Ventriloquism in Geneva: The League of Nations as International Organisation

31 Pages Posted: 7 May 2024 Last revised: 8 May 2024

See all articles by Megan Donaldson

Megan Donaldson

University College London - Faculty of Laws

Date Written: December 1, 2021

Abstract

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. However, the League was an irritant in the international legal order as well as an agent of law’s expansion. It posed new legal questions concerning its own status and personality; the nature of relations with states and others; and the regulation of officials working within it. 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 and the nature of (international) law.

This chapter probes interwar thinking about the League, its nature and authority, as an instance of legal innovation. It focuses in particular on the way in which the League, like other institutions, presented more than a static object of inquiry. Its existence shifted understandings of the ‘international’ as a subject and source of authority, just as the League, in offering new sites and procedures for political discourse, gave both governments and new actors (‘civil society’, mandatory peoples, minority populations, aspiring member states, ostensibly impartial and cosmopolitan ‘experts’) a means of articulating claims, albeit not on terms exactly of their own choosing; and so reshaped prevailing legal and political categories. By tracing a concern with speech—a theme which recurs in disparate ways as contemporaries struggled to make sense of the League—the chapter brings out the elusive qualities of the international organisation in international law: at once abstract and concrete, artificial and material, its operation shaping the conditions of its own analysis.

Keywords: international organization, international law, League of Nations, legal personality, international civil service

Suggested Citation

Donaldson, Megan, Ventriloquism in Geneva: The League of Nations as International Organisation (December 1, 2021). Faculty of Laws University College London Law Research Paper No. 12/2024, Available at SSRN: https://ssrn.com/abstract=4818237

Megan Donaldson (Contact Author)

University College London - Faculty of Laws ( email )

Bentham House
4-8 Endsleigh Gardens
London, WC1E OEG
United Kingdom

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