‘You must not break the back of the League’, they say, ‘it is too young’.
And meanwhile they deprive it of food and of spirit so that it may not grow.Footnote 1
There are few more harrowing fiascos in twentieth-century multilateralism than interwar efforts at general disarmament through the League of Nations. Disarmament was the first ‘political’ task explicitly stipulated in the League's covenant, and the cause gained immense and organised support from the general public throughout the period. It was the League's sine qua non. It was also a subject matter the went straight to the heart of national sovereignty and security, and linked the concerns, plans and fates of all the major (and minor) powers in complicated and ultimately insoluble ways. To this came the byzantine exercise of making disarmament technically feasible: how to compare and how to cut. For all these reasons, disarmament was the greatest task of the League Secretariat – the permanent administration of the organisation – and its most spectacular failure.
This article argues that the troubled birth and administrative strangling of the Disarmament Section of the Secretariat should play a significant role in our understanding of the broader collapse of general disarmament. By making this argument, the article breaks new ground by introducing failure as an analytical category for understanding the role and practices of international public administrations.Footnote 2 Susan Pedersen's 2007 call for historians not to ask why the League failed, but what it did and how it worked, coincided with a much needed transnational turn in international history more generally.Footnote 3 Since then a shift in emphasis has occurred: from writing about the League of Nations as a stage upon which national interests play out, to deciphering the League as a multifarious actor within an increasingly institutionalised global landscape.Footnote 4 However, with its natural inclination towards tracing networks, expertise, ideologies and goods across borders, this body of research has neglected the administrative and bureaucratic underpinnings of the early experiments in global governance.Footnote 5 Thus, while there is a burgeoning transnational literature on the disarmament question, exemplified particularly by the work of Andrew Webster, the Disarmament Section of the League Secretariat has received little attention.Footnote 6 As an administrative entity it has been touched upon only briefly as part of general studies of the Secretariat as a wholeFootnote 7 or in contemporaneous – and still very instructive – studies of disarmament governance and negotiations.Footnote 8 Those that have researched the Disarmament Section specifically have looked mostly at its statistical production but have not placed this practice in its proper administrative context.Footnote 9 This article offers a first investigation into the belated creation and workings of the Disarmament Section between 1919 and 1925. The timeframe is chosen for several reasons: first, it covers the period from the establishment of the Secretariat to the formation of a full-fledged Disarmament Section. Second, it traces its administrative development through what Webster calls the ‘disarmament for security’ period of the League's endeavours, encompassing particularly the work of the Temporary Mixed Commission for the Reduction of Armaments (henceforth TMC) and ending with the death of ‘The Protocol for the Pacific Settlement of International Disputes’ (henceforth Geneva Protocol). The period that followed was distinctly different both in political and administrative terms, with Germany joining the League in 1926 on the back of the Locarno Pact (1925) and thus ushering in years of increasing international stability. The Disarmament Section, for its part, shifted its attentions to servicing the Preparatory Commission (1925–31) and thus embarked upon the long road towards the disastrous World Disarmament Conference (1932–4).Footnote 10
The League Secretariat pursued two overall administrative strategies to ensure its legitimacy and influence: first, the Secretariat sought to build up and retain autonomy. In the first years of the Secretariat's existence, for instance, Secretary-General Eric Drummond decided that the Secretariat should be composed of a truly international staff, organised along functional, rather than national, lines. Drummond also fought to retain as much autonomy as possible in terms of staffing. While member state pressure to take on certain candidates for specific posts was not uncommon, the final decision lay with the Secretary-General himself. This principle, whether actual or imagined, had to be upheld for the Secretariat to survive as an autonomous entity.Footnote 11
The second strategy was publicity. The Wilsonian ideal of open covenants informed the function and rationale of the Secretariat from the outset. Several historians have shown that the Secretariat worked under the assumption that its legitimacy derived from an inherently liberal world public, that had to be mobilised to keep member states to the promises of the covenant. This public could be mobilised, it was thought, through rational arguments and expert knowledge produced by the Secretariat for the educated reading public and disseminated through a plethora of national and international non-governmental organisations (NGOs) connected to its cause, what Davies called ‘the Greater League’. Indeed, this relentless production and dissemination of information would banish the war-educing ghosts of the past and replace them with a new, liberal and democratic world order.Footnote 12
As this article will argue, the Disarmament Section was a peculiar outlier of the Secretariat on both accounts. It had less autonomy than any other part of the administration, which from an early stage limited its bureaucratic practice to the production of reports and statistics in the hope that this would mobilise the world public and create trust and openness between member states, and thus lay the foundation for disarmament. Rather than influence the public or policy processes through information and publicity, however, this bureaucratic production, combined with the reluctance of member states to share information and the very nature of the information (illusive military capabilities), created unreliable factual foundations for negotiations and false expectations in the public.
