Rebuilding internationalism

The wartime ruptures within the Second International are well known.Footnote ¹⁶ The animosities caused by the Great War evidently hampered attempts to revive the cooperation of socialist parties. For instance, in 1918 the former chair of the Second International, Emile Vandervelde, rejected an official meeting with the leaders of the German Social Democratic Party. As a Belgian socialist, he condemned the German comrades’ earlier acquiescence to their government's policy.Footnote ¹⁷ These rifts had practical implications: whereas the Second International's secretariat had previously been based in Brussels, the centre of gravity now shifted to other places. During the 1920s, the British Labour politician Arthur Henderson served as the LSI president, while the Austrian Friedrich Adler was its driving force. Adler was the son of a major figure in the Second International – Victor Adler – and had gained widespread prominence during the war: in 1916, he assassinated the Austrian prime minister Karl von Stürgkh, portraying this act as a demonstration for peace ‘without reparations or annexations’.Footnote ¹⁸ After his release from prison in 1918, Adler launched an attempt at transnational collaboration by founding the International Working Union of Socialist Parties. Also known as the ‘Vienna’ or ‘Two-and-a-Half’ International, this organisation initially sought to reconstitute socialist internationalism with communist involvement. While such efforts were unsuccessful, a congress in Hamburg in 1923 united the Vienna International with the London-based remnants of the Second International. The LSI was the result of this merger, with Adler as its secretary.

The LSI approached the international system through the lens of reform rather than revolution. In this context, it maintained links to another body of non-revolutionary labour activists: the International Federation of Trade Unions (IFTU). Similar to the LSI, this so-called ‘Amsterdam International’ had its roots in a pre-war organisation, namely the International Secretariat of National Trade Union Centres. As Geert Van Goethem has noted, the ‘concept of a structural cooperation between the union and the political international’ figured in socialist debates during the early interwar years, yet the LSI and Amsterdam International remained separate entities. From 1930, ‘a period of more intense competition’ ensued in the face of political and economic crisis.Footnote ¹⁹

The LSI and IFTU were more than mere remnants or reincarnations of pre-war internationalism: they operated within a drastically changed international environment. Three factors shaped the socialists’ approach to the new order. The first was the peace settlement, which the LSI as a whole did not challenge – although individual member parties certainly did and although Henderson was aware of the explosive issues generated by the post-war borders.Footnote ²⁰ Prior to the LSI's founding congress in 1923, delegates from Poland, Czechoslovakia and the Baltic States, as well as Ukrainian and Georgian exile socialists, coordinated their stance, seeking to avoid any discussion of the peace treaties.Footnote ²¹ The second factor was the emergence of Soviet Russia as a new international actor. The LSI's relationship with communist internationalism will be examined in the final section of this article – but it was not only the attitude of communist parties that was of relevance, but also Russian politics itself. As early as 1918, the Inter-Allied Labour and Socialist Conference expressed its concern about the situation of non-Bolshevik socialists in Russia.Footnote ²² During the 1920s, the LSI collaborated with exiled Mensheviks and Socialist-Revolutionaries and supported political prisoners in the Soviet Union. Indeed, in 1930, Adler expressed his irritation that Russian exiles had founded the Relief Society for Socialist Prisoners in Soviet Russia ‘behind the back of the LSI secretariat’. He argued that his organisation ‘had done so much in their favour that the secretariat has the right to be informed of all their activities’.Footnote ²³

The third factor was the left's growing involvement in government politics. Two leading LSI figures served as their country's Foreign Secretary: Vandervelde from 1925 to 1927 and Henderson from 1929 to 1931. Their rise illustrates how the parties within the LSI had increased their capacity to shape foreign policy. Two other members of the LSI executive even became prime minister: Hjalmar Branting on three occasions in the 1920s; Léon Blum as head of the French Popular Front government in 1936–7 and 1938. As a result, LSI members had to counterbalance internationalist views and national rationales. In some instances, they suspended their involvement in the LSI to avoid conflicts of interests. For instance, in 1924, the British trade unionist Tom Shaw ended his stint as joint LSI secretary when taking up a ministerial post in Ramsay MacDonald's first Labour ministry. One year later, Vandervelde temporarily resigned from the LSI executive as he joined a socialist-Catholic coalition government. Henderson's tenure as LSI president ended when he became Foreign Secretary. In 1930, the Labour Party's International Secretary William Gillies stressed the implications of governmental responsibility. In a letter to Adler, he explained why, unlike the French socialists, his party had been unable to endorse a socialist document on naval disarmament: ‘We are the Government; our French comrades are in the opposition’. He claimed that the French stance required ‘less courage because French Socialists do not need to consider if they are embarrassing to the Government’.Footnote ²⁴

