The internationalisation of animal disease questions

Animal diseases that spread beyond the borders of one country are a centuries-old problem that has gradually been included into projects of intergovernmental co-operation and transnational exchange of scientific knowledge. In Europe, the famous cattle plague epizootics of the eighteenth century caused most governments to realise that animal diseases were not only a serious challenge to progress in agriculture and trade, but also a matter of food safety and health protection. Regular systems of animal disease control, focusing on livestock needed for food, transport and military purposes, became an urgent necessity. European governments therefore supported efforts to make veterinary medicine an established professional discipline by founding veterinary schools and by creating permanent positions for state-employed veterinary experts.Footnote ¹⁶ During the long nineteenth century, however, the cross-border dimension of animal disease challenges became more and more apparent. Animal diseases illustrate the profound changes that Jürgen Osterhammel has recently called ‘the transformation of the world’.Footnote ¹⁷ Industrialisation, migration and increasing urbanisation facilitated the emergence of breeding grounds for diseases. Industrialised food production generated problems in animal and food hygiene. Meat refrigeration, sausage and tinning factories, the breeding of high-efficiency cows and the production of mass leather goods for millions of consumers facilitated the transmission of diseases via animal products. In addition, the expansion of the overseas meat and livestock trade by steamships and railways, and new methods of conserving, further helped to globalise disease problems. In the second half of the nineteenth century, economic quarrels about livestock diseases began to increase significantly. In particular, the British cattle plague epizootics during the 1860s, which devastated the livestock sector, heightened the general European awareness of the problem of animal diseases imported by ever-increasing trade and transport connections.Footnote ¹⁸ The most famous example of the way in which the international meat trade could be affected by animal diseases was the problem of trichina worms in pigs, transmitted to humans via bacon and sausage products.Footnote ¹⁹ In response to the discovery of such diseases in imported meat products of various origins, the 1880s and 1890s saw the beginnings of economic ‘pork wars’ between the United States and several European countries. Trichinosis and other animal diseases were readily used as arguments for restrictive national tariff policies.Footnote ²⁰ Whether the claimed disease cases were justified or not, tariff quarrels about animal products have continued to be a significant problem for international trade relations ever since. The bacteriological revolution played a key role in this development.Footnote ²¹ The new methods of tracing microbial disease agents and observing them through microscopes, and the refining of meat inspection, transformed veterinary medicine into a field of modern science and significantly influenced all areas concerned with animal health. In practice, however, many traditional veterinary procedures (such as the mass slaughter of livestock or quarantine measures) continued to be among the most effective methods of combating epizootics.Footnote ²²

The principal response of governments to the challenges of animal diseases was the establishment of regular forms of international co-operation. Several contemporary reference works that aimed to foster the internationalist movement provide a systematic overview of the different projects, initiatives and organisational forms of medical and veterinary internationalism before the First World War.Footnote ²³ Their lists of international projects reveal that international veterinary co-operation consisted, typically, of a combination of conference internationalism and occasional efforts to build up permanent international institutions. As early as 1851, the medical-scientific field famously began its international turn with a series of international sanitary conferences, organised by governments to keep cholera and plague (entering from ‘the East’) outside Europe's borders.Footnote ²⁴ Specific international meetings about animal diseases followed from 1863 onwards. Due to the diversity of issues, several different platforms were established to discuss various aspects of the topic. The largest and most important platform was the series of International Veterinary Congresses.Footnote ²⁵ Another was the International Congresses of Hygiene and Demography, which since 1852 had addressed almost all thematic fields with any link to ‘hygiene’.Footnote ²⁶ Reflecting typical features of the international congress movement, the two conference series developed from meetings of European experts to huge international events. By 1914, they included representatives from most of the so-called civilised world.Footnote ²⁷ Both thematically and in terms of participating experts and institutions, the two series overlapped considerably. From the 1890s, animal disease issues were regularly included at congresses on hygiene and demography, and a review of the congress programmes reveals the increasing breadth and diversity of the issues addressed. According to their thematic priority, however, the congresses of hygiene and demography focused above all on specific scientific issues, especially the microbial aspects of animal diseases (for example the agents of transmissibility in the case of zoonoses) and on problems of alimentary hygiene.Footnote ²⁸ More specifically, meat and milk safety issues were also debated by several of the international tuberculosis conferences, especially during the early years of the twentieth century when the question of transmissible bovine tuberculosis and the method of pasteurisation were at stake.Footnote ²⁹ The international veterinary conferences, however, not only debated scientific progress but also focused on practices of international veterinary regulation. Again, the topics of these projects of regulation were typical for all areas of international co-operation: co-ordination of measures, scientific standardisation of terms to facilitate international communication, and homogenisation of different practices of control. This went hand in hand with another typical problem of scientific internationalism: the urgent need for a regular system of information transfer about disease threats, be it through the establishment of an intergovernmental office or the foundation of an international scientific news journal. Moreover, veterinarian experts appealed to governments to establish basic standards and institutions of veterinary control in their countries and colonies, for the good of the whole international trading community. Further debates included the problem of animal transport sanitation, both in imports and transit, and the tasks of veterinary surgeons at borders. In most issues, however, any progress in international regulation was adjourned to the distant future. This was not only due to different opinions in scientific questions but also to the character of the conferences. The meetings had a dual function: they were official platforms for governmental co-ordination, and also semi-official meeting places for the exchange of knowledge among scientists. The role of governments and their financial and organisational support was, however, crucial to keeping the meetings alive. If projects were agreed on, they depended on international law and national legislation for their realisation. Governments, on the other hand, had a substantial interest in maintaining a highly productive agricultural economy and to foster scientific exchange.Footnote ³⁰

