity that the League does. You bring in this kind of early 20th century view about the unmixing of peoples. And I just wanted to ask you about that structuring decision about this book. And I guess the two of you have to agree on a structure as well. It's not just one person. So why begin with kind of population politics and this kind of ordering versus all the other kinds of ordering that the League was doing?
- [19:10]
D
I'm just going to jump in and then turn it over. Excuse me, turn it over to Laura, because this is what I found one of the great values of co writing with Laura. So it's interesting you raised this because we had a workshop before we submitted the manuscript. And this was exactly one of the questions that was asked. Certainly when you think about the League, it's about peacemaking first. So you have to begin with war and disarmament and Versailles Treaty and so on, and then then perhaps go into the economics and then put people last. And I think one of the great things that I learned in co writing this book is just actually how different the view of the League is when you're looking from the ground up. And at that point I'm just going to turn over to Laura because again, we began, I think we didn't make a decision. It actually sort of just flowed naturally that we began with people, wealth and then war, but over to You, Laura.
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C
So I think this is actually a really crucial kind of analytical point that we were trying to make in this construction, which is that when you think about the League, some of the earliest decisions that it was making in the kind of transition period between the peace treaties and the construction of the League and its institutions, which is actually itself kind of a fungible space, right? What is it actually doing in the first instance? What does it see? What does this new form of international organization that is being run essentially by the victorious allied powers, what do they understand as the necessary preconditions for setting up the kind of global order that they want to make permanent? And those preconditions have to do with the construction of particular kinds of controllable states and controllable populations. And so that's why we see, for instance, as early as 1919, 1920, you know, the very first stages, that some of the things that the League and its attendant bodies are doing are these territorial commissions moving people around. Right. The Lausanne, in some ways, is kind of the back end of this. Right? It formalizes the principle of population exchange. Forcible population exchange, we need to note, as a fundamental, legitimate mode of state building in the new world order, that is, it is legitimizing a fairly extreme form of violence as something that is being supported, undertaken and financed by the international with the goal of producing the kind of stable global order with which the League can work later on. So this is fundamental to the principles, the political principles of the new global order, right? That states will be constructed at whatever cost in ways that rendered them controllable by outside authority. Right. And so I think this is kind of. It's the flip side of the same, of the discussions of sovereignty that are emerging in this same period. And it's a crucial aspect of understanding what the League is doing that has been really substantially overlooked. I mean, I think it's notable historiographically to think about the ways in which the literature on the population exchange, which is, you know, as it's euphemistically called, I think that we maybe need better terminology for this particular event, but that literature is present. I mean, this has been a topic of research for many, many decades, right? This is not new information or new analysis in any way, but it has been hived off into a regionally specific historiography and not interpolated in a meaningful way into the historiography of the league and actually 1923 and the population exchange and all of the attend kind of, you know, population engine, demographic engineering, manipulation of borders and territories and peoples with which the League is engaged during those years. This is at the center of operations, right? This is philosophically, politically, practically, absolutely key to how the League is imagining its own operations will function and the mechanisms by which it will be able to control the globe. So I think that, you know, we really. This is something we have missed. And I. I myself, you know, was trained as a Middle east historian, and so this is something that Middle east historians have known and talked about for a long time. And I think that it's a. It's a really kind of crucial historiographical correction to place this at the center of operations where it should be.
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B
You talk about how the League imagines it can control people and states, which. Which I agree is. Is a really important kind of starting point for this analysis. But I also wonder the extent to which the narrative is complicated if we break down kind of what part of the League we're looking at not breaking down for the sake of breaking down, but to kind of see what internal disagreements there may have been. Another example that you point to as kind of both on the ground and an example of kind of controlling people is the ilo, the International Labor Organization. And you described the way in which the ILO sought to control and distribute workers across the colonial world, primarily for the benefit of Western employers and investors. And as a big picture, I think that makes sense. But I also, I guess here are a couple observations, and I wonder how you'd respond and whether you think that complicates the larger story. So I guess a first observation is the significance of the Secretariat in different parts of the League. So in the ilo, for example, you've got quite an activist Director General in Alberto versus a kind of much more neutralist civil servant type in Eric Drummond. So I think it's pretty clear that for Thomas, that the ILO was a vehicle for him to kind of try to globalize the Second International. He may have failed, but I think that was core to the vision. So that's one observation. The second observation is different degrees of representation, geographical as well as kind of sectoral, in different parts of the League system. So you've got employers and government, but also workers at the ilo. And that seems to me to generate a significant amount of contestation of these norms, sometimes pushing back, but sometimes kind of remaining at the discursive realm. But you may disagree with those observations as significant kind of in light of the bigger story. So I would be curious to hear how you think that these kinds of details matter or don't matter.