The article unfolds in three parts. The first part delivers a brief outline of the trajectory of general disarmament within the League in the first half of the 1920s. The aim is to allow the reader to engage with the complex administrative developments without losing sight of the contextual pressures that shaped the Secretariat's efforts. The second part investigates how the Secretariat struggled and ultimately failed to set up an autonomous Disarmament Section. This part is based on hitherto unexplored archival material and uncovers the immense pressure from member states and the existential considerations on the Secretariat's part that went into the creation the Disarmament Section. The third and final part links these findings with a more sweeping discussion of the Disarmament Section's publicity work. This final analysis draws more on published sources and the excellent research done by other scholars to make the point that the section's forced, exclusive attention on information and publicity involuntarily exacerbated the inconsistencies of the League's disarmament efforts and its own inadequacies – an unexplored element in the failure of the organisation itself.
The Tensions of General Disarmament, 1920–5
Throughout the interwar period three inherent tensions haunted the League's quest for general disarmament. First, there was the fact that the forced disarmament of Germany was explicitly linked to the promise of general disarmament of all states (the preamble of Part V of the Versailles Treaty).Footnote 13 This ticking clock meant that German authorities would, at some point, feel justified in their claim, articulated already in the early 1920s, that the Allies had failed to keep up their end of the bargain and thus feel free to unilaterally rearm (rather than tacitly violating the Versailles Treaty through secret rearmament).Footnote 14 This tied into a second dynamic: the incompatible interests of Germany, France and the United Kingdom. As subsequent German governments would demand first treaty revision and increasingly ‘equality’, they stoked French fears. French authorities wanted above all ‘security’, either by holding Germany down or by building alliances and giving the League ‘teeth’ – preferably both. The most important aspect of this strategy was some sort of commitment from the United Kingdom,Footnote 15 initially as a traditional military ally and later as a ‘joint-guarantor of a Europe-wide system of inter-locking arbitration and mutual assistance pacts’.Footnote 16 Subsequent British governments were, however, unwilling. Britain's strategic interest lay in freedom from constraining alliances, pacts or guarantees and balance between a Germany whose economic recovery was in their interest, and a France whose ‘grand strategies’ they distrusted.Footnote 17 Last, there was an inherent tension between the demands from an organised and sizeable global public for immediate and substantial disarmament, and governments – big and small – who would inevitably disappoint with incremental proposals arrived at in mutual distrust.Footnote 18
At the Paris Peace Conference the French laboured to have the League become a continuation of the wartime alliance and directed against Germany, arguing for disarmament under a potent League imbued with the power of inspection and its own international force.Footnote 19 The US Congress opposed any such sharing of power; while conservatives in Lloyd George's government and British military branches feared the prospect of being dragged into new conflicts.Footnote 20 In the end the League Commission of the Peace Conference promised no supranational army, no compulsory arbitration and no forced disarmament but linked the holy mission of disarmament with the purpose of the organisation. Reduction of arms as a prerequisite for peace was inscribed directly into the Covenant of the League of Nations (Art. 8) with the promise of general disarmament to ‘the lowest point consistent with national safety and the enforcement by common action of international obligations’.Footnote 21 The League's success, writes former League official F. P. Walters, ‘continued to be judged by public opinion and by its own most devoted supporters by one test above all – the test of disarmament’.Footnote 22
With Eastern Europe still in turmoil, violent revisions of the peace treaties underway in Asia Minor and the United States on its way out of the League, the first tangible step towards disarmament was the creation of The Permanent Advisory Commission (henceforth PAC) as stipulated in Article 9 of the Covenant. The PAC was originally supposed to ‘advise the Council on the execution of the provisions of Articles 1 and 8’ and thus provide the raw material for a general plan for disarmament. It soon became clear, however, that it would confine itself to giving purely technical advice.Footnote 23 An impatient First Assembly of the League, stoked by strong demands from public opinion and within the Secretariat itself, therefore called for the creation of the TMC. As opposed to the purely military PAC, the TMC consisted of recognised authorities within the political, social and economic field, experts from the Economic and Financial Committee, representatives from the Employers’ and Workers’ side in the International Labour Organisation (ILO), in addition to members of the PAC.Footnote 24 Recognising that some governments would be reluctant to reduce their armaments without guarantees against aggression, the TMC – after some initial hiccups – tackled the political end of the problem first. In 1923 it brought a report before the assembly – the so-called Draft Treaty of Mutual Assistance – which would come into effect once a treaty on disarmament had been agreed. Fundamentally, the treaty made the aggressive action of states an international crime and bound all signatories to assist any state under attack by an aggressor, provided that the attacked state abided to the (yet to be settled) provisions of disarmament.Footnote 25