Although the main topics (international agreements on the control of animals at borders, the regulation of transit and the systematic exchange of information on the sanitary situation) needed to be addressed urgently in order to facilitate trade connections, most governments were unwilling to concede to international regulation, fearing a loss of their national scope of action and specific disadvantages in trade. The veterinarian participants at international meetings (being the vast majority) therefore found themselves in a difficult dual role, on the one hand as scientific experts, and on the other as semi-diplomatic representatives of their government's interests, which they somehow had to promote. The conference series displayed an increasing tendency to act only as a platform for purely scientific discussions; most international regulation projects came to nothing. Whereas after decade-long debates, international sanitary conventions against cholera, plague and yellow fever had been adopted by the international sanitary conferences during the 1890s, the veterinary projects for similar comprehensive conventions against epizootics failed.Footnote ³¹ Likewise, the recurring ideas for an international institutionalisation of animal health questions were not realised. Both the International Agriculture Institute, founded in Rome in 1906, and the Office International d'Hygiène Publique (International Office of Public Health, OIHP), founded in Paris in 1907, marginally included questions of animal health, especially the Paris office, which focused on the task of establishing a regular information service. But neither of them acted as a central international forum to organise and regularly distribute international epizootic information that could help to prevent disease outbreaks.Footnote ³²

By the eve of the First World War, therefore, the efforts of veterinary internationalism had established several regular platforms for scientific exchange. Veterinary experts had used the opportunity of the conferences to build up transnational networks and thus to construct the beginnings of a transnational specialist veterinary community.Footnote ³³ The international meetings had boosted the ongoing process of professionalisation in the area of veterinary medicine, and experts used the meetings to circulate scientific knowledge in their new professional network in order to establish similar international standards of veterinary control. Increasingly they tried, backed by the prestige of an international meeting of their scientific community, to promote their solutions to governments. But their activities were clearly limited: by 1914, international co-operation had failed in terms of the original task of setting up an international regulatory regime for controlling the spread of diseases. Looking back after the First World War, prominent veterinarians such as the Hungarian Ferenc Hutyra complained that the failure to advance international agreements was above all due to the lack of government support – the scientific community, for their part, had agreed on most central points. Hutyra was one of the leading veterinarian protagonists who for decades represented his country in the international arena, and who since the 1895 congress at Berne had drafted most projects of international veterinary control. He advocated the idea of an international sanitary police for animal health in order to regulate international animal traffic in a systematic way. His draft for an international convention, presented at the 1895 international veterinary congress in Berne, included not only detailed measures to be dealt with at borders, but also presented the draft for a permanent sanitary information service combined with an international news bulletin to document current epizootic dangers in a standardised way.Footnote ³⁴ After the war, Hutyra emphasised how valuable all these international meetings had been in terms of scientific exchange, but networking between scientists could not on its own advance matters which required international legislation.Footnote ³⁵ However, despite the failure of institutionalisation and international conventions, by 1914 the debates had at least resulted in numerous different bilateral veterinary conventions with neighbouring or trade-related countries. What was missing was above all a permanent system of established co-operation which could override and extend these bilateral solutions.