These examples indicate how socialism had entered the political mainstream of several countries. Yet, this process came with intrinsic limitations. Instead of animating a transnational mass movement, the LSI primarily facilitated contacts between senior party figures. In this respect, it resembled liberal internationalist organisations, which were often based upon elite cooperation. Furthermore, the LSI remained a largely male body, although it did organise events for female socialists and maintained an International Advisory Committee of Women.Footnote ²⁵ Within the LSI executive, the Advisory Committee's delegate tended to be the sole female voice. The existence of separate women's structures arguably reflected the gendered construction of political causes. Again, such limitations were equally present in liberal internationalism, which involved a variety of female activists who were sidelined during the shaping of the post-war order. As Glenda Sluga has put it, ‘the peace process tended to reaffirm women's different political subjectivity’.Footnote ²⁶

Despite these similarities between socialist and liberal internationalism, one feature distinguished the LSI from many other associations: its constituent parties were veritable mass organisations that viewed themselves as representative of the people. This aspect shaped the LSI's international outlook, in which the democratisation of international relations emerged as a key concern. Arno Mayer has noted the demand for a democratic foreign policy as a major element of the ‘new diplomacy’.Footnote ²⁷ The LSI members could integrate such an agenda into narratives about their own history. The underlying link becomes clear if one considers how social movements and the left have contributed to the development of democratic structures.Footnote ²⁸ Seen from this angle, the LSI transposed domestic experiences to the international level. Unlike their communist counterparts, the parties within the LSI supported parliamentary democracy as a pathway towards socialism. The quest for popular representation within the new international structures was an extension of such views.

From the League of Nations to a League of Peoples

The principle of democratic world politics underpinned the LSI's views on the League of Nations. Calls for such a body had already featured in wartime statements of the labour movement. In 1917, for instance, the British Labour Party and the Trade Union Congress favoured ‘a Super-National Authority, or League of Nations, which should not only be adhered to by all the present belligerents, but which every other independent sovereign State in the world should be pressed to join’.Footnote ²⁹ Both the Allied Socialist Statement on War Aims of 1918 and the Bern conference of 1919 included plans for a League of Nations. At the latter event, delegates demanded that the future world organisation be based upon parliamentary delegations.Footnote ³⁰ According to G. D. H. Cole, the Bern conference did not favour ‘a League of Governments or of Sovereign States, but one governed by an international assembly representative of popular opinion in all democratic countries possessing parliamentary institutions’.Footnote ³¹ Henderson was one proponent of this view: as his biographer has put it, he ‘saw the League as a corollary of the Socialist International promoting unity among peoples’.Footnote ³² In a 1918 pamphlet, Henderson contrasted the League with the Holy Alliance of the nineteenth century: the League was to ‘be based on something more than an agreement between Governments’ and had to ‘be the first step in creating a real League of Peoples’. The creation of this body therefore required ‘the complete democratization of every country concerned’.Footnote ³³

The socialist vision of a ‘League of Peoples’ differed from the system enshrined in the League of Nations Covenant. For instance, while the League had its own Assembly, its delegates were selected by national governments. The LSI and its members discussed the perceived shortcomings of the organisation and considered ways of reforming it. A case in point was the memorandum Labour and the League of Nations, issued in 1923 by the Joint Research and Information Department of the British Trade Union Council and the Labour Party. Instead of wide-ranging ‘constitutional reform’, the document considered ‘the conversion of governments’ as the most realistic strategy: ‘the first step toward democratising the League is to democratise the foreign policy of our Government, which is a leading member of the League’.Footnote ³⁴ The authors argued that delegations to the League Assembly should reflect the constitution of parliaments. Such a solution would have resulted in a greater number of socialist Assembly members – which would have allowed the LSI to coordinate socialist action in Geneva.

