This article focuses on an abortive multilateral treaty from the 1920s, the Draft Convention on the Treatment of Foreigners, which exposed fundamental conflicts over the nature and function of trade rules in the League of Nations.Footnote ¹ This treaty addressed a sphere of policy at the heart of both national sovereignty and international order, the legal treatment of foreign nationals. It proposed wide-ranging standards that would ease legal burdens on foreign commercial agents in the domains of taxation, contracts, transport, property and the operation of local subsidiaries. This provoked intense debate over the League's authority to regulate the relationship between governments and international business.Footnote ²

The Draft Convention on the Treatment of Foreigners was controversial in part because it intersected with heated population politics in Central and Eastern Europe.Footnote ³ The First World War precipitated the end of empire in this region, creating large masses of minorities, refugees and resident foreigners. These groups were often perceived as a threat to the internal cohesion and external independence of post-imperial nation states.Footnote ⁴ In the League era territorial claims were made by demonstrating the attachment of the resident population to a particular state through ethnographic surveys and plebiscites.Footnote ⁵ Restricting movement at the border further reaffirmed national community as governments around the world introduced more stringent immigration controls.Footnote ⁶ The League tried to protect vulnerable groups defined as outsiders in the emerging system of nation states, most notably refugees and minorities. Although only moderately effective, League protection was often resented as an infringement on national sovereignty. This was particularly true of the minorities regime which applied only to young imperial successor states in Central and Eastern Europe (and not, for example, to the German minority in Alsace-Lorraine).Footnote ⁷ The Draft Convention on the Treatment of Foreigners proposed to extend League oversight over population politics to cover voluntary economic migrants, though within narrow limits.

The Draft Convention was also an important intervention in League trade policy, as a bid to bring mobile commercial networks under international protection. When the League of Nations was founded, its authority over trade was not clearly defined. Its Covenant included only one short economic clause, Article 23 (e), a commitment to ‘make provision to secure and maintain freedom of communications and of transit and equitable treatment for the commerce of all Members of the League’.Footnote ⁸ To implement this vague provision the economic committee was established in 1920 as a ten-person body. Focused on trade policy, it was the complement to a financial committee within the League's economic and financial organisation. Most members of the economic committee were national functionaries responsible for negotiating trade treaties, but experts and business leaders also exercised considerable influence as consultants, working closely with the League secretariat.Footnote ⁹

In the 1920s a young economic committee with an uncertain institutional mandate faced an international commercial system in flux. In the decades before the First World War bilateral treaties had been the primary mechanism used to regulate international trade, including the legal treatment of foreign commercial agents.Footnote ¹⁰ The war profoundly disrupted treaty relations by terminating agreements between enemies and prompting the cancellation of many others. Additionally, the disintegration of the Russian, German, Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman Empires left a string of new or reconfigured nation states that had to build their external trade policies largely from scratch. In order to provide more structure to commercial relations in this context of upheaval, the economic committee began to explore replacing or supplementing traditional bilateral treaties with multilateral agreements. League multilateralism gathered momentum after the world economic conference of 1927 but never produced a comprehensive system of policy coordination comparable to the later General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade or today's World Trade Organisation. Although League trade experiments yielded relatively modest practical results, they are nevertheless noteworthy because they reveal the political and legal issues at stake in the transition from bilateral to multilateral treaties. The Draft Convention on the Treatment of Foreigners is particularly illuminating because it was one of the most direct attempts to transfer the content of bilateral trade treaties to a multilateral framework.

The Draft Convention on the Treatment of Foreigners was the subject of extensive negotiations from 1927 to 1929. These negotiations did not produce a final treaty to be ratified by governments, but there was noteworthy disagreement about whether this outcome was a success or a failure. The supporters of the convention lamented that the League did not generalise laws preventing discrimination against foreign nationals. In contrast, critics argued that the League had in fact facilitated a successful political dialogue; it offered national governments an opportunity to examine and explain their policies and to ascertain the scope for international cooperation. If that scope was narrow, this reflected the great diversity of the League community, which included many young states as well as many countries that were in a position of partial imperial dependence, such as the British Dominions.Footnote ¹¹ The transition from empires to nation states was an on-going and contested process throughout the life of the League of Nations; this transition included the formal end of continental empires across much of Eurasia and the transformation of overseas colonial empires.Footnote ¹²

