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Daniel Gorman. e Emergence of International Society in the 1920s. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012.387 S. ISBN 978-1-107-02113-6.

Reviewed by Katharina RietzlerPublished on H-Soz-u-Kult (September, 2013)

D. Gorman: e Emergence of International Society

What is international society? In his study of An-glophone internationalism in the 1920s Daniel Gormandescribes it as the shared norms and values of states

and non-state actors and the means by which they reg-ulate and shape international relations (p. 16), citingHedley Bulls 1977 landmark study e Anarchical Soci-ety. Indeed, Bull argued that international society neednot be a universal phenomenon but emerges when agroup of states conscious of common interests and val-ues decide to come together as an ordered community.Hedley Bull, e Anarchical Society: A Study of Orderin World Politics, New York 2002 [1977], p. 13. Gor-man explores whether such notions of community ex-isted in Britain, the British Empire and the United Statesin seven case studies on intra-imperial relations, cam-paigns against trafficking, imperial citizenship, interna-

tional sport events, organised internationalism, ecumeni-calism and the Kellogg-Briand Pact.

Inter-state relations in the 1920s were complicated inunprecedented ways due to the presence of the League ofNations and the International Labour Organization andnew modes of transnational campaigning. Older formsof supra-national organisation had to reckon with thesenew structures. To Gorman, it is the intertwining ofchanging intra-imperial relations with post-1919 interna-tionalism that defines norms and values in internationalrelations in the 1920s. In the post-World War I age ofdemocratic nationalism the anachronism of empire was

recast as an innovation. In Gormans account, the BritishEmpire in particular served as a template for interna-tionalists. At the same time, the League and other in-ternationalist hubs were sites where Britains white Do-minions renegotiated intra-imperial relations. For exam-ple, they asserted their autonomy as independent mem-bers of the League Assembly, even as Britain representedthem on the League Council. ese ambiguities whiledaway the British legal doctrine ofinter se, which statedthat relations between Britain and its Dominions were

exempt from international law (p. 23). Formerly domes-tic issues became international issues; new internationalstructures gave those who challenged the Empire a new

space for their bales. Such bales could be futile, asGorman recounts in a lengthy chapter on the failed cam-paign of Kenyan Indians for imperial citizenship in the1920s, but were nonetheless evidence of the new kindsof appeals to the international now available to colo-nial peoples. Here, a more sustained comparison withTanganyika, which was, unlike Kenya, a British Leagueof Nations mandate and also possessed a sizeable Indianpopulation, could have shed light on the question howLeague-focused internationalism and imperial interna-tionalism interacted within the mandates system.

e Leagues humanitarian efforts, part of its tech-

nical work, receive a positive appraisal in two chap-ters on its campaign against international sex trafficking.Serving as a rallying point for national nongovernmen-tal organisations and pressure groups, the Leagues So-cial Section, and its capable head Rachel Crowdy, man-aged to transform a domestic moral concern into an in-ternational problem with an international solution - the1921 International Convention on the Traffic of Womenand Children. Crowdy herself became a figurehead forwomens international activism and the belief that do-mestic social reform successfully could be internation-alised. However, Britain ultimately refused to implementfurther League recommendations on trafficking, as the

diversity of local circumstances in its Empire meant thatit was reluctant to devise a uniform policy. Here, the do-mestic analogy, i.e. the idea that international politicsshould mirror the ideal functioning of a liberal demo-cratic national government (p. 226), did not work andinternationalism reached its limits. Nevertheless, world-wide regulated prostitution declined globally as a resultof League efforts. Gormans fourth case study, on the1930 Empire Games in Hamilton, Ontario, Canada, un-derlines that imperial internationalism could function as

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just another subcategory of internationalism. e pre-cursor to the Commonwealth Games heavily borrowedfrom practices and procedures established by the inter-

national Olympic movement, did not feature imperialsports such as cricket and had a strong Anglo-Americandimension.