The draft treaty was adopted by the League Assembly only to be shot down by British Prime Minister Ramsay Macdonald's first Labour government on the grounds that it would not bind itself to provide military assistance to any and all states whose rights were violated by an aggressor. Instead, in 1924 Macdonald and French Premier Édouard Herriot took the lead in negotiating the Geneva Protocol. The protocol proposed compulsory arbitration of disputes, a procedure to determine the aggressor of a conflict, collective responsibility to act against an aggressor and a comprehensive disarmament conference in 1925.Footnote 26 After preliminary approval by all the member states of the League at the Fifth Assembly, the Conservative government of British Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin rejected it: it would not commit to uphold such a comprehensive security and arbitration system before a general scheme of disarmament was agreed.Footnote 27
The first phase of general disarmament efforts aiming to link disarmament and security had produced few tangible results.Footnote 28 Indeed, the most important breakthrough came outside the League framework with a regional, limited naval disarmament conference in Washington (November 1921–February 1922).Footnote 29 Nonetheless, the fundamental and relatively consistent disagreements between the great powers on general disarmament played a crucial part in stifling the Disarmament Section, which in turn would shape the policy process itself. Accordingly, rather than seeing early disarmament efforts as part of a story of ‘inevitable failure stemming from unbridled nationalism’, we shall investigate what kind of failure it produced in the League administration.Footnote 30
Autonomy under Attack
The Disarmament Section saw the light of day under difficult circumstances and its early existence needs to be understood as part of a broader struggle to establish autonomy on the Secretariat's part.Footnote 31 Indeed, a great deal of the most effective suppression of the disarmament question was administrative in nature. Attempts at building a bureaucratic apparatus that could facilitate an agreement on general disarmament were systematically stifled from the very beginning by French and British authorities.
One of the Secretariat and Secretary-General Drummond's greatest challenges was the jealousy with which the Great Powers guarded their decision making powers in disarmament questions. Thus, while Drummond proposed ‘a small liaison section’ between the PAC and the Council already in May 1919, he realised that the question required ‘most careful handling since it arouse[d] violent national feelings’.Footnote 32 He knew, for instance, that any attempt at appointing officials working on behalf of the League Secretariat, rather than the military branches of the member states,Footnote 33 would ‘at once bind together all the forces which are in potential opposition to the League and its ideals, and I fear that we are not sufficiently robust at present to be able to withstand successfully such an attack’.Footnote 34 The early decisions on the creation of the PAC were, in other words, understood as a struggle for the very survival of the League of Nations.
Thus, while sympathetic to activist proposals,Footnote 35 the Secretary-General thought the Secretariat's main job was to prepare proposals so that advantage could be taken of the right occasion should it occur. The setting up of the PAC, however, was ‘a matter of real urgency’,Footnote 36 for without it he feared that any prospect of a Disarmament Section, and thus a truly international hand on the steering wheel, would disappear.Footnote 37 This, however, was no simple matter. At one end of the spectrum, British General and member of the Supreme War Council Charles Sackville-West, for instance, pushed for the League to cover all expenses of the PAC and its permanent staff, while the member states would have the privilege to appoint members as they saw fit. If there were to be a definite section within the Secretariat, moreover, it should ‘be merely a post office at Geneva’.Footnote 38 At the other end of the spectrum, several leading members of the Secretariat, citing the demands of public opinion, pushed for immediate, independent and daring proposals.Footnote 39 However, despite sustained pressure to set up a proper Disarmament Section – that is a section akin to those already in existence, with a designated director and at least two or three Members of Section answering to the Secretary-General alone – Drummond held firm.Footnote 40 Balancing between these demands, the Secretary-General proposed that the expenses of the PAC as such should be borne by the national governments, while the League would carry the cost of the collective secretariat of the commission. ‘It may be argued that this would make the Commission too independent of the League’, he reflected, but at least it would safeguard the Secretariat's financial autonomy.Footnote 41 Meanwhile, hearing the pleas of the League officials, he ordered the preparation of a series of technical studies, which, together with possible designs for the PAC, were submitted to the Council. Importantly, all proposals included ‘secretarial work’ conducted and paid for by the League itself. This was the embryo of the Disarmament Section.