From 1928, the LSI maintained a Commission on Problems of the League of Nations. Reflecting its overarching aim, this body was occasionally described as a ‘committee for questions to democratise the League of Nations’.Footnote ³⁵ Its discussions ranged beyond the League's internal structure, as it tackled aspects such as the Draft Convention to Strengthen the Means for Preventing War (which it favoured) and the future of the Permanent Court of International Justice.Footnote ³⁶ The committee thus addressed issues that were also crucial to the debates among liberal internationalists, including the League's role in creating a framework for collective security.Footnote ³⁷

The LSI's engagement with the League of Nations was not confined to theoretical debates: it extended to personal contacts and commitments. For instance, even prior to becoming chair of the World Disarmament Conference, Henderson expressed an interest in the League. In his case, internationalist convictions and national interests intersected. As Zara Steiner has suggested, his actions as Foreign Secretary were informed by the belief that ‘the League's security functions . . . would provide a way out of the disarmament–security dilemma without incurring additional British commitments’.Footnote ³⁸ Henderson was not the only LSI politician who engaged with the League. Hjalmar Branting, for instance, played a major role on the League Council. Meanwhile, the post-war career of Albert Thomas – a veteran of the Second International – took him to the heart of another Geneva institution: he led the International Labour Organization (ILO), which maintained direct links to the labour movement through its tripartite structure. As Reiner Tosstorff has noted, the IFTU had contributed to the appointment of Thomas, who subsequently shaped the ILO's character. The French socialist managed ‘to turn it from a purely socio-political appendage of the League of Nations into an international organization, with its own “political personality”’.Footnote ³⁹

In its interactions with the League system, the LSI drew on the support of sympathetic officials. Konni Zilliacus, a Labour Party member who later served as a left-wing British MP, was one such contact. In 1929–30, he worked at the League's Information Section and supplied the LSI secretariat with material on Briand's proposals for a federal Europe. While not having ‘been able to secure permission for any private person to see the documents’, he consulted the ‘extremely voluminous and tedious’ files himself.Footnote ⁴⁰ After the publication of the Briand Memorandum, Zilliacus sent the LSI a detailed assessment which he had originally drafted for the League's Secretary-General. Zilliacus was sceptical of calls for new regional structures. He warned against ‘the creation of a fresh set of conferences and committees’ that would duplicate the League's work. His proposed improvements to the League machinery resonated with the LSI's calls for popular representation: he suggested that parliaments ‘elect delegations by proportional representation to meet once a year at Geneva in a European Consultative Parliament’.Footnote ⁴¹ This is not to say that labour internationalism involved a critical attitude to European integration. Patrick Pasture, for instance, has shown that the IFTU became increasingly interested in such matters, although he has noted that its engagement with Briand's plans remained limited.Footnote ⁴²

The LSI's interest in the League of Nations contrasted with the Second International, which had paid little attention to the creation of new international institutions. This difference was not solely attributable to the legacy of the war: it also reflected the extent to which LSI members had adopted reformist policies. For them, reform involved working through democratic institutions. Accordingly, the LSI viewed democratic international institutions as a path towards peace. This observation, however, requires us to scrutinise the relationship between socialist internationalism and the politics of peace more closely.

The politics of peace

Socialist peace campaigns preceded the LSI's foundation. Speakers at international socialist meetings attacked armies as instruments of bourgeois domination and expressed their concern at mounting international tensions. Kevin Callahan has drawn attention to the anti-war sentiments expressed at the Basle congress of 1912, which he sees as a prime example of international socialism's ‘demonstration culture’.Footnote ⁴³ Nonetheless, the Second International remained ambivalent in its views on international relations. In discussing potential military conflicts, socialists did not agree on a binding response for members of the International. As a whole, their priority was to overcome class antagonism as the root cause of war. This stance explains why socialists and ‘bourgeois’ pacifists initially maintained a cautious distance from one another. After 1918, however, their relationship changed. Mark Mazower has suggested that interwar debates accorded a prominent role to democrats who held ‘that an expanded suffrage would take power out of the hands of warmongers and allow the peace-loving instincts of the masses to assert themselves’.Footnote ⁴⁴ Within this context, the aims of reformist socialism became entwined with the notion of democratic peace. This process increased the potential for socialist and non-socialist forces to cooperate on international questions.