Debate over the Draft Convention on the Treatment of Foreigners largely concerned the relationship between young states and international commerce. Several recent studies have emphasised the influence of private business organisations, especially the International Chamber of Commerce, in League-led trade cooperation in the 1920s.Footnote ¹³ The effectiveness of this public-private partnership – whether judged in a positive, negative or neutral light – has become a central measure of the success or failure of the League's trade agenda. This line of analysis highlights the League's seminal importance as a framework for the interpenetration of public and private economic regulation, which became a defining feature of global order in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries.Footnote ¹⁴

It is, however, also crucial to acknowledge the perspective of those who contested an alliance between international capital and international governance, and did so fairly effectively in the League era.Footnote ¹⁵ Many of them judged the League's modest multilateral trade policy more positively than historians generally do today. This article does not present a narrative of success or failure. Rather, it considers the League as a site of active political contestation that connected wide-ranging tensions over national sovereignty, empire and international commerce. It builds on Patricia Clavin's analysis of the League's broader economic apparatus as a field of conflict and experimentation to reveal the particular lines of cleavage in the domain of trade policy.Footnote ¹⁶

The ‘treatment of foreigners’ was on the trade agenda of the economic committee from an early stage. In 1922 the committee established a four-point programme to implement Article 23 (e) of the Covenant, stipulating the League's authority to promote the ‘equitable treatment of commerce’. One of the four objectives was to combat ‘unjust or oppressive’ legal and fiscal burdens on foreign nationals and firms. This was partly intended to implement resolutions from the 1922 Genoa conference that concerned economic relations among the imperial successor states of Central and Eastern Europe.Footnote ¹⁷

In conformity with the preferences expressed by many of the successor states at Genoa, the economic committee decided not to regulate the ‘treatment of foreigners’ by means of a binding multilateral treaty and instead simply to issue guiding principles for bilateral treaties. This course was most forcefully supported by the French member of the economic committee, Daniel Serruys, who had participated in the sub-committee of the Genoa conference concerned with the treatment of foreign nationals.Footnote ¹⁸ He declared that a multilateral treaty was a ‘political impossibility’ because ‘for many of the new countries this question had an important political side’.Footnote ¹⁹ He noted that at Genoa several representatives from successor states had vigorously resisted ‘making super-laws over-riding national legislation’.Footnote ²⁰ In lieu of a multilateral treaty, Serruys helped write a series of non-binding guidelines for bilateral treaties. These recommendations, issued by the economic committee in 1923 and 1925, addressed foreign nationals’ fiscal treatment, property rights, judicial protection and access to certified professions.Footnote ²¹ Daniel Serruys and the economic committee then shifted from a bilateral to a multilateral approach to the ‘treatment of foreigners’ in the context of the League's world economic conference in 1927.

The world economic conference was a massive event that gathered roughly 400 experts and delegates from fifty states for three weeks in May 1927.Footnote ²² It was an open-ended exchange of ideas rather than a formal diplomatic summit. As Michele d'Alessandro and Quinn Slobodian have shown, the 1927 conference helped establish a new model of international economic governance based on more intensive collaboration between League institutions and independent economic organisations.Footnote ²³ It notably strengthened the League's relationship to the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC). The ICC was a private confederation of business associations founded after the First World War under the leadership of Étienne Clémentel, France's wartime Minister of Commerce and Daniel Serruys's mentor.

While deepening ties to the ICC, the world economic conference also encouraged the economic committee to embrace multilateral methods more fully. This raised the stakes of League trade cooperation by equating success with the ratification of binding multi-party agreements rather than the promulgation of non-binding recommendations, which could be implemented more gradually and selectively by national governments.Footnote ²⁴ Following the 1927 conference the economic committee pursued a flurry of multilateral initiatives but achieved only modest practical results. These initiatives included a programme of concerted tariff reductions on individual commodities, policy studies focused on cartels and ‘administrative protectionism’, as well as treaty projects covering quantitative trade restrictions, sanitary regulations, contract arbitration, customs nomenclature and bills of exchange.Footnote ²⁵ The ICC participated in much of this activity and it was also centrally involved in the League's 1928 Draft Convention on the Treatment of Foreigners. The genesis of this treaty highlights how post-imperial models of regional hierarchy in Central and Eastern Europe shaped collaboration between the ICC and the economic committee.Footnote ²⁶