The rearrangement of animal health work after the First World War

During the First World War, the general situation with regard to the spread of animal diseases had become more critical for two reasons. Animals were increasingly being transported for military and food purposes, so veterinary problems escalated, especially in Europe, during the war and its aftermath. In addition, existing veterinary controls were often relaxed in order to facilitate transportations which were necessary to compensate for war losses. The veterinary control projects developed before 1914 therefore gained in urgency and acquired a greater political significance as soon as the war was over. But whereas the core of old questions remained, forms of international co-operation changed considerably with the creation of different international institutions in the area of animal health. Somewhat surprisingly, given all the previous fruitless efforts in this direction, institutionalisation was realised on two levels almost simultaneously, in form of the OIE and the Veterinary Subcommittees of the League of Nations.

The starting point for the new organisation of veterinary matters after the war was an intergovernmental conference of diplomats and veterinary experts. In terms of motivation for international activities, there was a striking similarity to nineteenth-century medical internationalism, which often was a reaction to threats presumed to have been imported into Europe from outside (above all from the East). In 1920, European agricultural ministries were alarmed by the news of the arrival of zebu cattle with highly contagious cattle plague in the ports of Belgium.Footnote ³⁶ The animals had been shipped from India and were actually on their way to Brazil. The incident prompted French state veterinarians to call for a new international meeting – where international regulation of veterinary matters by governmental activity was finally to be taken seriously. In addition, veterinarians from several central European countries declared their worries about the introduction of infectious diseases into Europe, citing the chaotic situation in regions controlled by Bolshevik armies.Footnote ³⁷ The list of participants of the following International Conference for the Study of Epizootics (Conférence Internationale pour l'Etude des Epizooties), held in May 1921 in Paris, revealed how much the animal health problem was now recognised to be both globally relevant and pressing in time. It was now underlined repeatedly that in times of intensified world connections on numerous levels, international co-operation being limited to Europe and America could not be sufficient. The containment of animal disease should now always include the ‘the states and colonies of the whole world’ (‘les Etats et colonies de toutes les parties du monde’).Footnote ³⁸ Accordingly, invitations to the conference were generously distributed by the French government. The problem was even pressing enough to overcome the restrictions on German and Austrian attendance at international scientific meetings. Finally, the conference included European and North, Central and South American delegates.

The circular for the conference mentioned its intention to launch a comprehensive system of animal health control, consisting of organised information transfer, common examination procedures, and regular, intensive scientific co-operation. The circular also stressed the significance of animal health questions for public health. The conference participants readily agreed on the insufficiency of the current situation and on their uncertainty concerning disease features. Discussing future methods, they began to dig out the old projects of pre-war times (many of the former long-time experts, such as Ferenc Hutyra and the French state veterinarian Emmanuel Leclainche,Footnote ³⁹ were present again), still focusing on the most fundamental questions and methods of animal health work: the global assessment of disease transmission and contagion to the highest standards possible, the standardisation of national sanitary procedures and measures, the examination of border control stations and export guarantees, and the establishment of a rapid system of cross-border information transfer by telegraphic news distribution and a news bulletin. As in all meetings about combating epizootics, a central problem proved to be the debate about whether and when to demand obligatory slaughter to cast out contagious diseases. This most radical but also effective way to end an epizootic was always contested, not only because it entailed extreme economic losses but also because of its brachial demonstration of state power. In 1921, the question now appeared to be a profoundly global one. Several experts argued that, for instance, one could not force the people in India to apply systematic mass slaughter as cows possessed a special cultural status – despite cattle plague being endemic on the subcontinent and often the source of outbreaks elsewhere. Finally, it was agreed that the slaughter paragraph should be limited to Europe, despite objections from participants who pointed out that they were actually attending a meeting of international character.Footnote ⁴⁰