- [26:17]
C
So I think that of course, you know, you're absolutely correct, of course that there are disagreements within the League itself. Right. Among the different kind of constituent parts, among its different constituent pieces. And, you know, within these institutions as well, there's, you know, we can certainly point to substantive disagreements that take place within the ilo, for instance, within the refugee commissions, within, you know, within these, these constituent space spaces that make up the League. So in some ways, you know, when we talk about the League, it is worth kind of delineating the specific actors at any particular moment. I think you're absolutely right to point, point that out. And in fact, I mean, the ILO is an interesting organization because it operate at a slight remove in some respects from the rest of the League operation and has its own sets of agendas in ways that not all of the League's parts do. So it's a particularly kind of notable example. That said, I would say that there are a couple of things that the ILO is interested in. It's worker rights advocacy, which is real in some ways. Right. I think, and Thomas himself is somebody who has a track record of particular kinds of interests in those movements. It is real and it is highly racialized. Because one of the things that the ILO does is to promote separate, segregated, differentiated sets of guaranteed worker rights for colonial spaces. It does this through a series of negotiations over laws on indigenous labor, which in some cases indigenous include provisions for the legal and legitimate use of forced labor in colonial spaces in the interests of colonial development. So I think that there are real limits to the understanding that anybody working within the ILO had about the kind of universal nature of workers rights. And that one of the things that we have broadly kind of overlooked in thinking about the ILO as an advocate for workers rights more generally, and is the way in which most of its participants were interested primarily in protecting and advocating for improvements in worker conditions in Europe and were very, quite willing to accept differentiated levels of protections or their lack in colonized spaces. So the ilo, on the one hand, yes, is protecting conditions for workers in particular places, but it also has a very significant role in promoting what it understands as top down colonial development, industrial development, and it understands the exploitation of local workers as very often as an absolutely necessary aspect of that rapid development, which, as you point out, primarily benefits colonial administrations and investors. That this is, this is a money making operation after all. So I think that, you know, it is, it is really crucial. This is, this is kind of one of the things that we're trying to point out throughout the project is that when you say, when you talk about peace and security on the one hand, and maybe rights, workers rights, conditions on the other, you always need to say rights for whom? Right. Who is, who is under protection here? And we can identify as some people who do fall under those kinds of protections and others who really don't. And in fact, you know, whose rights are being actively stripped away by the particular formulations of these new institutions. So I think that the, you know, once again, the kind of regional particularities really matter here and that this series of negotiations over what constitutes indigenous workers rights, which take place all the way through the 1920s and 30s, are an equally important aspect of the historical record when we come to think about something like the institution of the ILO and what it was designed to do.
- [30:36]
B
Thanks. So, I mean, there's this wealth of examples in the book that I feel like we could kind of comb through. But I thought it would be a good time also to return to an analytical question, which is not just any observation, but I think a very key one. And in fact, I think it is one that you conclude with, which is kind of the significance of the League in turning principles of colonial rule into those of technical expertise as a kind of legitimizing strategy for international governance. And I guess the analytical question I want to pose to you is, I guess, one about a threshold or about milestones or basically, how would we know if. If the world had changed to a significant degree? Because it is obviously always evolving. I'm thinking about a good number of experts, self proclaimed or deemed so by other people who were in the system, who witnessed the kind of shift in norms and practices, and they themselves often weren't sure exactly whether they were before or after a certain kind of threshold of change. So people living through this history were wondering about this, and historians also wonder about this. So in this kind of transformation from the imperial to the international, for example, as different kind of ways of governing the world, would you say that there are some criteria on which we could assess whether an institution like the League or a norm or a system had changed enough for it to no longer be the same thing as the imperial precedent that kind of created it or not? Or is this kind of question actually kind of misleading rather than clarifying?
