Patricia Clavin

Transnationalism and the League of Nations: Understanding the Work of Its Economic and Financial Organisation

This article explores the work of the little-studied Economic and Financial Organisation of the League of Nations. It offers a sustained investigation into how this international organisation operated that assesses the transnational aspects of its work in relation to its inter-governmental responsibilities, and demonstrates the wide-ranging contribution of the organisations secretariat. The second part of the article establishes the way in which transnationalism enabled the United States, the Leagues most influential non-member, to play a crucial role in shaping the policy agenda of the League. It also shows how a growing sense of frustration in its work prompted EFO to attempt to free itself from inter-governmental oversight and become an independent organisation to promote economic and financial co-operation in 1940 – a full four years before the creation of the Bretton Woods agreements.

The failure of economic diplomacy : Britain, Germany, France and the United States, 1931-36

Preface - Introduction - A World Adrift - The Rise of Economic Nationalism - Patterns of Disagreement - From Nationalism to Internationalism and Back - The World Economic Conference Convenes - The Barren Harvest: Tariffs and Trade - Faith Without Works - Note on Archival Sources - Bibliography - Index

The Austrian hunger crisis and the genesis of international organization after the First World War

From its foundation in 1918, the new Austrian republic was gripped by famine and a crisis of confidence in its currency that threatened to tip the new state into hyperinflation and revolution. This article shows how western efforts to aid Austria combat famine and its financial crisis were linked, and how they had a profound impact on the new League of Nations, the worlds first multi-purpose intergovernmental organization. It also demonstrates the importance of the incipient wartime international bureaucracy for League agency. Contrary to the expectations of its architects, member governments, international financiers, businessmen and economists began to see the League as a useful tool to meet common needs that today would be called the search for human security. The article demonstrates how the Austrian food and financial crisis was the founding moment in the institutionalization of international economic and financial coordination, cooperation and oversight. It established the Economic and Financial Organization of the League of Nations, whose work would later inform its successors, the International Monetary Fund, the World Bank and the European Union. The study speaks to the ways in which the notion of security has broadened in the past two decades to embrace economic, social, political and environmental concerns. But the notion of �human security� is not new; it was written into the body of the League.

Reparations in the Long Run

This paper explores how policy-makers during the Second World War attempted to “learn the lessons” of history from the reparations settlement imposed after the First World War. It shows how these lessons were developed and articulated in the formulation of, in particular, American foreign policy, and also their consequences for foreign policy during and after the Second World War. The paper demonstrates the important role of European advisors in shaping American policy, thereby illustrating that not all American lessons of history were born in the USA. It also draws out how many of these lessons have found an echo in the historiography of German reparations that has emerged over the past fifty years. In both periods the issues of enforcement and compliance, the issues that concern us generally in this volume, dominated the debate between advisors and policy-makers.

‘The Fetishes of So-Called International Bankers’: Central Bank Co-operation for the World Economic Conference, 1932–3

With his sharp denunciation of the ‘old fetishes of so-called international bankers’ for fixed exchange rates on the gold-exchange standard, President Franklin D. Roosevelt allegedly consigned the World Economic and Monetary Conference to failure. 1 The conference had been convened in June 1933 to tackle the crippling levels of ‘beggar-thy-neighbour’ economic policies which were strangling the international economy during the Great Depression; its brief was so appealing and its concerns so broad, that sixty-five nations came to London that summer. But from the outset of conference preparations, which began in the autumn of 1932, the issue of central banking co-operation was to highlight many of the difficulties which plagued not only co-operative central bank efforts to revive the international economy but also dilemmas which faced central banks in their relations with their domestic governments.

Obituary Gerald D. Feldman (1937–2007) Member of the Editorial Board of Contemporary European History

Gerald D. Feldman, professor emeritus of the Department of History at the University of California, Berkeley, died on 31 October 2007 at his home in Berkeley at the age of 70. He was a member of the editorial board of Contemporary European History from the journals foundation in 1992.