The case of the Inter-Parliamentary Union (IPU) illustrates this development. The IPU united deputies who favoured arbitration and the extension of international law, constituting one of the pre-war ‘peace internationals’.Footnote ⁴⁵ Up to 1914 its links to members of the Second International were mostly confined to British and Belgian socialists, occasionally extending to their Swiss and Scandinavian counterparts.Footnote ⁴⁶ Matters looked different in the 1920s: German socialists began to participate in 1921, with Paul Löbe, then president of the Reichstag, playing a prominent role. The size of Swedish and Danish delegations increased; Estonia and Latvia started to attend the meetings and so did deputies from Czechoslovakia. Such collaboration was a reciprocal matter: liberal internationalists and pacifists gave ‘some degree of assent to the ideas of the left’ in the interwar years, in contrast to their earlier attitudes.Footnote ⁴⁷ The converging interests of the IPU and the LSI resulted in a publication exchange that lasted for several years.Footnote ⁴⁸ Furthermore, during the Inter-Parliamentary Conferences, the LSI organised special meetings for socialist delegates.Footnote ⁴⁹ Strikingly, the 1923 memorandum on Labour and the League of Nations even envisaged the IPU as the basis for an ‘International Consultative Parliament’. Since the authors deemed it unlikely that governments would accept a directly elected international parliament, they regarded ‘developing the Inter-Parliamentary Union in the direction desired’ as ‘the most hopeful line of approach’.Footnote ⁵⁰ Their stance resembled the calls of liberal internationalists who considered the IPU as the potential nucleus of a world parliament.Footnote ⁵¹ Likewise, in his response to the Briand Memorandum, Zilliacus envisaged a division of labour between different international organisations: ‘it should not be difficult to develop the League as the machinery for government action and the Inter-Parliamentary Union as the machinery for educating public opinion.’Footnote ⁵²

These convergences should not obscure ongoing differences between labour and liberal internationalisms. For example, at its Rome congress in 1922, the IFTU suggested a specific working-class response in the face of war:

However, as Geert Van Goethem has noted, ‘below the surface, there was discontent’ with the focus on strike action.Footnote ⁵⁴ Similarly, when the IFTU and the LSI passed a joined resolution on general strikes as ‘the last resort against war’ in 1933, it met with criticism from some of their members.Footnote ⁵⁵ More frequently, political action against war was conceived within the existing international structures and mechanisms. For instance, in January 1923, the IFTU joined forces with the London and Vienna Internationals to denounce the Ruhr occupation but without calling for a general strike.Footnote ⁵⁶ Two months later, French, British, Italian and Belgian socialists organised a joint meeting in which they criticised the actions of the French and Belgian governments while suggesting that Germany give ‘a solemn undertaking to the League of Nations and to the United States for a period of ninety-nine years, not to declare war against any other Power’.Footnote ⁵⁷ Hopes that the League might help resolve the Ruhr crisis were shared by other internationalist groups, from the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom (WLIPF) to the German Peace Cartel.Footnote ⁵⁸

The most significant instance of coalition building started in the second half of the 1920s: the international disarmament campaign ‘generated impressive programmatic and normative unity among peace groups as well as extensive mass participation’.Footnote ⁵⁹ Thomas Davies has underlined the extent of this mobilisation, which involved over forty non-governmental organisations, from the International Federation of League of Nations Societies to women's organisations.Footnote ⁶⁰ The shared concern for disarmament fostered new alliances and manifested itself in overlapping memberships. For instance, several female socialists were active in WILPF. As the leading feminist peace organisation, WILPF cooperated with other groups to gain support for its disarmament petition – a document that had gained seven million signatures by 1932.Footnote ⁶¹

Three members of the LSI executive featured among the ‘core of individuals [who] set themselves apart over time as the main voices and chief experts on disarmament’: Henderson, Branting and the Belgian socialist Louis de Brouckère.Footnote ⁶² Another proponent of disarmament – the French politician Joseph Paul-Boncour – was a member of a smaller socialist party, albeit without a direct affiliation to the LSI. Meanwhile, the French trade unionist Léon Jouhaux combined his leading role in the IFTU with efforts for collective security and disarmament, as reflected in his contribution to the aborted Geneva Protocol for the Pacific Settlement of International Disputes (1924).Footnote ⁶³