- [32:28]
D
Well, it might be misleading, but what's really striking, and I think somewhere in the book I quote both Carl Schmidt and is it Eric Zimmerman? So we have on one hand sort of an illiberal German anti League theoretician, and then you Have a pro league, British jurist, sort of political theorist. And they both have arrived at precisely the same conclusion, that the League is kind of a centerpiece for creating a new form of knowledge of as depoliticized expertise, a kind of technocracy. But one is against it, and the other, of course, is praising precisely that this is where the power of the League lies. Now, did that mean that sort of, sort of around 19, 26, 27, that the league was somehow breaking away from its imperial colonial origins? I'd absolutely say not. What's happening, according to both of them, is that it's masking precisely that. It's what's successful about the League at this stage is that it's creating a camouflage for what are forms of intervention that are in the interest of particular powers.
- [33:45]
C
And I mean, the fact that there are substantial continuities. I think this is particularly interesting because this argument has lasted for so long that when you read kind of more recent assessments of the League, they very often say, well, it was a failure politically and it collapsed. But the kind of. The technocratic bodies continued their existence into the era of the United nations, and they form the basis for internationalism today. And that's true, of course. That's absolutely true. But that does not mean that those are not imperial institutions. Right. I think that this was in many ways the genius of the League. And it's one of our arguments that the League, which is so often described as a failure, was actually quite a dramatic success in this respect. It did build the world order that we have today in a number of identifiable ways. One of which is this emphasis on technocracy, on data, on expertise, as a kind of fundamental venue for remaking particular spaces. So I think, you know, the question does it change from its imperial kind of predecessors? Yes, absolutely. It is a much more developed kind of articulation of the nature of technocracy. The venues in which technocracy can take hold, the kind of institutions and structures of expertise, the defense of professional and scientific and technical knowledge as a much more solid base for the making of political decisions than any kind of public body. That's a crucial principle, and it is one that is being developed in this moment. I think in many ways, that's one of the lead's kind of most important innovations. And the fact that it is novel does not tell us that it is something segregated or separate from its imperial past or its kind of imperial goals. So I, you know, I think this is actually one of the most important things that the League does. And it's one of its longest standing.
- [35:52]
B
Legacies, I guess, one success, one way that these kind of legitimizing strategies are successful is that they present no alternative or they present a. As if there was no alternative. And that makes me want to kind of push the conversation a little bit from what the League was and did to its significance for historical reflection. So, I mean, this kind of depoliticized expertise, I guess it reminds me of adjacent kind of modernizing ideologies. I mean, I'm thinking of James Scott, high modernism, et cetera. And I guess with this kind of there is no alternative refrain kind of rings out across a number of them in different ways, where they kind of monopolize the space to think and imagine and do. And that seems to pose some questions or challenges to the historian, because then what does identifying these kind of hegemonic ideologies do for further historical work or for contemporary reflection? I mean, it is important to point out how they succeeded in kind of imposing themselves on the world. But does that kind of leave us just thinking, wow, I guess we're stuck with this now? Or does identifying that somehow help to unpick and unpack it as well? More of a historical kind of reflect question.