The impetus for the Draft Convention on the Treatment of Foreigners originally came from a prominent advocate of both pan-German unity and League-led multilateralism in the Vienna chamber of commerce, Richard Riedl.Footnote ²⁷ Riedl coordinated a programme based in the Vienna chamber to harmonise Austrian and German commercial law in order to create a de facto economic union.Footnote ²⁸ He was also the general secretary of the Austrian national committee of the ICC and sought to safeguard bilateral Austro–German legal integration by embedding it in an international framework.Footnote ²⁹ More broadly, he hoped that multilateral treaties would help restore Austrian commercial influence in the former Habsburg lands by constraining the regulatory authority of the other successor states.Footnote ³⁰

While Riedl favoured the union of Germany and Austria (Anschluss) as a long-term objective, he did not envisage a simple annexation but rather a partnership in which Vienna would serve as an autonomous commercial hub with its own hinterland, a ‘Hamburg of the South-East’.Footnote ³¹ Anschluss had wide support in interwar Austria, but many segments of the elite preferred a ‘Danubian’ orientation that emphasised cooperation with the other Habsburg successor states.Footnote ³² Riedl doubted that Austria could assert itself in a ‘Danubian’ grouping without German backing.

Riedl's pan-German nationalism is noteworthy because Anschluss was anathema to many League collaborators. The 1919 peace treaties expressly prohibited Anschluss without the consent of the League council. Riedl suggested that Austria might earn that consent through sustained international engagement, but in the meantime he advocated limited Austro–German rapprochement within the bounds of the treaties.Footnote ³³ A French diplomatic report on Riedl suggests that he was considered a valuable partner in internationalist circles precisely because he was a credible German nationalist who could help rally the large share of the Austrian business elite favourable to Anschluss around a fairly moderate, pro-League course.Footnote ³⁴

Thus, although Riedl held political beliefs widely condemned in both the League and the ICC, he received strong support in both institutions. This enabled him to play a central role in the elaboration of the Draft Convention on the Treatment of Foreigners. In 1926 Riedl submitted a memorandum to the ICC calling for a wholesale shift in the legal foundation of international trade from bilateral to multilateral treaties.Footnote ³⁵ Pietro Stoppani, the League official chiefly responsible for organising the 1927 world economic conference, singled out Riedl's memorandum as ‘the one that contains very definite seeds for future development’ and asked the ICC's leaders to give it special consideration.Footnote ³⁶ In response, they charged Riedl with preparing a draft agreement for the 1927 conference focusing on the legal treatment of foreign nationals, an issue that Riedl flagged as a key priority.Footnote ³⁷ At the conference, a member of the ICC delegation presiding over the subcommittee on commercial freedom secured an endorsement of Riedl's recommendations as the basis for a formal League treaty.Footnote ³⁸ Shortly thereafter, the economic committee appointed Serruys and the ICC appointed Riedl to serve as co-authors of a new multilateral treaty on the treatment of foreign nationals. Stoppani then sent an official from the League secretariat to the Vienna chamber of commerce to work with Riedl to write an initial draft and met in Geneva with Riedl and Serruys to finalise the text.Footnote ³⁹

Riedl was able to insert himself rapidly into the rule-making process of the ICC and the League in part because he was based in the Vienna chamber of commerce, which had developed strong internationalist ties in the early 1920s. Vienna became a focal point for international economic cooperation following the First World War, as Austria confronted immense food and currency crises.Footnote ⁴⁰ During this period the Vienna chamber developed a reputation among foreign officials in contact with the city as a powerful advocate of free trade and fiscal austerity.Footnote ⁴¹ Stoppani notably praised it as ‘an institution remarkable for its organisation and its seriousness’.Footnote ⁴² In the 1920s the Vienna chamber also became an international hub for the study of macroeconomics under the leadership of its secretary, Ludwig von Mises. Mises used the chamber's headquarters to host an influential seminar as well as an Institute for Business Cycle Research, which he ran in collaboration with Friedrich Hayek and the Rockefeller Foundation.Footnote ⁴³