In the late spring of 1920 the Council finally fleshed out the statutes of the PAC. As the Great Powers intended and Drummond readily accepted, the commission was entirely made up of military officers appointed by and responsible to their respective governments.Footnote 42 The PAC's secretariat, however, was slightly more ambiguous in its loyalties: three technical officers of French (army), British (navy) and Italian (air) nationality, were nominated by the Secretary-General on the recommendation of the respective governments. Though they were placed at the disposal of the three sub-commissions of the PAC, they formally answered to the Secretariat.Footnote 43 Drummond's cautious defence of the Secretariat's autonomy, meant that he would rather postpone the realisation of a proper Disarmament Section, than risk direct member state influence via the PAC. Particularly the British armed forces applied direct pressure to keep Drummond from moving the power of proposal and expertise away from the Great Powers. It took a concerted effort in the Assembly to force a change.
At the First Assembly of the League of Nations, the smaller powers, headed by the Scandinavian delegates, pushed for a new, more broadly conceived temporary commission ‘to prepare for submission to the Council in the near future reports and proposals for the reduction of armaments’.Footnote 44 Realising that the PAC would never facilitate elaborate disarmament plans,Footnote 45 the setting up of the TMC was a radical attempt at internationalising the process by moving power from government appointed military men to politicians, representatives of the employee and employer organisations and experts and technocrats nominally acting independent of governments and – ideally – in the interest of international society.Footnote 46
An important element in this attempted internationalisation was the setting up of a proper Disarmament Section to support the work of the TMC.Footnote 47 The section was to serve as a centre of information for the commission and as a channel for publications and information as prescribed by the Covenant, and was to include the secretaries of the PAC, one Director and one Member of Section. Its slender composition was in large part due to French opposition.Footnote 48 Nonetheless, the Secretariat welcomed its creation. The hope within the Secretariat was that the TMC would submit concrete proposals to the Assembly and the Council, and that the section would obtain a central position in overseeing the negotiations and subsequent agreements on general disarmament.Footnote 49
As late as April 1921, however, neither the TMC nor the Disarmament Section had been set up.Footnote 50 Dissatisfied with the obvious lack of progress, the internationally minded Swedish Prime and Foreign Minister Hjalmar Branting passed a resolution in the Assembly stating that: ‘the Secretariat should be asked to complete the organisation of the Section of the Secretariat dealing with the question of the reduction of armaments, and that this Section should have a directorship of its own’.Footnote 51 Drummond was asked to find the ‘best method’ of executing this request against the background of general budget cuts. The solution was to promote the Italian Director Bernardo Attolico of the Transit Section to the position of Under-Secretary General with the responsibility of the Disarmament Section, general administrative matters of the Secretariat and the section he came from. While Drummond argued that this signalled ‘the paramount importance of the question of Disarmament’,Footnote 52 this was more a symbolic than actual prioritising of disarmament. Moreover, it would take close to a year after the Second Assembly before it came into effect.
The tug-of-war between a strictly government-led disarmament process, favoured by the Great Powers, and a more internationalised process, preferred particularly by the Scandinavians, left the Disarmament Section an odd creature within the Secretariat. The PAC, while having no real purpose after the mid-1920s, lived on, with the three ‘out of work’ secretaries eating away large parts of the section's budget.Footnote 53 They also posed a continuous threat to the Secretariat's autonomy, and thus an effective check on independent action. Even though they increasingly acted as ‘senior members’ of the sectionFootnote 54, the PAC-secretaries remained much more directly related to and dependent on their own governmental and departmental authorities than any other member of the Secretariat.Footnote 55
Three years into the Secretariat's existence, the Disarmament Section had found a semi-permanent form. However, it would be the only section of the Secretariat to which the Great Powers had ‘direct’ access. In an attempt to strengthen international control of the section, and at the same time meet increasing demands for austerity, the Secretary-General took drastic measures.
In 1923, arguing that the Disarmament Section was overstaffed owing to the fact that it was composed of two secretariats, serving the PAC and TMC respectively, Drummond proposed to remove the three PAC-secretaries and instead have a total of three regular Members of Section. A Chef de Service would serve as the secretary to both commissions. This would place the PAC on the same footing as other commissions of the LeagueFootnote 56 and effectuate a considerable reduction in the budget. Tempting the Council with decreased spending, Drummond hoped to get a coherent section securely under the League Secretariat's authority.Footnote 57 Unsurprisingly, Drummond's proposal was met with vehement opposition by the PAC and, as neither French nor British authorities wanted independent, far-reaching disarmament proposals from the SecretariatFootnote 58, the Council sided with the PAC's interpretation of the division of labour.Footnote 59 Drummond's daring attempt bore no fruits.
