Carolyn Biltoft, Assistant Professor of International History, reveals her article “The League of Nations and Alternative Economic Perspectives”, which will appear in the 2016 Elgar Handbook of Alternative Theories of Economic Development.
Why write this paper on the League of Nations?
The League of Nations may seem a peculiar entry in a volume dedicated to heterodoxy. The organisation emerged from the Paris Peace Conference as a manifestation of, or an international advertisement for, the braided faiths of classical economics and liberalism. The League’s paper trail certainly contains claims that the rule of law and free trade based on comparative advantage could together secure peace by assuring the greatest good and wealth for the greatest number.
Yet, even though the League was born within a lineage of orthodoxy, it also provided an arena for discussing alternatives to classical liberalism. As the world’s first permanent inter-governmental forum of its kind, the League gathered and brought into conversation a host of different nations and interest groups. Whatever its initial intentions, it gradually became a zone where the claims of convergence continually and publically ran up against the persistent realties of political and economic divergences. Thus, the League piloted the working through of a question that continues to afflict multilateral institutions; should these bodies reflect or actively alter or redress the distribution of power and resources on the global stage? It was in grappling with, though not resolving, this question that the League both reasserted and then slowly came to revaluate some of its founding precepts, especially in the economic domain.
What are this paper's main research objectives?
This essay claims that beyond the narratives of success and failure, international organisations provide a historical laboratory for studying the ligaments connecting the international division of labour to the international balance of power. Furthermore, they provide a glimpse into the ways in which struggles to either preserve or restructure those ligaments often played out equally in the realm of ideology as in the realm of policy. To those ends, the paper addresses how the League’s efforts to promote the values of classical liberalism shed light on some of the fault lines of those doctrines. Secondly, it explores how the League weighed promises of laissez-faire’s long run prosperity against counter-claims that social and political dissatisfaction with gaps in wealth and power could undermine international stability in the short run. Finally, it focuses on how the League’s open discussions of wealth distribution helped to incubate the seeds of alternative trade and development theory after 1929.
What are your findings or conclusions?
In 1941, when Franklin D. Roosevelt and Winston Churchill published the Atlantic Charter, it was in some ways a revision of Wilson’s Fourteen Points, modified for the post World War II world. Along with familiar calls for greater equality and cooperation, there also existed lingering liberal tensions about how those principles might affect the privileges of the haves and the claims of the have-nots. The fourth article of the Atlantic Charter contained a familiar refrain: “All States, great or small, victor or vanquished, of access, on equal terms, to the trade and to the raw materials of the world which are needed for their economic prosperity.” Yet, the fifth article emphasised a new set of variables that had been absent in Wilson’s first call to international governance, namely, the importance of “securing, for all, improved labor standards, economic advancement and social security.” The United Nations thus came into being with a set of liberal recommitments to the wealth of nations on the one hand and the equality of nations and welfare of populations on other. Just as the League of Nations struggled in articulating and addressing the contradictions of and conflicts between those two goals, so too would the United Nations. In both cases, economists and economic theories shaped the structure and content of the ensuing and political debates.
What other research have you been undertaking?
My research has focused on viewing globalisation through the lens of international organisations. My new research project, however, will explore how the disciplines of history and economics responded to the crisis in global capitalism of the 1930s. To those ends it hopes to explore how systems of knowledge —including disciplinary boundaries—have also grown from and responded to the “faultiness” of the global system.
Carolyn Biltoft, "The League of Nations and Alternative Economic Perspectives” in Jayati Ghosh, Rainer Kattel & Erik Reinert, eds. Elgar Handbook of Alternative Theories of Economic Development, Elgar Publishing LTD, Cheltenham, UK, 2016.