10.1 LAW AND THE INTERNATIONAL ORGANISATION

For international lawyers, the League of Nations is an institution of great symbolic and doctrinal importance. With its quasi-universal membership (‘universal' of course heavily qualified), open-ended mandate, and inaugur­ation of an ‘international civil service', the League broke from the more limited institutional forms of nineteenth-century interstate cooperation, and helped shift ‘international organisation' from a general aspiration of ordered interaction to a more specific legal category of inter-governmental entities.¹ However, the League was an irritant in the international legal order as well as an agent of law's expansion.

Interwar thinking about the League is often treated by doctrinal texts today in narrow terms, as a subset of questions about the legal personality of international organisations later settled by a 1949 advisory opinion of the International Court of Justice,^[662] or as laying the foundations for the emergence of a distinct ‘law of international organisations'.^[663] Yet debates about the League were more wide-ranging, and perplexing, than these frames suggest. The League was a novel, even disturbing creature in a world of states and empires. Legal commentators found it difficult to grasp the League's relations with member states. Was the League an actor in its own right (albeit animated and constrained by the decisions of member states); or a mere shorthand for the combination of member states themselves? And how did the Secretariat - the closest the League had to human agents - relate to the League itself, and its members? These questions invoked puzzles already familiar to political and legal thought, about artificial personality and collective agency, but against the backdrop of renewed ferment over the conceptualisation of the state,^[664] and the nature of (international) law.^[665]

This chapter probes interwar thinking about the League, its nature and authority, as an instance of legal innovation.

The chapter seeks to bring out this quality of the institution - at once abstract and concrete, artificial and material, its operation shaping the condi­tions of its own analysis - by tracing a theme which recurs in very disparate ways as contemporaries sought to make sense of the League: a concern with speech. Speech is implicated in agency, personality and the constitution of a political sphere, and the identification of he who authorises speech has been central to the theorisation of sovereignty and the state.^[667] It is thus unsurprising that discussions of the nature and authority of the League circled uneasily around whether and how the League might speak for some kind of ‘inter­national’ position, and who might in turn speak for the League - or make the League speak (hence the reference to ‘ventriloquism’ in my title). More basic questions about speech - who could say what, to whom - also proved a pressing concern for those within the Secretariat, as they felt their way into new offices.

The chapter moves from the ‘outside’ to the ‘inside’ of the League, with a focus on the Secretariat. It begins by sketching efforts of commentators (legal and otherwise) to get to grips with the League in the 1920s (Section 10.2). It turns then to the gradual elaboration, within the Secretariat, of a modus operandi of institutional life, managing the public speech of delegates, balan­cing public circumspection on its own part with tacit flows of information (Section 10.3). This system, always precarious, broke down in the 1930s, as exemplified in an exchange between an outspoken internationalist on the Secretariat staff and his more conservative colleagues. Here, an official's speech threatened the hierarchy in the Secretariat and its conception of the League; but, for that official, it was the silence of the hierarchy - the failure to speak - which traduced a proper understanding of the institution (Section 10.4). This coupling of quite distinct sites, actors and sources is of course not a comprehensive, even representative, account of interwar thinking about the League, but the movement between formal and lived facets of the institution offers a way of re-examining the bounds of international legal thought, and of the disciplinary perspectives we bring to the international organisation today (Section 10.5).