For Drummond, the defeat of the reform proposal was symptomatic of a broader, politically motivated attack on the Secretariat's budgets ‘to clip the wings of the League’.Footnote 60 Being a direct challenge to his authority, Drummond was prepared to resign over the issue.Footnote 61 His misgivings were understandable: at a time when the League's workload exploded,Footnote 62 it was asked for a 6 per cent reduction of expenditure compared to the budget of 1923.Footnote 63 As a result, the Secretariat had to keep costs down through inventive measures. For instance, when, in 1924, the Disarmament Section appointed N. Sloutzki, a Russian émigré, to produce the Armaments Year-Book and the Statistical Year-Book of the Trade in Arms and Ammunition, he was started on the measly salary of 7,000 Gold Francs (compared to the salary of a Member of Section of approximately 17,800 Gold Francs). Arguably doing the section's most important job, he was made Member of Section only in 1928.Footnote 64
Even while assisting some of the most radical disarmament work of the interwar period, then, the Disarmament Section was chronically understaffed and kept to a minimal existence. For the remainder of its existence, it would be a lump-sided hybrid between military ‘post office’ and technical secretariat.
Moreover, despite several attempts at strengthening the position of the head of the Disarmament Section, its leadership would remain enfeebled in two fundamental ways: first, by the ad hoc manner in which the question was solved in the first many years and, second, by the so-called ‘nationality question’. Before the autumn of 1922 the question of leadership was entirely unclear. As a 1922 report by Under-Secretary General Attolico made clear, a temporarily transferred junior official,Footnote 65 the Greek Thanassis Aghnides, had ‘alone by himself, provided for the proper running of the Section for the whole year’, making him the first de facto head of the Disarmament Section. Aghnides was not even paid as a Member of Section.Footnote 66 In August 1922 Drummond appointed the Spanish official Salvador de Madariaga to take care of the daily business of the section.Footnote 67 In reality, Madariaga – as Aghnides before him – ran the Disarmament Section alone.Footnote 68 Together with Rachel Crowdy (Social Questions and Opium Traffic Section), he was the only head of section to hold the lesser position of Chef de Service. Footnote 69 The dismal state of the Disarmament Section became the topic of a heated debate in the Third Assembly (1923). The Supervisory Commission of the Assembly – its budgetary watchdog – argued that Madariaga should remain Chef de Service, despite his workload, to the bitter protest of the Spanish and Portuguese delegates. Drummond, meanwhile, argued that he had only followed the Assembly in trying to keep the number of Directors to a minimum.Footnote 70 The Assembly, in the end, decided that Madariaga should remain Chef de Service, and he first made the rank of Director in 1927 only to leave the Secretariat soon thereafter.Footnote 71 These details document the lack of priority given to the leadership of the section, and the many years of instability that followed. The Disarmament Section had four heads between 1921 and 1930, more than any other section.Footnote 72 The section itself first sat under the Under-Secretary General of internal administration, then it was de facto under the Political Section until 1930, before reporting directly to the Secretary-General in the early 1930s.Footnote 73
The second block on the leadership's influence was the nationality of the head of section. In his memoirs, Salvador de Madariaga contends that placing Attolico in charge of the section was ‘to put disarmament neither under Drummond (political affairs) nor under Monnet (economic and technical affairs), since disarmament was one of the chief bones of contention between Britain (i.e. Drummond) and France (i.e. Monnet)’.Footnote 74 In fact, (Scandinavian) officials within the Secretariat pushed for the same solution.Footnote 75 While it seems unlikely that Drummond could have appointed someone of French or British nationality, the appointment of Madariaga instituted a problematic norm of reserving the position for officials from neutral and relatively minor states.Footnote 76
This became apparent in 1930 when the Secretariat had to appoint a new Director of the Disarmament Section before the World Disarmament Conference. In an uncharacteristic move, Drummond put forth the high-ranking British official Frank Walters for the post, arguing that he ‘could not agree that the practice must necessarily prevail of placing the Disarmament Section in charge of a national of a country which was neutral during the war’.Footnote 77 The proposal was unilaterally blocked by the German Foreign Minister Curtius, with direct reference to the norm of hiring ‘neutrals’.Footnote 78 By the 1930s Germany and Italy directly challenged the Secretariat's autonomy and the international loyalties of its officials more generallyFootnote 79 and Drummond was forced to accept the fait accompli. Retaining a fig leaf of autonomy, the choice fell on Aghnides, who had been the first de facto head of the section,Footnote 80 a choice the German authorities reluctantly accepted as Greece had only belatedly declared war on Germany during the First World War.Footnote 81
Several other sections of the League Secretariat – such as the Minorities and Mandates Section – functioned relatively well under the ‘constraint’ of having to staff a certain number of ‘neutral’ officials.Footnote 82 Equally, it is not evident that the Disarmament Section would have been substantially strengthened had it been directed by an official from one of the Great Powers. However, combined with the administrative and economic wing clipping, the nationality question added to the problems of the Disarmament Section.
