Peace, Power, and Economic Order: International Rivalry and Cooperation in European Trade Politics, 1900-1930

Abstract

My dissertation examines links between national interest and international comity in the trade institutions of the League of Nations. I analyze the League as a framework in which Europeans pursued widely divergent programs of national and imperial power-projection using convergent multilateral methods. Previous research has highlighted the emergence in the 1920s of an idiom of multilateral order that was later translated into systems of European and international economic governance after 1945. My research shows that this idiom developed in dynamic tension with ideals of national and imperial solidarity. I present League trade politics as the product of a long and tumultuous process of institutional evolution by tracing the biographies of four League collaborators from the era of commercial rivalry at the turn of the twentieth century through the 1920s. My dissertation focuses on four spokesmen for prominent models of international economic cooperation in Europe in the 1920s. They each used the League to advance a particular vision of the world order in which trade functioned as an essential tool of power politics, but they also consciously invoked common principles of multilateral cooperation. I argue that both these convergent institutional commitments and these divergent national ambitions were essential elements of the League system.