While Riedl benefitted from the prestige of the Vienna chamber of commerce, he also tapped into more general concern in the League for the health of the Austrian economy. The country was a key test case for League-led economic cooperation. In 1922 the League's financial committee coordinated a pioneering international currency stabilisation loan for the Austrian government. From the standpoint of monetary policy, this intervention was very successful, but Austria remained plagued by high unemployment and slow growth. The 1922 Austrian loan was an important early triumph for the League's fledgling economic and financial organisation, but League officials were sensitive to allegations that the related austerity measures had contributed to the sluggish performance of the Austrian economy.Footnote ⁴⁴ They argued that the solution to Austria's economic woes should not be sought in the relaxation of fiscal restraints but rather in the elimination of barriers to Austrian exports in the other imperial successor states. A 1925 League inquiry conducted by the economists Charles Rist and Walter Layton to assess economic conditions in Austria following monetary stabilisation concluded that ‘the main cause of Austria's present troubles . . . lies in the difficulty of her commercial relations with her neighbours’.Footnote ⁴⁵

Through the Draft Convention on the Treatment of Foreigners (hereafter, Draft Convention), Riedl sought to promote Austrian exports in the former Habsburg lands by easing regulatory restrictions on the Vienna-based commercial elite. After the collapse of the Austro-Hungarian Empire the other successor states introduced a battery of licensing and registration requirements that forced Vienna trading houses to operate through local intermediaries to perform many routine activities – for example to sign contracts or to use ports, exhibition spaces and warehouses.Footnote ⁴⁶ The Draft Convention sought to enable Austrians to bypass these local registration requirements.Footnote ⁴⁷ It also included more general guarantees related to freedom of movement, freedom of establishment, property rights, fiscal treatment, judicial protection and access to professions.Footnote ⁴⁸

The Draft Convention contained two important caveats. Firstly, it did not cover admission, the very heart of immigration policy. Most provisions applied only to people and firms who had already been admitted to a foreign country in accordance with local immigration laws. A few provisions applied to residents and non-residents alike.Footnote ⁴⁹ Secondly, the Draft Convention, like nearly all League trade treaties, included a ‘colonial clause’. This gave imperial powers the right to restrict the application of the Draft Convention in their colonies, protectorates and mandates.Footnote ⁵⁰ Daniel Serruys endorsed both of these caveats, as French officials demanded wide latitude to regulate the massive interwar influx of foreign workers in mainland France and the large population of foreign nationals in French imperial territories.Footnote ⁵¹

Within these limits Serruys was a stalwart champion of the Draft Convention in the economic committee. At the time, Serruys was the committee's longest-serving member and his support carried substantial weight. Riedl was the Draft Convention's main author, but he was not a member of the economic committee. He was permitted to participate in meetings that concerned the Draft Convention, but Serruys still led discussion.

Serruys's commitment to the Draft Convention was particularly striking because he had firmly favoured a bilateral over a multilateral approach when the ‘treatment of foreigners’ was first considered in the early 1920s. In effect, Serruys's shift from a bilateral to a multilateral approach meant that he transferred his support away from France's military allies, Poland and Czechoslovakia, to their former imperial rulers in Vienna. This shift corresponded to an evolution in France's foreign policy posture in the region. France's eastern alliances weakened in the late 1920s, and its leaders started to cultivate closer ties with Austria.Footnote ⁵²

Serruys's enthusiasm for the Draft Convention also reflected his own evolving understanding of treaty politics. As the director of trade agreements in the French ministry of commerce, Serruys was France's top trade negotiator in the 1920s, concluding over sixty agreements.Footnote ⁵³ In the process, Serruys grew disillusioned with bilateral methods.Footnote ⁵⁴ He believed that commercial treaties were increasingly being used as tools of ‘defensive nationalism’. He saw governments compete to raise tariffs and tighten regulations with the aim of extracting future concessions in bilateral negotiations.Footnote ⁵⁵ Serruys promoted multilateral treaties as a means to disrupt this cycle of ‘haggling’ (marchandage). Thus, for him the value of multilateral treaties lay precisely in the fact that they accommodated the demands of individual national governments less easily than bilateral treaties. He saw them as

