10.3 SPEECH IN THE INSTITUTIONAL LIFE OF THE LEAGUE[695]

Leaders of the Secretariat, as the bureaucratic nucleus of the League, had to animate ‘the League’ as an entity distinct from its members, while also glossing the Secretariat’s own relation to the institution.

The Secretariat was reluctant to assert itself as a corporate body, or to speak for the institution. The Secretary-General resisted calls to give his annual report as a major public speech. The Information Section within the Secretariat was prohibited by Drummond from producing anything in the nature of pro-League ‘propaganda’, and as a result churned out primarily dry, factual documents which failed to ignite much interest. The Secretariat’s chief contribution was to work, quite literally, behind the scenes. After experimentation in the early days, and negotiation with government represen­tatives, the Secretariat became quite adept at stage-managing, for example, ‘public’ sessions of the League Council with enough substantive discussion to stimulate press interest, and offer a simulacrum of public diplomacy, and yet not so much dissension that they would reveal and risk escalating genuine conflicts.

Secretariat staff, reflecting on their work in 1939, commented that they had been a ‘shadow corps diplomatique :

it has been taken for granted that the Secretariat should make suggestions and proffer advice.... It is expected to know the desires of the various delegations, and to play a large part in reconciling, by private negotiations, any conflicting views.

A colleague observed that

it was the officials of the Secretariat who often indicated, in the corridors, the desired direction that the deliberations of various organs of the League should take, and it was [the officials], too, who in most cases prepared the texts of the reports of these organs as well as of proposals and draft resolutions, and sometimes even the speeches which were to be given by delegates.^[701]

These reflections are more candid than some of the public efforts to distil officials' experiences which would occur during the Second World War, under the auspices of Chatham House and the Carnegie Endowment.^[702] Taken at face value, they arguably imply a greater degree of control by the Secretariat over the ensemble of the League's work than in fact existed, particularly in instances of acute political controversy. And these reflections head in different directions. For some officials the Secretariat's activity was a laudable contribution. For others, particularly when considering the years after 1933, when Drummond was succeeded as Secretary-General by Joseph Avenol, this closet diplomacy was less a genuinely internationalist practice than an improper solicitousness of the positions of powerful members (a concern embraced by others, and detailed in Section 10.4 below). Yet these comments are revealing of the modalities of the Secretariat's work, and of the connection between conceptions of the Secretariat and the League, on one hand, and the more intimate and quotidian practices of speech which under­pinned this, on the other (speech in corridors, and preparation of the speeches others would give in public).

Officials recognised that the Secretariat's acquiescence in an informal traffic in information which these practices sometimes involved was difficult to reconcile with its role as a genuinely international body in the service of all League members. In the course of early efforts to think through the terms on which the Secretariat held information gleaned from governments, an official acknowledged that ‘[t]he theory that officials of the Secretariat could withhold information from the Members of the League merely by treating it as private would indeed be dangerous.' On the other hand, imposing any more egalitar­ian principle that information held by the Secretariat must be available to all member states would choke off the flows of information on which the Secretariat relied.^[703] The Director of the Political Section agreed: ‘for the moment' the Secretariat must avoid working on ‘principles' and instead ‘seize the opportunities... to inform ourselves more completely than [we could] through purely official avenues, by accepting the - inevitable for the present - conditions applicable to this sort of communications'.^[704] The Secretariat's need for information, particularly from governments, was such that officials sought and accepted it where they could, and subject to the demands for confidence imposed by individual interlocutors. This position seems never to have been revisited; indeed it was rare to see the problem even articulated again with this clarity.

Governments, for their part, understood well the influence of the Secretariat (periodic squabbles over the share of posts going to individuals of different nationalities were about not only national prestige but also perceived possibilities for steering the Secretariat's decision-making). But the novel role of the Secretariat was only palatable to governments because Secretariat staff were largely effaced in the public presentation of the League as institution. The Secretariat's often-obscured influence was to some extent compatible with liberal internationalist understandings of the dynamism and evolutionary character of the League.

The maintenance of this system required discretion on the part of Secretariat staff. Staff were prohibited by internal rules from disclosing matters of which they had knowledge by virtue of their role, and from speaking in public about current political problems. Both rules were, however, often compromised by the need to gather information, and exchange something in return. There was a sort of tacit relaxation of these rules within certain bounds: high officials tolerated or even encouraged informal ‘liaison' work to build relations with governments and internationalist audiences. This craft and compromise in turn depended on a loose camaraderie among Secretariat officials: a shared commitment to a particular vision of the institution and its role. This was always fragile, but broke down completely in the 1930s. An influx of staff supportive of fascist regimes in Italy and Germany meant that Secretariat personnel were increasingly divided (manifest in the felt need, by 1932, for all staff to make a ‘declaration of fidelity' to the League).^[706] Staff with strong pacifist and internationalist commitments distrusted the second Secretary-General, Joseph Avenol, who manifested pronounced fascist sympa­thies. As the sense of common purpose frayed, control over speech broke down, and questions about the nature of the League, the intellectual preoccu­pations of jurists and political scientists, became urgent matters of personal conscience for Secretariat staff.