Review of Jane Mumby’s Dismantling the League of Nations | Madeleine Dungy

BOOK REVIEW

Dismantling the League of Nations: The Quiet Death of an International Organization, 1945-8
by Jane Mumby

Bloomsbury Academic
2024. ix + 252 pp.
(e-book (pdf)), ISBN 978-1-350-37690-8;
(e-book), ISBN 978-1-350-37692-2

Reviewed by Madeleine Dungy

Today, as multilateral organizations are coming under strain, it has become clear that we lack insight into the processes through which they might be streamlined, transformed, or dissolved altogether. Numerous histories trace the genesis of international organizations, but relatively few analyze their closure. Perhaps this reflects the strong sense of forward momentum that is built into international institutions (captured in the European Union’s mantra, “ever closer union”). Within such organizations, there are rarely plans or even open discussions about what a wind-down might look like, as shown by the reluctance to formally close the long-stalled Doha round of negotiations in the World Trade Organization. Even the UN Trusteeship Council, which has not had a Trust Territory to supervise since 1994, continues to meet. The general squeamishness about discussing organizational death gives international historians and scholars of contemporary international relations a particular interest in the end of the League of Nations.

Jane Mumby has made an important contribution to the history of international governance by showing what the end of a comprehensive project for world order looks like in evocative detail. Dismantling the League of Nations is a story of chaotic succession, defined by the challenge of preparing the League’s end and consolidating its legacy before the UN system had taken shape. Mumby captures well the peculiar combination of time pressure and uncertainty about the future from the perspective of the individual officials involved, using institutional archives and personal papers.

Mumby covers the League’s zombie period. The book begins with the last meeting of the Assembly in 1946 (the organization’s formal funeral) and runs through the last rounds of financial haggling in 1948. The structure of the book follows this process chronologically. It reveals how a series of interventions, which were each presented as the final moment of dissolution, were in fact the beginning of further bureaucratic processes. This is a story that reveals the complex inner workings of international administration, as a simple Assembly resolution to end the League of Nations was put into practice. Mumby describes a wide gap between the formal Board of Liquidation that the Assembly appointed and the Secretariat staff who carried out their decisions. The Board sought to uphold a perception of bureaucratic efficiency and grew fixated on tracking down outstanding financial liabilities, large and small. This commitment to fiscal rectitude drew out the staff’s precarious employment through a long succession of new duties that were “tedious, repetitive and thankless” (p. 134). Significantly, in the last act of official League business, one unpaid volunteer based in the United States communicated the outcome of a futile tax dispute to another unpaid volunteer based in Geneva.

Dismantling the League of Nations supports a broader shift in the historiography of multilateralism away from the high-profile meetings of state delegations toward the day-to-day practice of cooperation carried out by international civil servants.[1] Mumby provides considerable insight into the motivations, career trajectories, and practical activity of the League staff by focusing on the group who were willing to stay on when there was little material or professional incentive to do so. Winding down the League of Nations required a large but brief expansion in staff, which was followed by a series of rather unceremonious layoffs and transfers. For example, one secretary was given only twenty minutes to decide on a new job at the UN (p. 61).

Mumby’s story moves back and forth between the United States and Switzerland, revealing how League officials who had come to believe that they were working at the center of the world had to adjust quickly to being on the outskirts of a new international order based in New York. She covers the wartime exile of the League’s Economic and Financial Organization in Princeton and the transformation of the Palais des Nations from the League headquarters into a secondary base for UN administration. When the first UN General Assembly was held in New York in the autumn of 1946, “the world’s attention turned away from Europe, leaving the [League of Nations] Secretariat without decision-makers” (p. 95). Her account of the empty halls in Geneva during this event reveals how the process of institutional succession intersected with the restructuring of international politics around US ambitions for global leadership.

In recent years, discussion about a possible US retreat from global commitments has renewed debate about the timing and nature of the US entry onto the international stage. Thus, Stephen Wertheim emphasizes the novelty of the US claims to political and military supremacy in the 1940s, while David Ekbladh describes a more gradual widening of US foreign policy horizons that began in the League era.[2] Mumby adds a new perspective, not by tracing a different trajectory for US foreign policy but by demonstrating how the advent of US global power imposed strains and gaps on the system of international administration that had already been built up in Europe.

Mumby is careful to differentiate the League’s end and the question of its failure. She shows how much effort League staff invested in achieving a successful dissolution and how difficult it was (and is) to reach a definitive assessment of their efforts. Because the League’s end was without precedent and was happening in a tumultuous postwar context, there were few institutional metrics available to guide bureaucrats. Money became the default gauge of success, and seen in those terms, the League was quite good at recouping outstanding financial obligations. However, negotiations over pensions, taxation, and member contributions dragged on much longer than planned and imposed considerable personal and professional burdens on the officials involved. Moreover, other priorities sometimes competed with frugality, such as concerns about the League’s long-term public legacy. Thus, the Board of Liquidation was willing to splurge for a much grander museum space for the League in the Palais des Nations than had originally been planned.

