ABSTRACT
Recent scholarship has vindicated the League of Nations (further: the League) by shifting the focus from causes for its failure to reconstructing its role in promoting innovative and surprisingly durable structures of international cooperation. Scholars of international history have traditionally stressed international efforts to stabilize hyperinflationist Germany in the wake of World War I to prevent it from becoming a breeding ground for Bolshevism. However, a new generation of historians argue that it was rather the broader region of “Central and Eastern Europe” (primarily meaning the successor states of the Habsburg Empire and of the western border regions of the Russian Empire) that was the focus of international efforts to stabilize Europe. 1 This had several reasons. Not least, as opposed to Germany, these countries were members of the League, which made direct support possible—be it voluntary or through assertive interventions. Moreover, at the international level, there were serious doubts concerning the viability of the newly established states. Many of these were involved in border disputes with neighboring countries and had ethnically mixed populations. This heterogeneity was increasingly seen as an impediment to long-term stability—and as something to be solved by internationally steered resettlement, population exchanges, and ethnic cleansing (as in the case of the 1923 Treaty of Lausanne, which stipulated the deportation of Greeks from Turkey and Muslims from Greece and was internationally regarded as a success). 2 In this chapter, we will examine how far the League’s efforts to address the challenges of the Great Depression were guided by such normative views on the states of Central and Eastern Europe, and, in turn, what agency these states had in shaping the League’s responses. We will focus specifically on two sets of institutions: a series of agricultural conferences, convened at the initiative of these states themselves, and the so-called Commission of Enquiry for European Union, set up by the League to aid Europe’s economic recovery through rapprochements and the abolition of trade barriers.