The real novelty of the conference, however, was its role in creating an international bureau for animal health.Footnote ⁴¹ The debates about how to bring about such an organisation prompted questions about the role of zoonotic diseases from specialists of comparative medicine who stated that human and animal health could not be separated, and warned against attributing less significance to the latter. Zoonotic diseases were seen as relevant in two ways: first, the discussions revolved around the question of whether the international organisation to be created was to be attached to the already existing OIHP in Paris, considering the overlap of the fields, and second, whether the inclusion of zoonotic diseases and their relationship to human medicine was too big a task for the new institution. The heated discussions about this point resulted in the Dutch veterinary scientist de Jong reproaching the French delegates of excluding significant aspects: ‘You are only taking into account infectious diseases that have serious economic consequences; however, there are diseases which are dangerous to human health, and this seems to me to be extremely important’.Footnote ⁴² De Jong's remarks identified one of the most significant general problems of veterinary medicine and the control of animal disease, which would, during the following years, achieve increasing importance on the international level: the ambiguity of interests involved that somehow had to be balanced, being situated between economic, profit-orientated agricultural production and concerns about public health. In the end, however, the aspect of human health aspect was not explicitly accepted in the draft for the new institution: the Office was generally charged with the supervision of infectious diseases, including transmissible ones. The concluding remarks of the discussions revealed the astonishment that in one afternoon session the delegates could agree on the fundamental features of a new international institution, a process which in the comparable case of the OIHP had taken half a century of discussion.Footnote ⁴³ The 1921 conference, all in all, reflected the now-settled awareness of the global dimension of the problem and even began specifically to consider local overseas conditions. The debates revealed again the central problem of permeable borders, and the inadequacy of previous border control strategies against animal diseases in more globalised contexts. Due to the war and its consequences, the border question was aggravated, as the deficits of state power, especially in Eastern Europe, had resulted in a chaotic sanitary situation and fed Western European fears of disease importation. Obviously, it was above all this renewed fear of disease importation, in the context of a turbulent international political situation, which persuaded governments to listen to advice from their experts to act against the presumed disease threats. As a response, a new international agency was created (though it was not included in the recently founded League of Nations) to enable new ways of dealing with the problem.

The Office International des Epizooties

Even if not all of the conference resolutions were to be realised during the following years, the project for the new international institution was elaborated into a convention in 1924 and, after ratification by twenty-eight states, the OIE began its regular work in Paris in March 1927.Footnote ⁴⁴ Financed by member states, it was an independent organisation administered by a committee of technical representatives (government-employed scientific experts), a small secretariat, and its director, Emmanuel Leclainche. In contrast to the original project, the OIE was in the end not attached to the OIHP. As with the OIHP, however, officially the OIE was restricted to the task of documentation (pouvoir documentaire), meaning that it had above all to organise an ongoing transfer of information about diseases and provide a transnational forum for experts to exchange scientific knowledge. In this context, the question was whether, and to what extent, its role as simply a scientific meeting-place and news office could be filled and or possibly exceeded.Footnote ⁴⁵ This issue was connected with the question of the actual international features of the OIE. After all, it had been founded in the classical tradition of intergovernmental efforts to keep Europe safe from disease importation. This international question concerned not only the geographical scope of the OIE's members, but also the attitudes of participating experts towards their role, which as we have seen cast them as scientists, government representatives and experts within an international organisation. At first glance, the geographical scope of the OIE until the Second World War seems impressive. It encompassed up to forty-four member states, including colonies and mandates that in some cases had their own (British or French) representatives. Though this number of members did not surpass that of the League of Nations, it included several (temporarily) non-League members – throughout the 1930s most significantly the Soviet Union, Germany and Japan. The most prominent non-member of both the OIE and the League was the United States, which however during the course of the years worked closely with both organisations.

Beyond this mere geopolitical breadth, the OIE's international work was quite complex. At the 1921 conference, the intentions of the institute had been outlined: to collect and select information on its specialist field and circulate it to sanitary administrations, to initiate and promote scientific research, and to examine international projects in the area, while giving general support to states seeking to improve their means of disease control. These activities are documented, above all, in the OIE's serial publications. The OIE at once began to publish a detailed monthly Bulletin, in which the claim to cover the global state of diseases was underlined in the annual summary reports about the world sanitary situation. In 1930, a separate series of statistical publications followed. In structure, these OIE documents closely followed the Bulletin Mensuel of the OIHP, containing a combination of institutional records, the texts of official documents and conventions, conference reports, recent disease documentations and research results, and detailed disease statistics. Until the Second World War, therefore, the OIE Bulletin not only documented the working programme of the organisation together with regular disease news; it presented itself as the most comprehensive collection of all activities and information available on animal health and adjacent specialist fields on both international and national levels.