- [37:19]
C
I mean, I. I think I would argue that it's crucial to remove the rhetorical from this narrative. Right. But I mean, one of the things that these kinds of narratives do about these kinds of narratives about technocracy, about scientific knowledge, about professionalization, about humanitarianism, is that they suggest that this kind of knowledge is neutral, that it is essentially beneficent, and that it operates without respect to the material interests of those who are in charge of it. And none of those things is true. Right. I think that we. And that one of the historical kind of. One of the intellectual reasons for engaging in a project like this is to point out all the ways in which this system is driven by very specific, identifiable, traceable material interests, and that its construction is no more neutral or beneficent than any other. And that's important because those are claims that these institutions themselves make repeatedly, over and over and over again, you know, from the 1920s up to the present day. Right. That this is. This is. This is neutral, that it's good for the world, as you say, that there might be no alternatives. So I actually think that we don't need to know necessarily what might have emerged in the absence of these systems to point out that there's nothing inevitable about them and that that is both a historically and a politically valuable thing to say that you know, there are particularities to these systems. I actually don't think we're stuck with them at all. Right. I think that, you know, it's crucial to understand that they were put together at particular moments for particular reasons, by particular people, and they can equally be dismantled for forms of other particular reasons. That's one of the lessons of history as a discipline, right, Is that nothing is inevitable and that we can identify genealogies and specificities to the construction of every human system. So I think that what we're doing here is that we are separating out the rhetoric and the discourse from the practice and pointing out that the practice has all kinds of rationales that have broadly not been brought to light, and that when we look at that practice, we can think about the ways in which it has been. I mean, I think part of this book, a not insignificant part of this book, is about the ways in which people objected to these systems, right, in the moment that they understood in the moment that there were other possibilities for the building of some kind of new world order, and that this was not what they were voting for. And so I think that, you know, that's important to point out as well that there was no sense of the inevitability of the rise of these systems in the moment, and that we shouldn't understand that now as being kind of a necessary outcome that we will all have to live with until the end of time.
- [40:23]
D
Just to elaborate on that, it's slightly worth an example, of course, is the beginning of the chapter we have on wealth where, you know, when I was an undergraduate, we looked at all the classic textbooks about the Versailles system and the early origins of the Cold War, and it's all Wilson versus Lenin. And what was the alternative? Well, the alternative was Bolshevism and global communism and so on. But when we actually look at the rebuilding of the global economy and rebuilding of global capitalism in the early 1920s, there are so many different visions that are articulated at the time. And even those who would eventually move into the League as small liberal conservative thinkers argued that an opportunity was missed at that moment to use the entire apparatus, the economic apparatus of waging war through mobilization and economic warfare and turning it into an instrument for some vision of global equality, however limited that vision might have been. But I hope in that early part of that chapter on wealth, you just see how quickly that's shut down and removed from as a possibility. And, of course, so, you know, and here we have the sort of a dual movement. It's done at the time and historically in the historiography, that whole part of the history of the early 1920s in the history of international relations was just removed.
- [41:59]
C
But I think you could say the same thing about many of the political systems, right? If you think about, for instance, the mandate system, which is one of the League's kind of most central institutions, there are so many objections to it everywhere that it is imposed. And those objections are not just about the nature of the imposition of a new form of imperial power across, you know, much of the Middle east, across parts of Africa, across, across the parts of the Pacific. They are also clearly imagined and, you know, and varied visions for what the political organization and, for instance, a post Ottoman Middle east could be. Right? There are imaginaries about new forms of Ottomanism, about federalisms, about nationalisms. Right. There are lots and lots of different ideas about what kinds of political institutions could replace the old empire. And, and that does not include, generally speaking, a brutal military occupation by the British and French that will last for decades. So I think that we need to understand two things. One is that there's no, as Joe says about money, equally true for politics. There's no lack, there's no dearth of imagination here. Right. There's no dearth of other possibilities. The thing that the League relies on, this is the second kind of crucial aspect of this, that for all of these enterprises, the thing the League relies on to realize its visions is not the inevitability of those visions, it is the use of the force. And that's equally something to kind of come back to. Your question at the beginning about peace is that one of the things that has been broadly overlooked about the way that this international organization upgraded is that it relied on the military capacities of its central members to realize nearly all of its visions. And we have, broadly speaking speaking, not understood that as historians. And it's a crucial aspect of how the system came to be.
- [43:54]
B
One question I was wondering from almost the beginning to the end of the book was why historians have missed the exclusive dimensions of institution building or often have missed the exclusive ordering that the League was doing. And you have some discussion about.
- [44:15]
D
The.
- [44:15]
B
Importance of not seeing order kind of as a good, but to kind of historicize and kind of break that down analytically. And you make a brief comment that maybe colleagues in political science have done a better job in kind of analyzing this aspect, and I wanted to hear you expand a bit about that.