The Bureaucratic Production of Failure
As seen above, the Disarmament Section was the administrative opposite of the lofty ambitions of the League. Already from the early 1920s it was clear that the thrust towards general disarmament would have to come from the member states, notwithstanding the unprecedented powers given to the TMC – ‘a group of essentially unaccountable individuals’.Footnote 83 The role of the Disarmament Section vis-à-vis the PAC and TMC was to prepare documents and statistics and provide secretarial assistance. However, it was the PAC – with six members inserted in the TMC – that gave technical advice on the feasibility of TMC-proposals.Footnote 84 The Secretariat had limited influence over the timing of the meetings (this was an oft-discussed issue in the beginning, when the top brass of the Secretariat feared that the Washington Naval Conference would steal the TMC's thunder), structuring (but not setting) the agenda, coordination between the TMC and the Assembly, and when it came to publicity of the meetings.Footnote 85 Even with regard to these issues, however, the Disarmament Section had neither the manpower, the position nor the mandate to exert any real influence. From a discussion among the Directors and the Secretary-General in June 1922 it is clear that Drummond wanted the Secretariat to play a deliberately withdrawn position in major political issues. The discussion was sparked by Director Rajchman (Health Section) being struck by Attolico's – formally responsible for the Disarmament Section – remarks ‘concerning the inability of the League to do anything [about Disarmament]’. The Secretary-General's advice was to ‘keep the League alive’, focus on ‘technical organisations and the smaller political questions’, not to take any initiatives unless matters were referred to them and wait for ‘a settled world’. ‘We are building for the future’, he cautioned, ‘and should take a long view of the situation’.Footnote 86
Accordingly, the section's bureaucratic production, apart from secretarial assistance, would become increasingly geared towards the only aspect of its initial mission over which it still had influence, the last part of Article 8 of the Covenant: ‘The Members of the League undertake to interchange full and frank information as to the scale of their armaments, their military, naval and air programmes and the condition of such of their industries as are adaptable to war-like purposes’.Footnote 87 Their work was guided by the belief that objective and written material could cool national rivalries and that the League could mobilise a global public opinion, which could pressure governments to act in the interest of the common good.Footnote 88 However, as we shall see in this brief discussion of the section's practices, their publicity work could just as easily be interpreted as the bureaucratic production of failure.
After the PAC's toothless preliminary questionnaire in 1920, an early attempt by the Disarmament Section to extract information from the member states through a questionnaire was, according to Webster, ‘firmly and fiercely slapped down by the French representatives’ as dangerously independent action by the Secretariat.Footnote 89 Thus, it was to be the TMC that implemented the idea of gathering and systematising a broad spectre of information on armaments, defence and security to create a sound basis for general disarmament.Footnote 90 After two separate studies, in 1922 and 1923, the TMC recommended to the League Assembly in 1923 to publish ‘an up-to-date and complete yearbook’.Footnote 91
With this, the Disarmament Section was tasked to produce its own knowledge, seeking to ‘preserve the independence of the Secretariat’.Footnote 92 In the report from the Secretariat upon which the TMC's recommendations were made, we may note a clear frustration with the exchange of information based upon voluntary questionnaires submitted by member states. Despite this, however, the Secretariat realised that a regular publication based on public sources would be incomplete. Nonetheless, it opined that this was the best way to overcome ‘the slowness hitherto displayed by Governments in replying to the questionnaires sent to them’.Footnote 93 Publications based on public sources would, with time, ‘improve the political atmosphere by creating confidence’ and ‘nip in the bud any campaign started by an alarmist Press and based upon the armaments of countries considered as potential enemies’.Footnote 94 Yet, this was not the main part of the Secretariat's scheme: the most important aspect was the setting up of a system of direct exchange of information between groups of countries formed on a territorial, naval or political basis.Footnote 95 This would create a network of ‘direct exchange’, building trust between member states with shared areas of interest. This second element was first postponed by the TMC and then conveniently forgotten.Footnote 96
