About the project
INNER_LEAGUE offers a social-bureaucratic history of the League Secretariat. We investigate its inner life to understand how it shaped the professional lives of the ca. 4,000 employees. And how this global workplace shaped the bureaucratic infrastructures of multilateralism it serviced.
INNERLEAGUE combines social, institutional, and digital history across three work packages: (i) Communities, (ii) Hierarchies, and (iii) Infrastructures.
The project has several concrete objectives:
- To analyze the emergence and impact of professional, educational, epistemic, social, and emotional communities within the League Secretariat.
- To examine the often-contested formation of bureaucratic hierarchies via state-of-the-art digital approaches.
- To investigate how (1) & (2) impacted upon the professional lives of the staff of the League Secretariat.
- To explain how the officials and staff built, maintained, operated, and passed on new infrastructures of multilateralism.
Rationale of the project
Why should we write histories of the inner life of the League of Nations Secretariat?
- Being the first international public administration of its kind, its practices, norms, and procedures became part of the very DNA of IOs for the remainder of the 20th and 21st century.
- The physical and social creation of a new multilateral diplomatic space, serviced by a permanently present bureaucracy, was a paradigmatic shift in diplomacy.
- The League Secretariat constituted the apex of liberal internationalism, but was also a microcosm of the racial, gender, class, national and professional hierarchies of the era. Hence, we may understand the ideological subtleties of institutionalized multilateralism as an emerging practice.
- The social life, communities, conflicts, and values of the League Secretariat are important in their own right. How are we to explain the lasting presence of the League’s working methods if we do not seek to connect its social and bureaucratic fabric to the infrastructures of multilateralism that they built?
