10.4 SPEAKING IN, AND FOR, THE LEAGUE IN A MOMENT OF CRISIS

Struggles within the Secretariat played out particularly starkly in the confron­tation between Konni Zilliacus, an official in the Information Section of the Secretariat, and his superiors.^[707] Zilliacus had worked for the Information Section since 1920.

In August 1938, Zilliacus wrote Avenol a letter of resignation, condemning the ‘official doctrine or political principle' of the Secretariat and urging Avenol to speak out against violations of the Covenant.⁵⁶ As Pedersen makes clear, the arguments mobilised by Zilliacus in this correspondence were not

Zilliacus graduated with a BA from Yale during the First World War, and served with British military missions to Russia, where he opposed the Allies' anti-revolutionary intervention, and wrote anonymously to the London press detailing British activities which Churchill had denied in the Commons. Zilliacus was a supporter of the British Union for Democratic Control (a small but influential organisation devoted to increasing parliamentary control over foreign policy) and, along with many radical Liberals involved in the UDC, joined the Labour Party after the First World War. See Archie Potts, Zilliacus: A Life for Peace and Socialism (London: Merlin, 2002), 1-16.

⁵³ See, e.g., C. Howard-Ellis [Zilliacus], The Origin, Structure and Working of the League of Nations (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1928).

⁵⁴ A. Pelt, comments on Certificate as to Grant of Annual Increment, 26 December 1934. Unless otherwise indicated, all materials pertaining to Zilliacus here cited are in LNA S912/Zilliacus.

⁵⁵ Second meeting of the Appointments Committee, 23 May 1938, re Annual report on Mr Zilliacus.

⁵⁶ Zilliacus to Avenol, 9 August 1938.

new: he was presenting an array of positions taken since the League's incep­tion about the institution's authority, albeit in ways reflecting his experience of Secretariat life.^[708] In this moment, though, the very existence of this polemical text raised concerns about renegade speech, as Avenol feared that Zilliacus, a notorious strategic leaker with a known intention to stand for office as a Labour candidate in Britain, would publish the letter and any reply Avenol gave (indeed this fear may explain Avenol's petty initial refusal to accept Zilliacus's letter as a valid letter of resignation at all).^[709] Although formal proceedings against Zilliacus seem to have been abandoned in the chaos of the Secretariat's final months, an indignant official in the Personnel depart­ment, possibly the Frenchman Henri Vilatte, annotated the letter, challenging Zilliacus's conception of the League and the Secretariat.

Zilliacus's letter opened with an assertion that Secretariat officials were ‘responsible to the Secretary-General alone and through him to the whole League', not to individual governments. Insofar as the Secretariat dealt with governments directly, it did so ‘in their [i.e. states'] capacity as Members of the League and subject to our [i.e. officials'] loyalty to the League as a whole.' This entailed that ‘The Covenant became our charter.... we exerci[s]ed our functions of collecting data, drafting reports, giving advice and making sug­gestions, assuring publicity for League activities... in such a way as to work on the basis of the Covenant.' This function ‘became particularly important when Governments disagreed about what ought to be done'.^[710]

This opening established ‘the League' as an entity in its own right, above governments (although brought into being by them). Yet by this time ‘the League' as a unitary actor was crippled; it could not take decisions in accord­ance with the provisions of the Covenant governing its key organs. Perhaps for this reason, Zilliacus moved quickly from ‘the League' to the Secretariat, eliding distinctions between the two, and emphasising instead the centrality of the Covenant. However, the spectre of disagreement about ‘what ought to be done' was difficult to dispel. A marginal annotation challenged Zilliacus's confidence, asking ‘who is the best judge in last resort?' Zilliacus's letter conceded that governments were responsible for taking decisions, but insisted that the Secretariat had to ‘prepare' those decisions ‘on lines compatible with the obligations of the Covenant'.

These questions - ‘who is the best judge?', ‘who can arbitrate?' - have for us particular echoes (Augustinian, Hobbesian, Schmittian); though their mean­ing for Vilatte may well have been a more local tussle for authority. And, while such questions have been, for Hobbes, part of the case for a unitary and supreme sovereign, they here amount to an assertion that no one could decide. If the Secretariat would not assert its own interpretation, it was left to members divided amongst themselves, and the failure of the whole project on which the Secretariat's own position was premised.

Zilliacus's letter had in fact refrained from asserting any formal interpretive authority on the part of the Secretariat, or even offering any strong account of custom or previous practice as generating new powers of the Secretariat in some legally cognisable way. Rather, in falling back on the Secretariat's ‘preparation' of decisions which would then be ‘taken' by governments, he was invoking a sociological reality of the institution's operation as a ‘tradition'; and suggesting merely that this de facto role of the Secretariat - ‘this unpre- cedential relationship of the Secretariat to the Governments Members of the League' - be maintained, with conflicts being managed by the craft of Secretariat officials.