- [44:38]
D
No, I. I would definitely not say that colleagues in IR have done a better job at this. In fact, what I would say is so. I mean, we're criticizing, obviously, a wide body of literature and scholars, many of whom I know. And what I would say is they were relying on what were very current ways of thinking about international relations and globalization post collapse of Soviet Union into the early 2000s that saw sort of sense, the stream of history moving in one direction, an ever integrating, ever liberalizing world order. What's funny, by the way, is that in 1930, either 30 or 31, Arnold Toynbee wrote a piece for the League of Nations for a big presentation that made exactly that case. The world is moving in exactly one great direction. And I think so. I think both in international history and in international relations, scholars have taken ordering as a sort of just a single category, a single kind of, you know, uniform good. That there is order. And what order means is a particular vision of a liberal order rather than sort of the neutral term, just order being order. Right. And it's Ian Heard recently in International Relations and I think in the journal Security Studies, and several other scholars have been trying to show that ordering is not just sort of a neutral activity, but a competitive strategy of either stratification of military organization or adopting a certain set of values upon which the institutions of order are built upon on. And so much of the. And I'll just speak for the both of us, but Laura will want to pop in on this herself, is that when we began talking about this, one of our great frustrations was this body of literature about the League that had a particular narrative rhythm of sort of. It failed. But if you look at it, it sort of set the foundations for our new globalized way of. Of governing the world. And.
- [46:57]
B
Well, you know.
- [47:00]
D
I hope our book more or less puts that argument where. In a space where it belongs.
- [47:06]
C
I agree with everything Jo said, and I also think that there has been a kind of, you know, there have been regional barriers in the historiography as well, that I think in some ways, you know, many of these critiques that we're bringing to bear on this historiography, these are not. Not really new. Right. They're critiques that came from other spaces that. That have come. One of. One of the members of our workshop called us Bolsheviks, which, you know, but. And. And I think that there are. There are critiques that come out of that space that are intellectually defensible. Right. In these. That, you know. And of course, the Soviet Union has its own kind of hypocrisy, set of hypocrisies around the idea of international organization. But there are early Critiques from all sorts of, you know, all ends of the political spectrum about the League. But the other thing that I think is really crucial here is that the modern historiography on these occupied spaces. I know the Middle east literature the best, but the same is true for Africa, for the Pacific. These are spaces where regional historians have been bringing these charges to bear against the concepts of international organization and the kind of, you know, the quote, unquote, order that it brings, which is actually a profound form of violence. Right. As experienced on the ground. These people have been saying this for decades. Right. And the issue is not that those critiques have not existed. The issue is that those critiques have not entered into the body of historiography on the League itself, which has been almost exclusively written by Europeanists. And I think that that's a really. That has been a huge problem for understanding what the League was, how it operated, what it looked like from a ground view, and that, you know, part of what we're trying to do is just really just to kind of bring some of that literature into conversation with the diplomatic history of the League as it has been written over the past century. That is almost exclusively from the perspective of the countries that constructed it. So I think that that's an important reason as well, that the historiography has been so kind of unbalanced in thinking about the actual mechan mechanics and the actual impact of an institution like the League of Nations.
- [49:28]
B
And if we were to inject this more critical approach to order and ordering into the histography on the League, how might you think. Like, how might that then kind of also spill over and reinvigorate the histories of other international organizations. I'm curious about kind of of how this case could shift the way we see a whole other set of institutions. I mean, including the un, which is often kind of follows in line in the kind of sequential sequence, but not necessarily only the UN kind of the broader history of international organizations.