Anglo-American liberal internationalism makes upthe second part of Gormans study, which features muchorganisational history. One chapter covers well-knownpressure groups such as the League to Enforce Peace andthe League of Nations Association, detailing their effortsto function as a link between American public opinionand Geneva-centred internationalism. A short excur-sion on the Leagues Intellectual Cooperation Organi-sations efforts to internationalise intellectual propertyrights puzzlingly states that these came to nothing by the

end of the 1920s, although other researchers have arguedthat the harmonisation of intellectual property law madeimportant strides in the 1930s with the participation ofLatin American states, contrary to the familiar narra-tive of the anti-internationalist 1930s. Isabella Lhr, DerVlkerbund und die Entwicklung des internationalenSchutzes geistigen Eigentums in der Zwischenkriegszeit,in: Zeitschri r Geschichtswissenscha 54 (2006), pp.900-910. A second chapter on the World Alliance for Pro-moting International Friendship through the Churchesusefully details the life of an internationalist organisa-tion at work: its educational efforts, the pitfalls of coor-dinating national branches, its unofficial but highly ef-fective relationship with the League and aempts to in-troduce internationalist rituals in the form of Peace Sun-day. What is missing is a comparative angle, notablya brief exploration of Catholic internationalism in thisperiod. e World Alliance contained a latent anti-Catholic streak (p. 246) and one wonders about thelimits of religious internationalism, a topic which re-searchers are only beginning to explore. Abigail Green/ Vincent Viaene (eds.), Religious Internationals in theModern World: Globalization and Faith Communitiessince 1750, Basingstoke 2012.

e final chapters of the book deal with the Anglo-

American outlawry movement which reached its apogeewith the 1928 Kellogg-Briand Pact. Here, Gorman offersa slightly novel take on a well-known story by highlight-ing the role of private Anglo-American connections inthe promotion of the pact. Ultimately, though, he frameshis discussion in familiar terms of realism and idealism(p. 266), when a more thorough discussion on the role ofinternational public opinion may have been more fruit-ful, and in this context the different ways in which or-ganisations such as the British League of Nations Union

or the American Foreign Policy Association - a woefullyunder-researched organisation - sought to harness it.

is ambitious study draws out a number of themes

which held Anglophone liberal internationalism togetherin the 1920s: the intertwined nature of imperial and in-ternational relations; the domestic analogy; the promi-nence of non-state actors; Protestant ecumenicalism; andthe various ways in which the League tinted the lensesworn by people in the business of looking at the world,such as international lawyers and colonial administra-tors. Gorman makes it clear in his introduction that hehas no intention to move beyond the Anglosphere, and itwould be unfair to demand it of him; yet, his explorationswhet an appetite for much more research on the otherinternational societies that may or may not have existed.Where are the French and the Dutch and their empiresin all this? Where would someone like Lon Bourgeois,another architect of the League, fit in? Was there such athing as fascist international society? If Anglo-Americaninternationalism was associational, voluntary and nor-mative (p. 15), was there another internationalism ofthe non-associational, involuntary and non-normativekind? Other internationalisms competed with liberal in-ternationalism, not least that of the communists. eserival claims to building an international society merit at-tention, even if liberal internationalists themselves pre-ferred to ignore them. Is it accurate to treat the 1930s asa barren plane on which international society could not

grow, when issues such as intellectual property rightscomplicate this assumption? Towards the end of thebook, there is some conceptual slippage and interna-tional society is used synonymously with internation-alism. Bull, the originator of the former term, chieflywrote about states. Gorman does not, and this calls forsome clarification, for example by exploring whether in-ternational society is merely the end result of successfulinternationalism(s).

Finally, there are more minor inaccuracies: ElihuRoot is misnamed Elijah Root in a later chapter, theLeague of Nations Conference for the Codification of In-ternational Law takes place one year before it actuallydid, the United States did not stay outside the PermanentCourt of International Justice until 1931 but never rati-fied the protocol it signed in 1935, and David Mitrany,the Romanian-born British scholar, could only loosely bedescribed as a federalist.

Small mistakes are perhaps unavoidable in such awide-ranging narrative. As a whole, this study offers anumber of stimulating case studies that will be of inter-est to scholars of interwar internationalism, particularly

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those seeking to explore its imperial dimension. Somechapters, for example the one on sport, seem particu-larly suitable for undergraduate teaching, as they illus-

trate the different facets of lived internationalism rather

than dwelling on abstract concepts. At the same time,the book challenges researchers to investigate interna-tionalisms that may have been less successful than the

liberal Anglophone variety but were just as ambitious.

If there is additional discussion of this review, you may access it through the list discussion logs at:hp://h-net.msu.edu/cgi-bin/logbrowse.pl.

Citation: Katharina Rietzler. Review of Gorman, Daniel, e Emergence of International Society in the 1920s. H-Soz-u-Kult, H-Net Reviews. September, 2013.URL: hp://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=40101

Copyright 2013 by H-Net, Clio-online, and the author, all rights reserved. is work may be copied and redis-tributed for non-commercial, educational purposes, if permission is granted by the author and usage right holders.For permission please contact [email protected].

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