Serruys signalled his shift from bilateral to multilateral methods by retiring as France's director of trade agreements in 1928 and focusing his energies on the League. He continued to serve as the French member of the economic committee through 1930 as an independent expert.Footnote ⁵⁷ During this interval, the Draft Convention was one of his central preoccupations. Serruys cited this treaty in particular as evidence of the necessity of multilateral cooperation. He noted that in the early 1920s the League had already tried to promote cooperation on the treatment of foreign nationals through traditional bilateral treaties. Although Serruys had been largely responsible for writing those bilateral guidelines, he later concluded that they were ‘practically without effect. Disputes continue, restrictions remain and the regime of foreigners appears in many countries to be unfair and intolerable’. He saw the 1927 conference as an opportunity to try anew to remedy this state of affairs through a ‘regime of international law’.Footnote ⁵⁸

Both Serruys and Riedl repeatedly affirmed that international trade law established through multilateral treaties should be based on the current practices of the most commercially developed states. Riedl described the Draft Convention as ‘a codification and a stabilisation of the legal principles that usually govern the treatment of foreigners in civilised countries’.Footnote ⁵⁹ It was widely accepted among international lawyers that the basic legal rights that Western European states usually accorded one another's nationals constituted a shared ‘minimum standard of treatment’.Footnote ⁶⁰ A contemporary legal expert described the minimum standard as

Although the Draft Convention was not a direct codification of the minimum standard, it was based on the fundamental principle that international law concerning the treatment of foreign nationals need only take account of the Western European context.Footnote ⁶²

The idea of the minimum standard of treatment dovetailed with a more general theoretical proposition that international order entailed a fundamental right to receive ‘hospitality’ from foreign governments. This principle could be traced back to Immanuel Kant, who included it as one of the ‘Definitive Articles’ in his 1795 plan for perpetual peace.Footnote ⁶³ A League report on the ‘Economic Tendencies Affecting the Peace of the World’ by the eminent social scientists Moritz Bonn and André Siegfried highlighted this lineage, praising the Draft Convention as the basis for ‘a code of international economic hospitality’.Footnote ⁶⁴ Bernhard Harms, a leading theorist of world economy, also emphasised the Draft Convention's elemental significance. He warmly supported the early version that Riedl presented to the 1927 conference as a ‘Magna Carta guaranteeing the freedom of world commerce’ and insisted that it was the ‘first and highest task’ of the conference.Footnote ⁶⁵

Yet, while many of the League's collaborators believed that it had a fundamental legal and moral obligation to guarantee the equitable treatment of foreign nationals, others insisted that national governments must retain undivided authority in this domain as an essential attribute of their sovereignty. Several of Austria's neighbours asserted this view in debates over the Draft Convention in the ICC and the League. The association of Czechoslovak chambers of commerce urged caution to the ICC leadership:

Czechoslovak leaders were deeply committed to cooperation with the League and with Western Europe, but they also had to manage strategic vulnerabilities associated with their country's large manufacturing sector inherited from the Austro-Hungarian Empire.Footnote ⁶⁷ In the early 1920s Czechoslovakia had introduced many restrictions on multinational trade networks and also pursued a programme of ‘nostrification’ that transferred industrial and financial assets from foreign to local hands. These efforts focused in particular on limiting ties to Vienna. Foreign capital and expertise nevertheless continued to play a prominent role in Czechoslovakia's economy, and officials there wanted to retain wide discretion to regulate this outside intervention.Footnote ⁶⁸

In both the ICC and the economic committee, Polish representatives insisted that the legal rights of foreign commercial agents were not yet ‘ripe’ for international codification because national legislation on this topic was still in flux. In the 1920s Poland was in the process of integrating legal systems inherited from three different empires into a unified national framework. It would be very difficult logistically to implement the wide-ranging provisions of the Draft Convention in this fragmented legal landscape. Moreover, to do so would transfer the locus of national legislative integration from the Polish government to the League of Nations and could thereby undermine the process of Polish state-building.Footnote ⁶⁹