- [50:13]
C
I think it's fairly profound. This is something I'm interested in doing further work in. So. So, you know, maybe stay tuned in some respects, but I. But I do think. I mean, there are differences, of course, with the post1945 order, but there are also significant continuities, and I would point particularly to the kind of rise of technocratic institutions is something that is clearly a legacy of the League and something that can be critiqued in much the same way the UN itself, at least in its initial stages, was. Is very clearly imagined. As I think Mark Mazauer calls it a warmed over version of the League. And so I think that, you know, and it's transformation later on, a couple of decades later in that kind of era of decolonization into a public venue for the expression of anti colonial ideas, which is something that happens in the General assembly but not in other constituent parts of the League of Nations. To the same degree. I think we can identify kind of particular historical trends there that nevertheless are broadly consistent with many of the arguments that we're laying out here about the League in the earlier period. I think that these remain institutions that are dedicated to top down technocratic expertise driven, quote unquote solutions, particularly to, to what they perceive as problems of state development. They also remain institutions that are dedicated, of course, this is a phenomenally obvious point, but I'll say it anyway, you know, that are dedicated to maintaining the sovereign, quote, unquote sovereign nation state as the only legitimate building block of international political organization. That's another continuity between the League era and the United Nations. So I think that there's work to be done here and I don't want to suggest that the continuities are absolute, but I would say that a lot of the groundwork was laid in the interwar period for the kinds of internationalisms that we see sort of proliferating in the post1945 era.
- [52:21]
B
So I thought we might wrap up with a question going back to the fact that this is a co authored book.
- [52:29]
D
Book.
- [52:30]
B
You've expressed a remarkable degree of agreement with each other, which makes me want to ask about what were the hardest things to agree upon, either arguments or decisions about the book.
- [52:49]
D
Well, it's worth pointing out that this book began life at a conference about 1922 as sort of a founding moment, international relationship. We were on the island of Samos and the series editor, Robert Carifarth was attending the conference and announced that he was accepting manuscript proposals for his series. But it was during. I hope you don't mind if I take some credit on this point, Laura. But listening to Laura speak and what I was thinking and then and what I was saying, it just seemed that we were converging to exactly the same conclusion from completely two different directions. I just wish to at that take a moment to just reinforce Laura's last point about historiographical collaboration from multiple strands of research coming together to highlight something in a completely different way. And that's precisely the way this began life as Laura talking about her expertise. And I was doing the same with respect to the 1922 moment and we approached Robert and said, you know, well, I approached Laura and said, what do you think? And then we recorded Robert and he didn't take very much convincing. No. And that's how this book began. And I would say it's probably one of the fastest manuscripts I've ever turned around. I mean, I'm not particularly fast, but it was a huge pleasure to write with Laura and bounce the ideas back and forth and, and the fluidity of. And the way that just all came together was remarkable.
- [54:32]
C
Yeah, it was really a gratifying process. And I think in some ways you feel more secure in your own conclusions when they are being affirmed and reinforced by someone with a totally different training from yours. I think that we had this dinner conversation at Samos where it was really remarkable that Joe and I had have very little overlap in terms of our kind of training and expertise in some respects, but had come to almost precisely the same conclusions about this and had the same frustrations about the kind of nature of the historiography that surrounded the League and this narrative that it was sort of this, you know, like, well intentioned first try. I think that both of us were. Had come to be profoundly skeptical about that claim over a pretty long period of time. So I. I am not sure we had very much in the way of disagreement. I mean, in a way it was remarkable that I think our individual kind of topic areas within the frame of the League, we have different areas of expertise under the same umbrella organization in some respects, and that the conclusions that each of us had come to about those individual pieces broadly seemed to apply to the pieces that the other person knew the most about as well. So I think that it led to this kind of real feeling of confidence about the conclusions that we were collectively drawing, that it was possible to come to them from such disparate points of view and from such disparate historiographies. So I think that it was a very smooth process, a very fast process, as Joe said, and that, you know, we're really hoping that this will start a new set of conversations where maybe the historiography of the League in particular, and internationalism more generally can incorporate, create more points of view, more historiographies, more types of scholarship, to provide a clearer and more rounded sense of the genealogy and outcomes and ramifications of this kind of internationalism.
- [56:34]
B
Well, all I can say is that it sounds like an ideal collaboration and you probably should write more things so that you can discover core reasons for conflict and disagreement. But in the meantime, thanks a lot for joining today, and it was a pleasure to hear your reflections on the book.
- [56:52]
D
Huge thanks, Lucas.
- [56:54]
C
Thank you so much for having us.