The OIE's committee of experts, meeting once a year, tried above all to assess the global situation for certain diseases and to clarify the state of scientific research, concentrating on livestock diseases but still maintaining a broad scientific focus. Recurring problems were foot-and-mouth-disease, rabies, anthrax, tuberculosis, swine fever and brucellosis. Their analyses covered the combating of diseases, together with prevention and immunisation methods. Although many questions still centred around problems and research principally related to Europe (because most participants were European delegates), the global context of disease issues was constantly held up in debates, for instance with analysis of specifically tropical diseases.Footnote ⁴⁶ Officially, as was usual for international bureaus, the OIE's only means of intervention in member states’ sovereignty was to formulate recommendations. However, it certainly had the means indirectly to influence national procedures: for example, it transferred financial aid to laboratories in several countries to support research (especially on foot-and-mouth-disease). And the OIE administration used their connections to the French veterinary institute at Alfort to enable countries without adequate laboratories to take part in Alfort's research facilities.Footnote ⁴⁷ By elaborating standardised evaluation reports and questionnaires, however, the OIE attempted to acquire a comprehensive picture of worldwide disease challenges with which it could exert some pressure on national administrations to co-operate and improve their sanitary systems. The national representatives on the OIE's committee presented annual accounts of their country's veterinary situation, and this international comparison (insofar as their reports were correct) indirectly served as an incentive to foster sanitary measures. In addition to the reports on the sanitary situation in different countries, there were detailed statistical annexes. Throughout the 1930s a good number of veterinarian experts actively contributed to the OIE's work by preparing special reports about their own country's sanitary situation, and they used the OIE Bulletin as a scientific platform to publish their own research results. Most contributors were European, but the active participation of Soviet researchers, for instance, was notable. They contributed actively to working papers for internal OIE debates and almost every Bulletin published their individual findings – although reports about the USSR sanitary situation were only irregularly submitted.Footnote ⁴⁸ Clearly they seized the opportunity for international exchange and for presenting the advanced level of their country's scientific research in this area. During the 1930s, German, Italian and Japanese experts also continued to play a very active part in the OIE's work; as was the case in other organisations, the breakup with the League of Nations was obviously not seen as a hindrance to international commitments within the OIE. In August 1939, the German government even made a pledge to provide foot-and-mouth disease vaccines to other countries in case they were needed, Germany being one of the few countries producing these vaccine stocks.Footnote ⁴⁹

How, then, can we describe the role of the OIE in the context of international work and the transnational networking of experts? As an organisation of government-appointed experts, the OIE certainly did more than simply build up a scientific arena for experts and organise the regular documentation of animal health news. During the thirteen years before the outbreak of the Second World War, it carved out an increasingly important role as an active generator of ideas for intergovernmental negotiation: a double role which was typical for this type of government-founded international organisation. For the participating experts, this international engagement was a most useful way to increase their influence with their respective governments. The OIE expert committee often unanimously agreed to push the governments involved to apply specific measures or support scientific projects on animal health, or they jointly criticised governmental lack of success in certain areas. Most committee meetings ended with urgent demands for governmental improvement in particular areas – more was not in the power of the organisation. The internationalism of the veterinary experts, therefore, not only consisted in representing their own respective government within the OIE, it also involved using the support of their transnational veterinarians’ network to pursue their own research agenda and opinions on disease control. The OIE was therefore multifunctional: beyond the core task of identifying questions of importance and centralising disease information, assessing the research situation to launch further examinations, and establishing a transnational exchange forum for researchers, it demanded active internationalism from governments and from national or international organisations. Animal disease governance was therefore, in this context, to a great extent basically the often fruitless impetus of (government-employed) scientific experts to drive reluctant governments into international co-operation. For the 1930s, however, the next step seemed obvious: a closer relationship with the largest form of international governance, the League of Nations.

