Sometimes, reading about the League of Nations brings to mind lines penned by the famous Scottish poet, Robbie Burns. “To a Mouse” includes the observation that, “The best laid schemes o’ mice and men, Gang aft a-gley.” Even if you have extremely good ideas and the very best motives at the start of your project, even if you organize everything carefully, still, as soon as your planning begins to meet reality, things start to go wrong. This excellent collection of specialized essays addresses the generally well-intentioned work of the League of Nations in South Central Europe, in the process unveiling how its initiatives went “aft a-gley.”
The League of Nations was long maligned in academic literature, and its shortcomings do need to be recognized. For example, dominated by the great powers that emerged victorious from World War I, it evidenced a continuation of at least some imperial tendencies. Likewise, at times it set out to provide liberal initiatives but managed only to deliver illiberal outcomes. It was also a victim of a self-subverting paradox: the League was established to promote peace through internationalism, yet its structures and processes consolidated the nation-state. This collection takes account of these important insights fully. With that said, the contributors are to be congratulated for telling the story in ways that are nuanced and packed with fascinating detail. Hopefully, they will encourage further research into a variety of historical themes that, at the time, were arguably only lights that flickered—but at least they were lights in an interwar period where there was more than enough darkness.
The collection contains sixteen contributions. Looking at the world from the perspective of formerly Habsburg lands, they deal with internationalism, food science, health, expertise, finance, Hungary in the League, intellectuals, passports, economic integration, crime, people trafficking, optants, nonterritorial autonomy, and Czechoslovakia's international relations. The introduction and epilogue provide the individual contributions with a wider context. Taken as a whole, the collection explores the transition of territory once under an imperial, supranational dynasty into a system of nation-states existing under an international umbrella organization. As the story unfolds, it reveals several individuals who deserve greater exposure in English-language historical literature, not least Ludwig Rajchman (health) and Count Apponyi (diplomacy). Figures such as these highlight the way that, in the 1920s, ideas did not simply percolate from West to East, but from East to West too. The text also displays well how networks of contacts dating from the imperial period sometimes continued to operate after 1918.
All the contributions are worthy of reviewing in their own right, but unfortunately space makes that impossible, so I will just mention two essays in particular, personal favorites if you like. For this reader, Börries Kuzmany's discussion of national minorities was particularly enjoyable. Kuzmany is quite right that the introduction of minority rights supervised by an international organization was a tremendous innovation. The step involved at least a partial decoupling of state from nation and, just as radically, a splitting of sovereignty between state, minority, and League. Kuzmany explains confidently the too-little-known work of Jósef Eötvös and Rudolf Laun, as well as the important Moravian and Budweis compromises. It's a fine article about an important topic. The desire of minority groups to assert themselves not only nationally but also internationally led to the creation of the European Nationalities’ Congress. The organization first met in October 1925 (not August, as the article suggests) and thereafter gathered annually with a view to lobbying the League about minority affairs and promoting minority interests in general. Here we find a particularly promising area for research because it highlights issues around the creation of ethnic identity in the wake of conflict and the participation of nationally disenfranchised groups in not just national politics but also international relations.
Turning to a second essay, Johannes Feichtinger presents a very welcome discussion of the League's intellectual cooperation program, during which he focuses especially on Vienna historian Alfons Dopsch. The International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation (ICIC) was instigated by the 1920 Nobel Peace Prize laureate Léon Bourgeois to promote “practical internationalism.” It was led by a committee of twelve that included Henri Bergson, Gilbert Murray, Marie Curie, and Albert Einstein. In due course, Dopsch was invited to participate too, first as a corresponding member and later in person. Dopsch's personal journey that brought him to this point was fascinating. He had been a founding member of the Association of German Historians in Vienna in 1889, lectured in support of the German war effort during World War I, and after 1918 supported the provision of rights for Sudeten Germans. By 1923 he was active in Vienna promoting the international linkage of German scholars. That same year he was invited to attend the ICIC in person. His response, however, as published in the article, suggests both that the League's administration could be disorganized and that Dopsch could be cantankerous. Feichtinger's assessment of the ICIC is, in the end, balanced. Its work was made difficult by clashing national and international agendas, as well as by the League sometimes having mutually opposed aims. In the end, the ICIC helped the international reintegration of Austrian academics but did relatively little to address the concrete difficulties they faced in the 1920s. The project as it developed, however, did grow into UNESCO, so perhaps it should not be undervalued too much.
Inevitably, as with anything ever published, it is possible to carp about the collection. At times, its focus on the Habsburg lands feels a little artificial. Rajchman's work on epidemics, for instance, always had wider significance than that, as did minority rights and nonterritorial autonomy. Perhaps also it might have been possible to present some of the material in ways likely to appeal to at least a few “popular” readers. To be clear, however, this is a fine collection of historical scholarship in which contributions are always original, well-informed, thoughtful, and well worth reading.