Zilliacus admitted that it had grown ‘more difficult' to function in this way since 1933, but insisted that, if there was some choice to be made, the only course was to ‘stick to the Covenant'. The Secretary-General's argument that the Secretariat was merely an administrative body was incoherent. If the Secretariat was to function at all, it had to do so on the basis of the Covenant: ‘The political duty of loyalty to the obligations of the Covenant underlies and informs all the administrative and advisory functions of the Secretariat'. This entailed, for Zilliacus, the Secretariat taking a clearer public stand against violations of the Covenant: Secretariat staff animating ‘the League' more forcefully as against the governments of member states.

This course would have been in accordance with one reading of the staff undertaking to ‘regulate my conduct with the interests of the League alone in view', but Zilliacus's repeated invocation of the Covenant as a placeholder for the League itself in fact undercut his position. The Covenant certainly gave the Secretariat no substantive role. Perhaps sensing the difficulty of an argu­ment which elevated the Secretariat staff as spokesmen for the League and Covenant over the states which had brought both into being, Zilliacus also offered an alternative approach. He suggested that there was, properly under­stood, no real conflict between serving the League and serving member states. As he put it, the League ‘is not merely a congeries of governments, but also the treaty obligations of the Covenant, by which the nations are bound that the governments temporarily represent.... We owe loyalty to those obligations and to the idea behind them as much as we do to the governments.'⁶⁰

This argument echoed efforts to cast the League as a League of peoples rather than governments, and with commentators' invocations (discussed in Section 10.2) of ‘public opinion' as an animating force. But this, too, was something of a dead end in the working-out of a credible theory of the League's authority, and Zilliacus's place within it. As the marginal annotation put it, ‘who can... validly represent within the League those nations & responsibly speak for them if not the G[overn]ments? Or are we a superstate?' Any dismissal of governments as legitimate representatives for the more endur­ing ‘nations' entailed an assertion of Secretariat officials' own authority to act for these nations. Zilliacus had no real answer, other than to invoke tech­nique; what he saw as a peculiarly Anglo-American ‘mingling of idealism and realism'; an indefinable ‘political responsibility to the Covenant'.

For the marginal annotator, Zilliacus's allegation that the Secretariat was failing in its duty and had ‘incurred a share of the political responsibility for denying the victims of aggression - Abyssinia, Spain, China - their rights' was a brazen challenge.

At points, Zilliacus cast officials' deference to the Covenant as a sort of ethical commitment independent of consequentialist reasoning. Favouring the standards imposed by the Covenant might lead to the Secretariat's advice being ignored; but ‘the responsibility for disregarding their treaty obligations would rest squarely on [governments], in the eyes of the world including their public opinion', and ‘the Secretariat would have done its duty'. However, this was not really a disavowal of instrumentalism, but an argument for the one remaining instrumental strategy which seemed open to internationalists.

Zilliacus warned that the Secretariat was ‘in danger of losing the respect and confidence of the Governments and sections of public opinion that are still loyal to what the League stands for (implicitly, especially a future Labour government in Britain).⁶¹ Zilliacus here makes the shift seen elsewhere in League practice, from an abstract ‘public opinion', figured as the ‘eyes of the world', which typically underpinned accounts of the League's authority, to a much narrower, more concrete and strategic notion of ‘public opinion' as electorally significant views in Britain.

Throughout the letter, Zilliacus is wrestling with some of the same funda­mental questions about the nature and authority of the League that had arisen from the first moment of its creation. He switches between different starting points for his analysis, from the Covenant text to the League itself, as an already-existing person to whom political duties of loyalty were owed. The texture of his arguments ranged from formalist invocation of the Covenant as a ‘treaty obligation' to anti-formalist assertion that such obligations bound ‘nations' in some timeless way distinct from the legal apparatus of states and governments. Zilliacus worked hard to integrate the Secretariat into the juridical identity of the League, but ultimately was forced to fall back on a ‘tradition' with no formal expression, an ‘unprecedential relationship' in which the Secretariat's role within the League remained on a purely de facto footing.

Even if this de facto authority, crafted from bureaucratic and diplomatic skill, could be attained, it was dependent on the Secretariat taking a unified view, and the whole exchange around the letter itself had grown out of discord within the Secretariat. It seemed very difficult to ground the argument that the Secretariat alone could speak for the League, and to claim that, in doing so, the Secretariat had some higher representative function. Efforts to press the Secretariat to speak for the League as an embodiment of the ‘international' ultimately drove Zilliacus well beyond the universe of legal and political obligation, and abstract ideals, into a realpolitik alliance between the Secretariat and perceived internationalist publics in Britain.