Dismantling the League of Nations fits into a long-running effort to challenge the narrative of failure associated with the League of Nations. This ignominy primarily stemmed from the League’s efforts to promote collective security and prevent war. However, scholarship in recent decades has shown that the League’s political mission was only one part of its work, as Susan Pedersen outlined in her seminal article “Back to the League of Nations.”[3] The League also served as a framework for the renegotiation of sovereignty in imperial and postimperial contexts, and its wide-ranging “technical” activity had a large practical impact on the ground in areas such as health, transit, and finance. Across all these fields, Secretariat officials and expert committees generated a body of norms and organizational practices that consolidated nineteenth-century precedents and framed later institutions. Since Pedersen first published her article, historians have considerably developed each of these areas of research.

Mumby makes an important intervention by drawing together the different strands of League historiography to present a unified picture of the organization in its final hour. In doing so, she highlights important structural differences between the postwar transitions in 1919 and 1945. The League of Nations was established with an expansive but vague remit to do everything that needed to be done to promote postwar peace. By 1945 it had become a finely articulated organization, and this meant that the UN was founded as a branching tree. Many of the League’s operational activities were handed over to new agencies that enjoyed a high degree of autonomy from the outset, such as the World Health Organization, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, or the Food and Agricultural Organization. The breadth of the single sweeping ambition behind the League of Nations in 1919 can be seen clearly when contrasted with the compartmentalized transfer to the UN after 1945.

Renewed interest in the League of Nations over the past two decades means that 1945 is no longer seen as the “zero hour” in the history of international governance. Crucially, in Mumby’s account, the end of the League of Nations brought positive transfers to the new UN, but it was also a moment of rupture and loss. Many of the League’s officials and units found that their considerable store of competence was no longer wanted. This was partly the result of deliberate efforts in the UN to avoid overt links with the League, but it was also simply a product of the topsy-turvy shuffle of a big institutional transition. Mumby’s analysis of uneven continuity can also be applied to the League’s longer history. Iris Borowy’s and Patricia Clavin’s foundational research, which traced the arc of the League’s technical work from beginning to end, revealed many significant projects in public health and economic policy that did not survive the pressures of the Second World War and the early Cold War.[4] In sum, Mumby provides a valuable reminder that the League must not be understood solely as the precursor to the UN. The League was a rather different animal in many respects, and its history should also be seen as a window into the idiosyncrasies of the interwar period.

Mumby extends the story of uneven continuity beyond the League’s core structures. For, although the League did not survive the war, the wider system of international governance was not wholly dissolved and reconstituted. Ancillary organizations continued their work, and this forced the League into a subordinate relationship where it had previously enjoyed preeminence. Mumby illustrates this point with the example of the International Labor Organization. Future research could carry this line of analysis further to consider interactions with the NGO sphere and with organizational contexts beyond the North Atlantic. Recent collected volumes have shown that the League of Nations and the UN were substantially shaped by multilateral projects that developed far from Geneva and New York.[5]

In Dismantling the League of Nations Mumby deftly shifts the central question of debate concerning the end of the League of Nations. She does not interrogate why the League of Nations ended, but rather why it dragged on for so long after the final meeting of the Assembly. She shows that there was not a neat passing of the baton from the League to the UN, for “the two organizations were interwoven until the League’s eventual end” (p. 46). The title of the book is aptly chosen. By tracing how the League’s constituent building blocks were gradually “dismantled,” Mumby reveals the range of organizational forms used to construct international order and the crucial role played by the Secretariat staff as the glue that held everything together.

Notes

[1]. Mumby builds on the work of a large collaborative project led by Karen Gram-Skjoldager at Aarhus University, which underscored the importance of the League of Nations in the longer history of the international civil service. See notably Karen Gram-Skjoldager, Haakon A. Ikonomou, and Torsten Kahlert, eds., Organizing the 20th-Century World: International Organizations and the Emergence of International Public Administration, 1920-1960s (London: Bloomsbury Academic, 2020).

[2]. Stephen Wertheim, Tomorrow, the World: The Birth of U.S. Global Supremacy (Cambridge, MA: The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2020); David Ekbladh, Plowshares into Swords: Weaponized Knowledge, Liberal Order, and the League of Nations (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2022).

[3]. Susan Pedersen, “Back to the League of Nations,” American Historical Review 112, no. 4 (October 1, 2007): 1091–117.

[4]. Iris Borowy, Coming to Terms with World Health: The League of Nations Health Organisation 1921-1946 (Frankfurt am Main: Peter Lang, 2009); Patricia Clavin, Securing the World Economy: The Reinvention of the League of Nations, 1920-1946 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013).

[5]. See notably Glenda Sluga and Patricia Clavin, eds., Internationalisms: A Twentieth-Century History (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2017); and Simon Jackson and Alanna O’Malley, eds., The Institution of International Order: From the League of Nations to the United Nations (Abingdon: Routledge, 2018).

(Review author: Madeleine Dungy is an associate professor of history at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology. Her research focuses on international institutions in the areas of trade and migration. She is the author of Order and Rivalry: Rewriting the Rules of International Trade after the First World War (2023))

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