The League of Nations and the challenges of veterinary problems

Apart from co-operating with national animal health institutions, the main networking activities of the OIE concerned other international organisations; above all it began to establish ties with the League of Nations. However, it was also in this context that differences in locating animal health became most apparent. Article 23 of the League's constitution mentioned its commitment to disease control as well as its aim to support fluent international trade. Animal health concerned both these areas, yet within the League it was predominantly the Economic and Financial Organisation which was concerned with animal health. The LNHO, among its vast field of activities, also touched on a number of animal-related disease and research issues, in particular those diseases which were of relevance for human health. This concerned inquiries into the anthrax problem in factories and trade (the disease being transmitted through hides) in co-operation with the International Labour Organization (ILO). Furthermore, other animal-human connected issues at the LNHO were rabies, the newly-discovered zoonosis tularaemia, brucellosis, milk hygiene, and especially the highly-disputed question of vaccination against tuberculosis with Bacillus Calmette-Guérin (BCG). In 1928, the League was approached by BCG developer Albert Calmette, who had previously co-operated with the LNHO standardisation committee about the tuberculin question, to evaluate the protection and risk of the new BCG vaccine. This resulted in the first international conference on BCG, which also included a veterinary commission to discuss the question of livestock vaccination.Footnote ⁵⁰ Most veterinarians on this commission also collaborated with the OIE, and in its repeated tuberculosis sessions during the 1930s the OIE always referred to the 1928 BCG conference protocols to promote vaccination in livestock. Though not uncontested, the veterinary BCG use was maintained; OIE experts were not affected by the general doubts over human use of BCG after the terrible Lübeck vaccination accident in 1930 where numerous children died as a result of being vaccinated.Footnote ⁵¹ The League, in the example of BCG debates, served as an international norm-setting platform and endowed a contested health tool with a certain additional legitimacy. Tuberculosis in cattle and its transmission fell, however, more in the remit of the OIE than in that of the League, as the League maintained its focus on the social aspects of the tuberculosis question, which seemed more pressing.

Thus, ‘veterinary questions’ addressed by the League were above all examined within the context of its economic and agriculture-related work. The League's involvement in veterinary medicine started in 1927 at the Geneva World Economic Conference, which concentrated on abolishing import and export barriers and trade prohibitions in order to overcome economic nationalisms. The mid-1920s had again seen several ‘pork wars’, especially in the context of the strained economic relations between Poland and Germany. This again brought up the question of meat safety being used as an argument for prohibitionist economic policies. Both the Conference's trade and its agriculture commission debated the problem of sanitary measures at borders in the context of tariff disputes. Several delegates argued that, to protect domestic agriculture but prevent unnecessary prohibitions, both intensified scientific co-operation and an international obligatory form of defence against animal and plant diseases were urgently needed.Footnote ⁵² In the Conference's final report, the special resolutions about agriculture therefore included a paragraph on the international battle against diseases of plants and animals:

This resolution was adopted by most delegations, probably because it pointed out important issues but did not present any binding practical consequences for the respective states. The following Conference for the Abolition of Import and Export Prohibitions in the autumn of 1927 took up the question of animal diseases again and passed the issue on to the League of Nations Council for further investigation.Footnote ⁵⁴ The Economic Committee was then charged to build up a subcommittee for veterinary questions. This meant a re-examination of the projects for an international convention to combat animal diseases, debated since the conferences of the late nineteenth century. Subcomittees of technical experts investigating specialised questions and advising the League's bodies were common practice in the League of Nations system. The participants in the new veterinarian subcommittee were reminded that a purely objective view was required in order to draft the most logical and scientifically-revised solutions; they should disregard any issues about subsequent practical implementation: these would be considered by economic specialists.Footnote ⁵⁵ Probably this ideal of political neutrality, also held up in other working areas of the League, was underscored because most attending experts of the commission (appointed by the League after suggestions from the respective governments) were leading veterinary personnel of state institutions; their political independence was per se an illusion. But conversely the League depended on influential expert personalities within the national governments to support its aims. The veterinary subcommittees of the League, therefore, represented the typical combined function of technical expert advisory body and platform for semi-official intergovernmental interchange.Footnote ⁵⁶

