Fighting the Scourge of International Crime

This chapter examines initiatives to organize the global fight against international crime, which emerged in Central and Eastern Europe in the 1920s and which by the 1930s posed an alternative to the imperial and liberal internationalist programmes pursued by many Western Europeans and Americans. Police, especially from Austria, sought to internationalize policing through the International Criminal Police Commission (today Interpol). At the same time, jurists from the region sought to unify norms for fighting international crimes as a first step towards a broader project of founding a body of international criminal law. Both programmes responded to the particular social and demographic problems engulfing the region after the collapse of Europe’s great land empires. By the 1930s, these post-imperial and often illiberal programmes increasingly set the agenda at the League of Nations on a range of international offences, notably the drug trade and sex trafficking.

On the Fraught Internationalism of Intellectuals

This chapter investigates the idea and practice of intellectual cooperation as a tool of international governance: an innovation of the League’s International Committee on Intellectual Cooperation (ICIC). It shows how Austria’s involvement decisively shaped both the ICIC’s agenda and the future European intellectual order. From the mid-1920s onwards, cooperation included the newly emerging area of cultural heritage and its institutions, such as libraries, archives, and museums, all of which had a rich imperial tradition in Vienna. The chapter also elaborates how interwar intellectual cooperation subsequently informed the strategy that UNESCO, ICIC’s successor organization, would adopt after 1945. This chapter provides a relational history of the development of international intellectual cooperation between Austria and the League of Nations, and aims to illuminate the opportunities, expectations, and realities of international intellectual cooperation from a regional, actor- and institution-oriented perspective. It reconstructs the ‘international’ of intellectual cooperation in the making.

Reinventing International Health in East Central Europe

A network of east central European health experts involved in the state-building of their post-imperial region were responsible for the methods and objectives of the League of Nations Health Organization. Their programmes challenged both western influence in public health and the great powers’ dominance within interwar internationalism. The health services of east central Europe did not evolve in national isolation, and their principles of mutual assistance became the basis for the League Health Organization to redefine human security and to support early international development projects.

Nation, Internationalism, and the Policies against Trafficking in Girls and Women after the Fall of the Habsburg Empire

Interwar Poland inherited the problem of prostitution and human trafficking from its three predecessor states, above all from the Habsburg Monarchy. It soon came into the focus of interest of the League of Nations’ anti-trafficking agencies. Exploring the interaction between the recently acquired national sovereignty of post-Habsburg Poland and the new world order with the League of Nations as its pivotal force is tantamount to understanding how a nation state tried to tackle a transnational problem such as ‘white slavery’, as well as how it struggled with commitments resulting from its new position as a sovereign actor in interwar international politics. This chapter investigates governmental and non-governmental activities against prostitution and human trafficking in Poland, along with the government’s stance on the League’s recommendations. Whereas prewar international Jewish activities to save women from prostitution came to an end, domestic institutions seized opportunities provided by a democratic state and took their place.

The League of Nations and the Optants’ Dispute in the Hungarian Borderlands

With the fall of the dualist Monarchy, the so-called Hungarian optants in the annexed territories chose the Hungarian nationality instead of the nationality of the three Little Entente states and transferred their place of residence to Hungary. As most of their land was expropriated without due compensation, they started to contest the land reforms before a series of national and international fora. The regional dispute initiated by the Hungarian optants against the Little Entente governments became part of a global controversy between the protection of private property (individual interests) and the sovereign states’ agrarian policies (community interests). The League of Nations provided a framework to debate about the conflict both at the level of international law and politics. This chapter claims that to face the delicate choice between socio-economic community interests and individuals’ property interests, all procedures of the League had to maintain a careful balance between the two.

Clemens Pirquet

This chapter traces the professional ascent of Clemens Pirquet, a central figure in the international postwar humanitarian relief effort in Austria and a contributing expert at the League of Nations Health Organization in the 1920s. Pirquet administered American Relief Administration resources in Austria between 1919 and 1922, using his own Pirquet System of Nutrition. Pirquet had worked at Johns Hopkins, and his postwar ascent suggests the postwar significance of prewar international networks. His career as a scientist also underscores the importance of depersonalized data and statistics for an emerging (American) postwar model of public health, as experts in science and public policy sought to universalize the ideal of humanitarian relief around the figure of the child. The Rockefeller Foundation financed much of this new public health model, and Foundation advisers knew Pirquet well. Meanwhile, local politics mattered, as Pirquet was engaged in a bitter rivalry with Socialist leadership of 1920s Vienna.

Habsburg Histories of Internationalism

This chapter explores points of ideological and institutional intersection in the Habsburg and Austrian past in the context of a new historiography of internationalism and studies of the League of Nations. Drawing from the expanding historiography of international ideas and institutions, on the one hand, and the uncollected evidence of people and politics of the Habsburg empire-cum-Austrian republic, on the other, its intention is to gauge the political, cultural, and economic significance of strands of the ‘new internationalism’ in the history of the Habsburg empire, and its afterlife. This is nowhere more obvious than in the persistent invocations, through the first half of the twentieth century, of the affinities between the post-First World War history of internationalism and Austria’s prewar experience with diversity and multi-nationality, and the persistent political and cultural ambitions attached to the specific idea of Weltösterreich.

Introduction

This introduction explores the entangled history of the Habsburg successor states and the new international order of 1919. It argues that Central Europe formed a key laboratory for tools and practices of supranational governance, thereby reframing a historiography long focused on national histories. It presents four new frameworks for analysing the interplay of nationalization and internationalization. The first concerns legacies of empire, and suggests new directions for studies of the afterlives of Habsburg rule. The second focuses on the benefits of a regional approach that moves beyond the framework of individual states. The third involves an integrated history of the interwar order in Europe that encompasses different fields of international activity and coordination. And the fourth reexamines the history of sovereignty, supranational governance, and European integration.

International Commerce in the Wake of Empire

This chapter reveals how imperial conceptions of regional economic integration lived on in the League of Nations even as the Habsburg successor states, including the Austrian Republic, embraced a national approach to administration. It focuses on an influential Austrian bureaucrat, Richard Riedl, who saw an ethnic German commercial elite as the key unifying force in Central and Eastern Europe. He promoted this vision from the upper echelons of the late-imperial Austrian state and then as an independent expert based in the Vienna Chamber of Commerce in the 1920s. He used the League of Nations to devise an innovative code of trans-border commercial rights that proposed to curtail government authority over international trade networks. The Austrian government ultimately rejected Riedl’s formula, affirming its national regulatory prerogatives. Riedl’s story shows how the League’s sprawling ‘multiverse’ complicated post-imperial state-building by opening direct policy-making channels to business leaders.

Hungary and the League of Nations

Although Hungary became a member of the League of Nations in 1922, its relationship to the organization was often troublesome. After the First World War, a defeated Hungary, in the wake of the Trianon Treaty, was in a diminished territory with a reduced population, while its economy and finances suffered. After years of hardships, only League membership promised the way out of financial calamity and political isolation. The positive role that the League of Nations played in the financial reconstruction of Hungary from 1924 to 1926 offers a unique opportunity to examine a country that did not wish to give up its independence and treaty revision, but was in a situation where it had to accustom itself to realities. The case of Hungary also provides an illuminating comparison with the Austrian financial reconstruction, with its many similarities, but some striking differences as well.