The Italian member of the economic committee argued that the Draft Convention went both too far and not far enough. The fascist government would have preferred that the economic committee continue to offer only general principles to be invoked in the context of bilateral negotiations but also wanted these recommendations extended to cover immigration policy proper.Footnote ⁷⁰ League resolutions along these lines would provide leverage in Italy's efforts to claim and protect the large population of Italian emigrants abroad.Footnote ⁷¹ Flexible international norms would also better facilitate the fascist strategy to use the League as a forum to assert Italy's status as a great power through participation in modest collaborative ventures.Footnote ⁷²

In the economic committee, the Czechoslovak, Polish and Italian members all demanded that the Draft Convention be substantially weakened or abandoned in favour of bilateral treaties, but they met strong resistance. Because Riedl and Serruys understood the Draft Convention to be rooted in fundamental principles of international law, they believed that it was not open to negotiation. When he initiated debate on the Draft Convention, Serruys allowed little room for dissent:

In 1928 and 1929 the economic committee considered approximately 200 amendments and suggestions related to the Draft Convention.Footnote ⁷⁴ Riedl and Serruys responded by making some minor modifications and adding some clarifications, but the fundamental principles and structure of their text remained unchanged. Within the economic committee, Serruys was generally able to control the course of discussion, aided by the Belgian and German members. Belgian leaders saw the Draft Convention as a contribution to the codification of international law, which would favour small, trade-dependent countries.Footnote ⁷⁵ The German government supported it as a means to ease restrictions on German direct investment and commercial activity that had been introduced across Europe during and after the First World War.Footnote ⁷⁶ German leaders also hoped that it might eventually open up trade in their former colonies that were being administered as League mandates.Footnote ⁷⁷ This was impeded by the ‘colonial clause’, but Germans saw the Draft Convention as an opportunity to contest this standard restriction.Footnote ⁷⁸

It is noteworthy that the United Kingdom and the United States – the two countries that many scholars argue could have exercised international ‘hegemony’ in the 1920s – were fairly passive in debates on Draft Convention.Footnote ⁷⁹ The United States was represented on the economic committee starting in 1928 but sent only observers to the final diplomatic negotiations for the Draft Convention in 1929. British officials were broadly supportive of the treaty but did not fight to defend it. Both states faced intense pressure to regulate migration in the 1920s, in the British case at the imperial level.Footnote ⁸⁰ US or UK leadership might well have brought the negotiations to a more decisive conclusion, but at the time there was considerable disagreement about whether indecision was a positive or negative attribute of League economic governance.Footnote ⁸¹

Riedl and Serruys called for forceful action. Riedl affirmed ‘it must be demanded that the most liberal principles and the least restrictive provisions be maintained and the greatest progress possible be achieved, even if there is a risk that a number of states . . . will refuse to participate in the agreement’. He confidently predicted that ‘once concluded’ the treaty would act as ‘a lover that will attract one after the other the states which at first refused to sign’.Footnote ⁸² Against this view, the Polish national committee of the ICC argued that the Draft Convention should be the product of a broad consensus and that this was the proper rule-making procedure of the League of Nations:

Dissatisfied with the functioning of the economic committee, critics of the Draft Convention had a further opportunity to secure revisions when the when the agreement moved to a general international conference for final diplomatic negotiations in 1929.

Riedl and Serruys had limited influence at the sprawling international conference on the treatment of foreigners that convened in November 1929. They did not attend as delegates appointed by their home governments but rather as consultative experts without voting rights, representing the ICC and the economic committee. The conference was a large event; it gathered forty-nine national delegations for one month. The work of the conference was divided among four committees, which each formed several subcommittees to examine specific articles. The committees met for three weeks, during which time they considered roughly 400 amendments.Footnote ⁸⁴

Serruys and Riedl found few allies at the conference. Both the French and Austrian governments conducted a thorough inter-ministerial review of the Draft Convention in preparation for the 1929 conference and instructed their official delegates to pare down key articles, responding to concerns about labour market conditions and national security.Footnote ⁸⁵ Most other national delegations remained passive in discussions and voted to weaken the treaty. The delegations that most forcefully challenged the Draft Convention represented young countries that were heavily dependent on foreign capital and expertise. They argued that international norms protecting foreign traders and firms could durably reinforce existing political and economic asymmetries. They expressed particular concern about Article 8 of the Draft Convention, covering employment practices in foreign subsidiaries. It granted foreign nationals and firms the freedom to employ managerial and technical personnel of their choosing, without regard to nationality.Footnote ⁸⁶