Thus, while the progressivist overtones of expert- and information-driven ‘moral disarmament’ are apparent,Footnote 97 the Secretariat's plan was predominantly a response to the lack of progress in the disarmament question and a direct measure to retain autonomy and agency for the section. Moreover, it was never purely internationalist: the autonomy of the Disarmament Section in one aspect of the ‘knowledge production’ was balanced by a state-driven exchange of information. As this two-legged approach failed to materialise, the League was left with the Disarmament Section's yearbooks alone, based solely on public sources. The Secretariat itself had pointed out that this would be unsatisfactory.Footnote 98 As Megan Donaldson writes, publicity now ‘had to be designed’ by inadequately combining economic, customs and military statistics and the Disarmament Section ‘as the broker of information, became caught in this politicized exchange, and ultimately produced information that disappointed both lay publics and militaries’.Footnote 99
But the problems ran deeper still. As Sloutzki, the chronically underpaid chief editor of the Armaments Year-Book and the Statistical Year-Book of the Trade in Arms and Ammunition, noted in a 1941 study of the subject, the Disarmament Section merely registered ‘the various phases of the race in arms’.Footnote 100 Moreover, even the basic facts of disarmament were difficult to agree upon and were constantly undermined by member states. Total war had rendered it near impossible to calculate total military capacity. Technical advances, the integration of civilian populations into national defence systems and the shift to wars of economies and resources made the job of the Disarmament Section immensely complex. Added to this was the fact that most states hid military expenditure in seemingly innocuous budget posts under civilian ministries. As the report of the Secretariat made clear, secrecy did not hinder information from seeping out, but made it less reliable and more open to speculative attacks. Even when the Disarmament Section found ways to compare data, individual governments, with their experts inside the League machinery, objected to the methodology. British experts, for instance, objected to the section's comparison of armament expenditure based on the pre-war wholesale price index in its first three Year-Books, forcing the section to abandon a functional method of comparing data.Footnote 101 Seen in this light, it is doubtful that the section's statistical work created lasting trust between member states.
Because it was limited to the production of inadequate statistical information on armaments, the Disarmament Section worked tirelessly to disseminate information to the ‘Greater League’ of NGOs and the general public in the hope that this would push governments to act. Possessing few other administrative tools, this dissemination strategy would either deliver a spectacular victory provided by the member states themselves or continuously erode the credibility of the League.
The pressures of the organised public were not a construct of the Secretariat. In the first Assembly, the Norwegian internationalist and secretary of the Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU) Christian Lange warned that the peoples of the world would ‘be sadly disillusioned if we leave this hall having given them only a promise – and that a vague one – of studying the question of armaments a long time hence’.Footnote 102 The League had ‘no more important duty than that defined in Article 8 of the Treaty’, the French internationalist Léon Bourgeois stated in May 1920, and ‘to postpone the discussion of so important a problem would be to disappoint the most confident hopes of the peoples of the world’.Footnote 103 This ‘moral’ sense of urgency was matched by a ‘legal’ urgency, as the unilateral disarmament of Germany rested upon the expectation of general disarmament. Similar pressures came from within the Secretariat. Already in July 1919 Walters wrote to the Secretary-General that ‘nothing the League can do would have so great or immediate an effect on public opinion as this: and rightly so, for this is undoubtedly the line along which it can be of most use to the world’.Footnote 104 Likewise, Director Joost van Hamel of the Legal Section warned that ‘it would be a great disillusionment if the League did not handle this [disarmament] question at an early date’,Footnote 105 as ‘enthusiasm for the League was in proportion to the desire for limitation of armaments’.Footnote 106 Thus, the impression that the League was in a hurry to deliver what the public demanded drove the Disarmament Section into an alliance with the very transnational NGOs that had articulated this demand in the first place.