In light of these connections, it is hardly surprising that the LSI joined the disarmament campaign. In September 1927, it asked its affiliates ‘to organise during the last fortnight in October a campaign of propaganda in favour of disarmament’.Footnote ⁶⁴ In 1931, the LSI and the IFTU launched a Joint Disarmament Commission.Footnote ⁶⁵ However, this policy was not universally popular among LSI leaders: the British politician Fenner Brockway later alleged that he had ‘rarely spent hours more futile than these long discussions in the International Executive, debating whether reductions in armaments should be applied to material or men or budgets and whether Socialists should be encouraged to go to the Disarmament Conference if they could get appointed to delegations from capitalist governments’.Footnote ⁶⁶ Furthermore, there were limits to the cooperation between the campaign's protagonists. For instance, when Vandervelde was invited to serve as a patron of the Universal Peace Congress in Brussels (1931), Adler advised him against accepting, as the pacifists’ approach was likely to differ from the socialist position.Footnote ⁶⁷ The same year, the LSI's female representatives declined the invitation to a WILPF conference because of a simultaneous meeting hosted by the LSI and IFTU. Footnote ⁶⁸

On the whole, the LSI's support for disarmament continued in the face of major obstacles: in the summer of 1933 – two months before Germany's withdrawal from the conference – the LSI's Joint Disarmament Commission called for further negotiations.Footnote ⁶⁹ The conference's subsequent failure caused disappointment not only among the ranks of the LSI, but also within the IFTU, whose leaders ‘had pinned their hopes on the League of Nations for a long time’.Footnote ⁷⁰ As chair of the conference, Henderson suffered from divisions within the British left. His work in Geneva was undermined by the government of Ramsay MacDonald, the former Labour leader who had been expelled from his own party after forming the National Government.Footnote ⁷¹

Notwithstanding these setbacks, the LSI continued to engage in peace activism during the 1930s. Some of its members participated in the International Peace Campaign (Rassemblement Universel pour la Paix), which the British Conservative peer Lord Cecil and the French Radical politician Pierre Cot launched in 1936. That year, the Rassemblement's Brussels congress attracted prominent figures such as the former French prime minister Edouard Herriot, the Christian pacifist Marc Sangnier as well as the British Labour politician and former aide of Henderson, Philip Noel-Baker. Significantly, the then LSI president Louis de Brouckère also addressed the meeting.Footnote ⁷²

Communist and socialist internationalism

The 1936 World Peace Congress in Brussels was unusual as LSI leaders shared a platform with communists. The published congress records even depicted Vandervelde sitting next to Nicolai Shvernik, first secretary of the Soviet Union's All-Union Central Council of Trade Unions. The seating plan reflected the political shifts of the period: the Soviet Union had joined the League of Nations and thus Shvernik was able to affirm the need to ‘organize the peoples in defence of Peace, in support for the League of Nations’.Footnote ⁷³ Yet, the presence of Vandervelde and de Brouckère did not mean that the whole LSI moved towards cooperation with communists. In early 1936, Adler had warned de Brouckère against supporting the Rassemblement's launch appeal, drawing attention to the dangers of communist influence. In response, the Belgian LSI president – who had signed the document in a private capacity – pointed out that the movement had ‘exceeded the phase in which it could be dominated by communists’. As evidence, he cited the involvement of associations such as Britain's League of Nations Union and of figures such as the Spanish republican Manuel Azaña and Czechoslovakia's president Edvard Beneš. De Brouckère acknowledged the ‘delicate’ nature of the socialist position but warned against ‘an indifferent or hostile attitude’. The latter, he argued, risked ‘isolating a movement at a time when joint action is needed by all those who want to develop collective security’.Footnote ⁷⁴