In the 1920s many young states had passed laws requiring foreign nationals and firms to employ local technical staff or to have local board members, and Article 8 was intended to ‘exclude’ such laws. It stipulated that foreign firms must be permitted to appoint managers and commercial representatives without regard to nationality and, more generally, could not be obliged to employ local ‘administrative or technical’ staff.Footnote ⁸⁷ At the 1929 conference a broad coalition of delegations representing young or dependent countries, including Czechoslovakia, Egypt, Estonia, India, the Irish Free State, Latvia, Poland and Turkey, demanded that Article 8 be eliminated or substantially curtailed.Footnote ⁸⁸ Charles Poznanski, a member of the Polish delegation, emphasised that ‘the provisions embodied in Article 8 were new in the field of international Conventions’ and suggested that the benefits of this innovation would be unequally distributed: ‘it must be realised that there were States with different and possibly conflicting interests. There were States which exported and States which imported capital’.Footnote ⁸⁹ Poznanski argued that an international legal regime that made it too easy for foreign firms to bring along their own managers and technical staff would impede ‘commercial education’ in capital-importing states and thereby perpetuate reliance on foreign expertise and investment.Footnote ⁹⁰

Against this view, a smaller coalition of delegates representing capital-exporting states, including Belgium, Germany, Japan and the Netherlands, contended that multinational firms simply could not function if they were not guaranteed the right to select competent staff, regardless of nationality. The main spokesman for this position was Johan Alexander Nederbragt, the head of the Dutch delegation. He insisted that Article 8 was of the ‘utmost importance’ and recommended widening its scope to cover ‘any position of personal trust’.Footnote ⁹¹ The conference ultimately produced a compromise between Nederbragt and Poznanski. The relevant committee agreed to preserve Article 8 but to limit its protections narrowly to senior managers.

The other committees produced similar compromises, but after three weeks of negotiations several delegates led by the conference president, the Belgian jurist Albert Devèze, announced that they would not accept the majority decisions. They claimed that the amended text would offer substantially less protection to foreign commercial agents than the status quo previously obtained through bilateral treaties. Nederbragt, Serruys and Riedl all took this view.Footnote ⁹² Devèze proposed that the conference abandon the compromises that had been hashed out and adopt a treaty based more closely on Serruys and Riedl's original draft. He suggested that a second conference could then be scheduled to consider whether individual signatory countries might be granted temporary exemptions from particular articles.Footnote ⁹³

Italian delegate Giuseppe De Michelis offered a very different assessment of the conference from that of Devèze and also a very different solution. He contested Devèze's claim that ‘the Conference was in a difficult situation owing to the fact that it had not been able to achieve a satisfactory Convention’. He asked the delegates to consider ‘what was a satisfactory Convention? The President thought that it was one inspired by the most liberal principles. There were, however, perhaps some members of the Conference who thought that, on the contrary, a good Convention was one which respected the interests of each State, while not injuring the interests of the others’.Footnote ⁹⁴ De Michelis argued that the League should not attempt to produce a treaty until there was a consensus among all interested parties. The international conference on the treatment of foreigners had revealed that this consensus was lacking. De Michelis rejected Devèze's plan to limit the next round of negotiations only to states willing to adhere to a pre-defined set of legal standards. Instead, he recommended that governments be asked to review the results of the first conference and then submit their responses to a second meeting, which would be ‘attended by all delegates, without exception’.Footnote ⁹⁵ He asserted that only through a slow, iterative process of study and compromise would the League achieve effective multilateral cooperation.