The League's Economic and Financial Organisation set up an initial veterinary subcommittee which did its main work from 1928 to 1930. A second set of three entwined subcommissions worked from 1935 until the beginning of the Second World War. Participants were at first confined to several continental European countries (some in favour of veterinary conventions, some more sceptical), plus a representative from the OIE, but the regional focus of this international subcommittee was in permanent dispute. After the first meeting, it was enlarged to include a British and a Brazilian expert. However, at the beginning the most important non-European animal and meat-exporting countries (Argentina, Australia and New Zealand) were not represented, and neither were mandates or colonies.Footnote ⁵⁷ This Europe-centred representation on the subcommittee had several reasons: first, it was central European trade conflicts that had again brought the veterinary questions to the fore (especially at the Conference for the Abolition of Import and Export Prohibitions). Second, members of the Economic Committee had made special efforts to include participants of importance for their own country's trade. Arthur Sweetser, American member of the League's Secretariat's Information Section, saw the veterinary subcommittee as an opportunity to include the USA in the League's work, given America's commitment to animal hygiene, and its work at the World Economic Conference. His initiative, however, was soon blocked by the argument that concentration on European economic rapprochement was needed first.Footnote ⁵⁸ Over the next few meetings, the subcommittee eventually included representatives from Argentina, Uruguay and New Zealand. But the focus on Europe still remained much disputed within the League. Given the globalisation of the animal and meat business, Drummond, the Secretary General, criticised the open Eurocentrism of a committee that dealt with questions of global interest.Footnote ⁵⁹ As the OIE director Leclainche described it in retrospect, ‘the OIE's aim is exclusively to care about the protection of animal health’, whereas the Geneva veterinary committee ‘is above all occupied with facilitating the trade of livestock, to discard or to preserve the sanitary barriers which oppose international traffic in animals’.Footnote ⁶⁰ The relations between the OIE and the Geneva veterinary subcommittee were close, due to the mere fact that many of the Geneva experts were also active in the OIE, not least Leclainche himself. However, the fact that Geneva had only months after the first OIE session established a second body to deal with animal health seemed disconcerting if not problematic. The Economic Committee vindicated the establishment of the subcommittee with its prime focus on economic relations and the opportunity for more direct intergovernmental exchange.Footnote ⁶¹ In a way this directly contradicted their own plan of a purely neutral expert scientific committee that would not interfere with economic debates. Naturally, Leclainche tried to prevent overlaps of responsibility and clearly confined the thematic focus of the Geneva experts.Footnote ⁶² On the other hand, that the Geneva subcommittee included so many OIE-connected experts gave the OIE another opportunity to demonstrate its practical purposes and interests within the already established international networks of the League.

Thus, when the veterinary subcommittee met for its first session in January and February 1928 it was not completely settled what questions they should actually work on, apart from the idea that they should draft a convention. Drummond's invitation mentioned that the expert committee should examine guarantees for livestock-exporting countries and the best measures to use when assessing veterinarian sanitary arrangements in both exporting and importing countries. Participants therefore initially argued whether an internationally binding veterinary sanitary agreement was desirable at all. The debates wavered between economic and scientific arguments: some experts from Eastern European exporting countries argued that there were immense economic disadvantages to overcome. The much-too-strict sanitary regulations of certain countries, in their view, made a common agreement on certain standards overdue. This would limit the extent of further ‘meat wars’. By contrast, German experts in particular argued scientifically that import restrictions were an essential part of the fight against epizootics.

This problem of alternating between economic and scientific arguments was a persistent feature of the work of the veterinary subcommittee, together with the basic lack of clarity as to whether the subcommittee should actually focus on the economic dimension or instead try to confine itself to advisory ‘scientific’ recommendations. Many claims during the sessions repeated the requirements of the OIE, such as a viable veterinary administration and the distribution of official and regular sanitary bulletins. In typical League working procedure, the experts decided first to assess the situation, and then constructed questionnaires to figure out the basic veterinary situation of the various countries, their border sanitary procedures, and the requirements of their import and export regulations.Footnote ⁶³ The debates particularly centred on the question of which diseases, apart from the highly contagious ones, should be covered by a common regulation and which procedures were to apply in administration and scientific diagnostics. What should one do, for example, with bovine tuberculosis, as the standard tuberculin diagnosis test was not accepted by several central European veterinary administrations? In the case of meat imports, there was also the problem of whether internal organs should be left in imported carcasses (they were needed for diagnostics but were also very easily perishable). Thorny questions of this kind, although very significant, were eventually excluded from further discussion, to be negotiated on a bilateral level or to be examined by the OIE.

Apart from these permanent relations with the OIE, the committee was also approached by the LNHO to work out potential collaboration. Ludwik Rajchman, the LNHO medical director, visited the first session of the veterinary subcommittee with a draft co-operation agreement. He pointed out the connections between animal and human health, especially in transmissible zoonotic diseases, and suggested that there was much to learn from the experiences of the LNHO in the area of epidemics. He won no friends on the committee, however, when he stated that the battle against epidemics was after all a much more difficult task than fighting epizootics, because human movements were more difficult to control and veterinarians could apply easier measures such as emergency slaughter.Footnote ⁶⁴ A further effort at co-operation was made by Frank Boudreau during the third session in June 1929; he presented the worldwide medical exchange projects of the LNHO as also offering further possibilities for animal disease containment. In the context of this visit, the Secretariat even approached the Rockefeller Foundation for financial support. The Foundation, however, declined to engage in this area.Footnote ⁶⁵