Adler's warning and de Brouckère's comments draw attention to the divide between socialist and communist internationalism. During the Great War, communists had debated matters of war and peace alongside the future protagonists of the LSI. However, the socialist conferences in Zimmerwald (1915) and Kienthal (1916) exposed the growing rifts within the left, with ‘bourgeois pacifists’ and ‘socialist war-mongers’ attracting severe criticism.Footnote ⁷⁵ By March 1919, the rupture had become formalised with the establishment of the Communist International. Despite initial attempts to unite the Comintern, the Vienna International and the remnants of the Second International, cooperation soon gave way to conflict. Communist appeals to a ‘United Front’ – as featured at the Third Comintern Congress of 1921 – presumed communist leadership rather than dialogue.Footnote ⁷⁶ Tensions mounted when the Comintern adopted its ‘Class against Class’ strategy, denouncing socialists as ‘social fascists’ and treating fascism as ‘only the continuation by other and sharper methods of the policy of the social patriots’.Footnote ⁷⁷

The Comintern policy was contradictory and subject to change. Nonetheless, its stance on international relations clearly differed from the LSI's position throughout the 1920s. Whereas socialist parties envisaged an international order based on democratic nation-states, the Comintern dismissed such positions as ‘social chauvinism’. These tensions were reflected in the attitude to the League of Nations, at least until the Soviet Union's accession in 1934. The Sixth Comintern Congress of 1928, for instance, attacked the ‘reformist foreign policy’ which supported ‘the counter-revolutionary “Holy Alliance” of the imperialist States (“League of Nations”)’.Footnote ⁷⁸

The divergent views on nationhood and the League of Nations informed the two Internationals’ approach to colonial questions. According to Mark Mazower, the League was a ‘product of empire and indeed, at least at the outset, regarded by those with colonies to keep as a more than adequate mechanism for its defense’.Footnote ⁷⁹ While the LSI discussed ways of reforming the Geneva institutions, its position was largely conceived within the existing international order. Its debates on colonial questions illustrate this point. In 1926, the LSI established a ‘Committee on the Colonial Problem’ and, two years later, debated colonialism at its Brussels congress. As its resolutions indicated, most LSI members signed up to the ideas of trusteeship and civilisational hierarchies that underpinned colonial discourse in the interwar years. While they deemed one category of colonial subjects ready for full independence, they envisaged a period of mandatory rule for people of ‘primitive culture’.Footnote ⁸⁰

Meanwhile, the Comintern aligned itself with anti-colonial nationalism. As G. D. H. Cole has pointed out, the Comintern's founding manifesto called for ‘a series of open rebellions and revolutionary ferment in all colonies’.Footnote ⁸¹ Within the context of this policy, the Comintern backed the League against Imperialism and Colonial Oppression, a body that had been founded in Brussels in 1927. The organisation's bulletin attacked the LSI, asserting that the representatives of colonised peoples ‘were profoundly shocked’ by the latter's stance on colonial matters.Footnote ⁸² Although the League against Imperialism included non-Communist groups and individuals, the LSI added it to its ‘blacklist’ of ‘quasi-Communist organisations’ alongside Workers’ International Relief, Friends of Soviet Russia and International Red Aid.Footnote ⁸³ Communist influence in this organisation was exemplified by its secretary Willi Münzenberg, the driving force behind a range of communist ‘solidarity organisations’.Footnote ⁸⁴ To LSI leaders, the anti-colonial initiative amounted to ‘another camouflaged Communist conspiracy’.Footnote ⁸⁵

There were, however, dissenting voices. Fenner Brockway – who represented Britain's Independent Labour Party (ILP) on the LSI executive – supported the new organisation. He viewed the ‘fact that the Kuomintang, the Indian National Congress, the Egyptian Nationalists and Latin American parties were represented’ as ‘a reason why Socialists should actively participate’.Footnote ⁸⁶ Brockway argued that a closer connection with the League against Imperialism would help unite ‘all sincere anti-Imperialists with the rising Liberation Movement of the subject races of the world’. He contrasted the extent of non-European representation at its founding congress with LSI events, claiming that ‘I have attended many conferences which have been described as “International”, but only one of them was international, in fact’.Footnote ⁸⁷ Having served as chair of the new organisation, Brockway was soon forced to resign this position as his colleagues on the LSI executive deemed membership of both bodies to be mutually exclusive.Footnote ⁸⁸ Instead, Brockway's position within the League against Imperialism was taken over by the ILP leader James Maxton.Footnote ⁸⁹

