A social-bureaucratic history of the League of Nations Secretariat

Introduction

INNER_LEAGUE provides the first, comprehensive social-bureaucratic history of the League of Nations Secretariat. The project will investigate the inner life of the secretariat to:

• Understand how it shaped the professional lives of the approximately 4000 people that worked there.
• Explore how this global workplace shaped the lasting bureaucratic infrastructures of multilateralism it serviced.

Historical Context

The project posits that it was the personal, social, and professional relationships in this bureaucracy that created what later has been reinterpreted as an anonymous machinery in the background of grand politics. Today, international public administrations are so pervasive that the innovation of its emergence is mostly forgotten.

Methodology

To deliver on its undertaking, the project implements an approach combining social, institutional, and digital history across three work packages:

1. Communities
2. Hierarchies
3. Infrastructures

Objectives

To operationalize its approach, INNER_LEAGUE has several concrete objectives:

1. To systematically uncover and analyze the emergence, endurance, change, and impact of professional, educational, epistemic, social, and emotional communities within the League Secretariat.
2. To examine the often-contested formation of hierarchies within the League Secretariat via state-of-the-art digital approaches.
3. To investigate how processes of community building and hierarchization impacted the professional lives of the staff of the League Secretariat.
4. To study and explain how, and under what material circumstances, these hierarchized communities of officials and staff built, maintained, operated, and passed on new infrastructures of multilateralism.

Conclusion

INNER_LEAGUE thus provides a completely new history of why – while the League was first disgraced by its inability to prevent WWII and then slipped into obscurity among diplomats and politicians alike – its bureaucratized multilateralism became a foundational hallmark of 20th and 21st century international politics.