It was the creation of the TMC that initially triggered the question of which role the Secretariat was supposed to play in the League's general publicity efforts for disarmament. Drummond, believing that if the TMC ‘did not work, nothing would’, consistently argued for concerted publicity efforts. Accordingly, the Disarmament- and Information Section were allowed to carefully promote the TMC and its work, while ensuring ‘that the public should not be led to expect immediate results from the meeting of the Commission’.Footnote 107 In the Second Assembly, the British internationalist and later member of the TMC Lord Robert Cecil, demanded that propaganda ‘should be carried out with earnestness and conviction in all nations’.Footnote 108 This statement was picked up by the TMC, which specified that it was not ‘the intention of the Assembly that the League of Nations itself should participate in that propaganda’. The Council interpreted the resolution the same way. Nonetheless, the TMC proposed to examine the issue and asked the Secretariat to prepare ‘a list of the various peace associations to which the Commission might think it desirable to communicate documents concerning disarmament’.Footnote 109
Within this restrictive framework, the acting head of the embryonic Disarmament Section, Thanassis Aghnides, saw an opportunity to give the section a bigger role. Aghnides wrote to Drummond that, although the League could not engage in propaganda, the Secretariat could communicate reports, documents and resolutions to the various peace and disarmament associations. The associations, Aghnides argued, could produce the material that would enlighten and ignite ‘world opinion’ to such a degree that limitation of armaments ‘may be imposed by peoples on Governments’. Both ideas had, in fact, been introduced to Aghnides by Lange, indicating that the associations were prepared to take on this task.Footnote 110 Drummond sanctioned Aghnides's proposal.Footnote 111 So began the collaboration on the dissemination of information and propaganda on disarmament between the League Secretariat proper and ‘the Greater League’.Footnote 112 As Webster writes, the 1920s saw the pressure on governments build as transnational groups ‘sharpened their focus upon the need for specific progress within the League's disarmament talks (as opposed to more diffuse calls for the general promotion of peace) and constructed closer transnational links’.Footnote 113
As the Secretariat readily acknowledged, however, their information efforts could just as easily create unrealistic expectations as to what the member states and the League could deliver. The different organisations making up ‘the Greater League’, moreover, would create and propose their own disarmament schemes, often promoted through massive petitions and the wide distribution of manifestos or questionnaires. These were sent to Geneva and to the League Secretariat. It started with a trickle, escalating to a steady stream in the late 1920s.Footnote 114 By 1927 Drummond complained that the NGOs’ ‘communications to the League itself should be discouraged’.Footnote 115 While Cecil complained that the NGOs busied themselves ‘too much with policy and too little with propaganda’.Footnote 116 It is also clear that from the mid-1920s onwards there was a growing feeling among leading figures within the Secretariat that public opinion could be turning on the League, as tangible results failed to materialise.Footnote 117 Even the Director of the Information Section Pierre Comert held that ‘it would be better to unite and ascertain frankly that there is almost nothing to do, except technical documentation’.Footnote 118
The historical narrative of transnational activism on disarmament is usually that information was produced to bolster moral disarmament and mutual understanding, which was to form the basis for material disarmament. However, in the above analysis the immediate halt to any substantial plans for material disarmament and the effective administrative suppression of the Disarmament Section led the Secretariat to embrace a skewed notion of publicity. As the steady stream of information and propaganda turned into a full flood in the early 1930s in anticipation of the WDC, this proved deeply problematic.Footnote 119
Conclusion
This article has offered the first systematic investigation of the impact of, and the relationship between, administrative organisation and bureaucratic production in early League disarmament governance. Studying the Disarmament Section, we can conclude that some of the earliest and most successful suppression of internationalised general disarmament efforts was aimed at the League Secretariat. Indeed, the Disarmament Section was the least autonomous part of the Secretariat, as was the intention of the Great Powers. This, in turn, means that we need to rethink the section's publicity work: it was the only significant bureaucratic practice it was left with, resulting in unreliable data, quickly picked apart in negotiations, and contributing to unrealistic public expectations, as their information was fed to the world via the ‘Greater League’. Thus, the Disarmament Section was an unusual outlier, when looking at two of the League Secretariat's most important strategies to build legitimacy and gain influence: autonomy and publicity.
The second purpose of this article is wider in scope. As the legal scholar Thomas M. Franck wrote: ‘the more international organizations . . . succeed, the more they become the agents of their own failure’.Footnote 120 With increasing autonomy and internationalisation of expertise, it has become important for legal scholars, social scientists and practitioners to understand how international administrations become the architects of their own failure.Footnote 121 However, the impact of international administrations needs also to be investigated and understood historically. For now, the vast majority of historical research on international administrations remain focused on origins or shape.Footnote 122 To take a further step and connect questions of origins and shape with those of practice and impact, this article has sought to reintroduce ‘failure’ as a useful analytical category in the League historiography.
Acknowledgements
I thank the conveners and participants of the 29th Annual British International History Group (BIHG) Conference, University of Keel, 2017, for the opportunity to present and discuss a first rough draft of this article. I am also grateful to Karen Gram-Skjoldager, Emil Seidenfaden and Torsten Kahlert of the Invention of International Bureaucracy project, Aarhus University, for discussions, comments and encouragement along the way. Thanks also to Megan Donaldson for some very helpful tips towards the end of the writing process. Lastly, I thank the three anonymous reviewers for thoughtful comments and suggestions. All mistakes and omissions remain mine.