Brockway and Maxton's willingness to engage in a communist-backed venture arguably reflected the ILP's support for cooperation between the different Internationals.Footnote ⁹⁰ For instance, Ellen Wilkinson – a key ILP member and one of the most prominent female socialists of the period – cooperated with communists in several campaigns and strongly supported the League against Imperialism.Footnote ⁹¹ By contrast, most LSI leaders rejected any involvement in suspected communist front organisations. Their stance was exemplified by Adler's opposition to the Amsterdam-Pleyel movement. In 1932, the communist author Henri Barbusse and the pacifist novelist Romain Rolland had launched this initiative by convening a ‘congress against war and fascism’. In response, Adler expressed his ‘sad[ness] that, today, when the true and loyal collaboration of all forces of the proletariat is necessary more than ever, we always get more of these small and infantile … united front manoeuvres’.Footnote ⁹² Similar debates regarding cooperation with the communists occurred within the IFTU, where the question of ‘international unity between social democratic and communist trade unions divided the movement four times in twenty years’.Footnote ⁹³

These issues account for Adler's apprehensions about the Rassemblement of 1936. Although this venture is often associated with Lord Cecil, its roots point in a different direction.Footnote ⁹⁴ In 1935, an International Committee for the Defence of the Ethiopian People was founded in response to the Abyssinia crisis. The body involved personalities who later played prominent roles in the Rassemblement, for instance Pierre Cot and Marc Sangnier.Footnote ⁹⁵ From the start, the Abyssinia initiative maintained close links to communists, in particular a front organisation that had originated in the Amsterdam-Pleyel movement.Footnote ⁹⁶ Nonetheless, in Pietro Nenni, the exiled secretary of the Italian Socialist Party, the International Committee managed to attract a member of the LSI executive.

These initiatives reflected wider changes in communist internationalism. The twelve months between May 1934 and May 1935 have been described as a ‘transitional period’, characterised by the Comintern's increasing willingness to engage with other political groups.Footnote ⁹⁷ This development resulted in meetings between representatives from both Internationals. In the summer of 1935, the Comintern's shift became official as its Seventh Congress endorsed Popular Front alliances. As Geoff Eley has suggested, the new Comintern line included a shift in its perspective on nationhood: ‘Internationalism was still upheld, but democratic patriotism replaced the purism reigning since Lenin's extreme Zimmerwaldism of 1915–16. This meant speaking the language of national democracy.’Footnote ⁹⁸ Evidently, such a perspective came closer to the LSI's outlook, in which nation-states played a prominent role. Nonetheless, the LSI did not formally embrace the concept of a Popular Front. In October 1935, the LSI executive also rejected a Comintern invitation to engage in joint protests against the war in Abyssinia.Footnote ⁹⁹

The LSI's cautious approach vis-à-vis the Comintern continued during the Spanish Civil War. In light of German and Italian support for the Nationalists on the one side and the absence of League of Nations intervention on the other, Comintern secretary Georgi Dimitrov suggested the creation of a liaison committee involving the LSI, the IFTU and his own organisation. As president of the LSI, Louis de Brouckère was unable to take such action as the stance of the LSI executive only allowed for an informal meeting. These limitations derived from the ongoing anxieties of LSI members regarding collaboration with communists. For instance, in an open letter, Johan Willem Albarda, leader of the Dutch socialists, was at pains to stress that no official commitment had been made.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ De Brouckère, in turn, resigned as LSI president. His decision was attributed to both the limitations of the League of Nations and the obstacles to socialist–communist cooperation. According to de Brouckère, democratic governments’ armaments should have been used

Adler emphasised his understanding for these frustrations, referring to the ‘objective problem’ of not being allowed to forge closer ties with the Comintern in the quest to influence public opinion.Footnote ¹⁰²

These difficulties illustrate the LSI's features as an organisation whose national affiliates often prioritised domestic considerations. Gerd-Rainer Horn has argued that as a result, the LSI had become ‘little more than an empty shell’ by the 1930s. Nonetheless, he has also shown that the LSI continued to provide a forum for wide-ranging debates among leading socialist politicians.Footnote ¹⁰³ This ambiguity points at the dilemma that lay at the heart of the LSI. The nature of its internationalism facilitated transnational contacts between socialist politicians, liberal internationalists and League staff. However, the very features of this internationalism – with nationhood as a key category – imposed clear limits to transnational action.