Serruys made De Michelis's proposal palatable to Devèze and Nederbragt by reinterpreting it as an admission of failure. He affirmed that ‘the Conference had loyally and sincerely attempted to establish a uniform law, which would be applicable to all, but it had now accomplished the most difficult act of all – a public confession of the difficulties and obstacles, which had been encountered’.Footnote ⁹⁶ Over the course of the 1920s the economic committee had tried to broker a series of multilateral treaties through large diplomatic conferences in which all League members participated on an equal footing. Serruys affirmed that ‘in all cases, equality excluded equity’ and recommended that in the future the League should sacrifice equality in the name of equity.Footnote ⁹⁷

Serruys proposed that the League assign states varying degrees of responsibility in the international rule-making process and require varying levels of compliance from them, depending on their position on a universal scale of political and economic development. He suggested that plotting countries on this scale should be the purpose of the second conference proposed by De Michelis:

On the basis of this interpretation, Devèze agreed to endorse De Michelis's plan.Footnote ⁹⁹

Accordingly, the conference agreed to circulate its conclusions to all participating governments for review and authorised Devèze, as president, to convene a second meeting in 1930 ‘if possible’.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ However, Devèze used his discretion concerning the timing of the second conference to try to implement the two-stage negotiation process he favoured.

Devèze did not call a second conference in 1930 as originally planned. Instead, he sought to secure a firm preliminary agreement on a new treaty text among a small group of Western European governments before reconvening the other delegations. Officials from the ICC and the League secretariat supported his efforts. They organised a series of four meetings in 1930 and 1931, but in 1932 they finally decided to abandon the project until the depression abated. Representatives from Belgium, France, Germany, Italy, the Netherlands, Switzerland and the United Kingdom attended these meetings.Footnote ¹⁰¹ It seems that Italy sent a representative primarily in order to ensure that no definitive treaty was produced excluding the other members of the 1929 conference. In 1931 the Italian representative blocked a proposal from the secretariat to conclude a small, seven-party treaty before reconvening the full conference.Footnote ¹⁰² Interestingly, the Austrian government refused to send a representative to the second round of negotiations despite entreaties from the secretariat. Riedl privately expressed his support for Devèze's new approach, but Austrian immigration officials opposed all further involvement in the project. They worried that the employment provisions in Article 8 would impede internal labour market controls.Footnote ¹⁰³ Devèze's smaller negotiations did not produce a new treaty, but elements of the Draft Convention were later incorporated into bilateral and regional trade agreements.Footnote ¹⁰⁴

The Draft Convention on the Treatment of Foreigners was a key test case for League-led multilateral trade cooperation. It was a very deliberate attempt to transfer bilateral treaty norms to a multilateral framework and was also the farthest-reaching effort to address migration as a factor in international trade during the League era. It covered a sensitive topic – the legal treatment of foreign nationals – that was widely seen as an elemental facet of both national sovereignty and international order. It emerged out of a key hotspot of geopolitical tension, the former Austro-Hungarian Empire. For all these reasons, it prompted vigorous debate about the League's authority to mediate the relationship between national governments and international commerce.

Supporters of the Draft Convention argued that the League had a duty to use international law to combat discrimination against foreign traders and firms. Its critics insisted the League had a higher-order obligation to uphold national political authority. The two sides disagreed fundamentally about whether or not the League's rule-making process worked. The treaty's champions demanded more tightly controlled and more hierarchical negotiations, while its opponents insisted that the League's inclusive universalist approach fostered valuable political dialogue. The analysis presented here does not demonstrate the validity of one of these perspectives. It shows that the League of Nations opened debate about the structure and purpose of multilateral trade rules. That debate was not settled during the League era; it is still not settled today.

The Draft Convention on the Treatment of Foreigners reveals the legal and political issues at stake in the shift from bilateral to multilateral trade negotiations. This shift largely remained a theoretical prospect in the interwar period but was more fully realised after 1945. The 1947 General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade and its offspring, the World Trade Organisation, provided robust mechanisms for multilateral cooperation that constrained but did not supplant bilateral treaties. The European Economic Community and then the European Union supported more thorough integration on a regional scale. The Draft Convention on the Treatment of Foreigners was not a stepping-stone that led directly to these later institutions. Rather, it should be seen as a window into an important liminal moment when veteran European trade officials began to transform the nineteenth-century system of bilateral commercial treaties into a durable edifice of international institutions as part of the broader transition from a world of empires to a world of nation states. This transition made mobile foreigners a key source of tension between international commerce and national political community. After the League's initial attempt to manage this tension in a multilateral framework, personal mobility remained one of the most intractable and hotly contested issues in economic governance at the European and global level.