During the fourth session, in October 1930, which was due to produce the draft the final report, the member of the Economic Committee present at the discussions once again reminded the experts to concentrate purely on veterinary aspects. Most members, however, continued primarily to use the committee as an intergovernmental platform to foster the economic advantages of their home countries, thus assuming a quasi-diplomatic role. The final report, meant as the basis for future conventions, included detailed recommendations on how to organise national veterinary services, sanitary bulletins and trade regulations; it also argued for intensified international co-operation in research. However, while it emphasised the importance of the question, it also indicated that it would be difficult to implement solutions. Consequently, three separate conventions were drafted out of this expert report to increase the chances of acknowledgement.Footnote ⁶⁶

The first of these conventions, intended to ensure the existence of a basic veterinary service in each of the countries involved, was to play a key role in forcing more countries to contribute actively to the fight against epizootics. However, more and more states involved in the subcommittee distanced themselves from the project. Finally, when the three international veterinary conventions were ready to be signed in 1931, hardly any of the states who had contributed experts to help draft the report either signed or ratified the conventions. Others, though, such as the (non-participating) Soviet Union, did do so. Instead of presenting a set of globally effective solutions against epizootics to alleviate trade mechanisms, the project became law with regional significance above all for south-eastern Europe.

The debates continued. Three new but different veterinary committees were created in 1935 with the aim of drawing up a meat trade convention. The initiative came in 1933 from the London Monetary and Economic Conference, which asked the Economic Committee to examine ‘the whole series of problems relating to the exportation and importation of fresh and preserved or prepared meat.’Footnote ⁶⁷ But only when the Institut International du Froid (International Institute of Refrigeration, IIF) contributed to the launch of the new initiative, by drafting a report addressing important questions in the summer of 1934, did the Economic Committee react more favourably to the sequel of the animal health endeavours.Footnote ⁶⁸ The three new expert committees on International Commerce in Meat and Meat Preparations, the Inspection of Meat, and the Import and Export of Live Animals, which convened from June 1935, in several respects took a different approach, although they discussed a range of questions very similar to the previous ones. First, they showed themselves more open to influences of non-governmental expertise in reacting to the demands of the IIF. This institute was to be represented at least on the first expert committee about the meat trade. Second, all subcommittees now included non-European representatives, among them delegates from Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Argentina and also the USA, thus giving greater acknowledgement to worldwide trade networks. They also briefly considered inviting experts from Italy and also from Germany, the country which had caused most difficulties during the first round of veterinary talks, yet this was discarded ‘for political reasons’.Footnote ⁶⁹

In fact, the questions these committees addressed centred on old problems, especially the lack of uniformity in meat sanitary regulations in the different countries. This meant that debates concentrated again on regulating scientific methods of meat inspection, slaughter supervision, disease definitions and classifications and the issuing of salubrity certificates. However, the committees now differed considerably in strategies and methods of implementation. Admitting that the previous convention projects obviously had been somewhat disappointing, the committees looked for alternatives with greater flexibility and without ratification procedures. The first project, on the international meat trade, still focused on drafting a convention, but this remained in abeyance. The two later ones therefore presented their results as non-binding ‘rules’ for standards and uniform principles available for use in bilateral (or later even multilateral) negotiations or in the modernisation of national veterinary services.Footnote ⁷⁰ The intention was to present a set of practical rules with scientific details, clearly with the aim that governments would use them as guidance for their trade policy without being bound to a convention. Obviously taken with this new method – negotiations without the drawbacks of conventions – the subcommittee of meat inspection proposed to further widen the perspective by creating a new working group of experts about conservation methods.Footnote ⁷¹ This was to include veterinarians, refrigeration experts, and representatives of the chemical industry and food hygiene bodies. With these veterinary projects in the late 1930s, the League returned to its powerful role gathering knowledge and producing guidelines on cross-border technical problems. Whereas the alleviation of trade relations naturally remained the common background, the committees began to put a stronger focus on health consequences for humans as well, by elaborating guidelines for meat inspection.Footnote ⁷² The League here presented itself not so much as an intergovernmental negotiating body for specific trade conflicts (as in the first round of veterinary projects), but more as a transnational forum for scientific exchange, including semi and non-official participants. As to the inclusion of an array of different agencies, there is a similarity to way in which a variety of agencies were involved in the processes of disease governance. However, though they provided much of the strategic innovation, the actual scope for action of non-official participants in the League's projects proved to be limited. The last animal health project of the League in this context, in June 1939, concerned methods of meat conservation; however, it could not be implemented because of the outbreak of the Second World War.