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Inventing Interwar Diplomacy: Why the Weimar Republic Was Represented by Socialists, Conservatives, and Women at the League of Nations

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Inventing Interwar Diplomacy: Why the Weimar Republic Was Represented by Socialists, Conservatives, and Women at the League of Nations Forum Conference Reports GHI News INVENTING INTERWAR DIPLOMACY: WHY THE WEIMAR REPUBLIC WAS REPRESENTED BY SOCIALISTS, CONSERVATIVES, AND WOMEN AT THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS James McSpadden UNIVERSITY OF NEVADA, RENO GHI VISITING POSTDOCTORAL FELLOW, 2018-19 Every September during the 1920s and 1930s, delegations from around the world converged on Geneva to attend the Assembly of the League of Nations. This annual gathering transformed the Swiss city: crowds of people fi lled the streets speaking a multitude of languages, the worldwide press crowded into the city’s salons, and motorboats crisscrossed Lake Geneva to the luxurious hotels where diplomats took up residence.1 Foreign ministers and even the occasional prime minister or chancellor served as delegates alongside ambassadors and specialized envoys, some of whom were women. This cast of characters would seem familiar to twenty-fi rst-century diplomats. However, when considered alongside our professionalized diplomatic corps of the present, the elected parliamentarians milling around as national delegates, substitute delegates, and technical advisors in interwar Geneva seem out of place. Even more surprising from our vantage point, a number of these legislators came from opposi- tion parties, appointed as national delegates by governments that they themselves opposed.2 Having members of the United States Congress, especially Democrats, wandering around the halls of the United Nations representing Donald Trump’s administration seems 1 “Aus meinen Erlebnissen beim Völkerbund,” n.d., absurd to us, but during the interwar years the practice of using N 1626/3, Nachlass opposition politicians as diplomats was common. This article will Thusnelda Lang- Brumann, Bundesarchiv- examine interwar innovations on the international diplomatic stage Koblenz. Unless otherwise by focusing on the German experience joining the League of Nations noted, all translations are the author’s. and dispatching delegates to the League’s Assembly. 2 “List of Assembly Narratives of failure and collapse have long dominated the historiog- Delegates and Substitutes,” League of Nations Photo raphies both of Weimar Germany and of the League of Nations. His- Archive, last modifi ed torians of interwar Germany have wrestled with accounts that read October 2002, http://www.indiana. Weimar as the prologue to the Third Reich or as the fi nal stepping edu/~league/; First stone of a Sonderweg that started in the nineteenth century and ran Assembly of the League of Nations, “Offi cial Guide to the horrors of the Holocaust. Detlev Peukert worked to pick up the and List of Members of pieces of a post-Sonderweg historiography in his path-breaking 1987 Delegations” (Offi ces of the Secretariat: Geneva, book Die Weimarer Republik: Krisenjahre der Klassischen Moderne by 1920). MCSPADDEN | INVENTING INTERWAR DIPLOMACY 89 rescuing Weimar from these master narratives of failure and arguing that the period was marked by experimentation with modernity that should be explored on its own terms. Peukert highlighted the paradox of Weimar — “the hopeful picture of avant-garde cultural achievement and the bleak picture of political breakdown and social misery” — so he constructed a narrative that recognized the enduring contradictions of Weimar while appreciating its role as a laboratory in providing open-ended answers to the issues of modernity.3 Peter Fritzsche’s superlative 1996 review essay “Did Weimar Fail?” summed up post-Peukert scholarship on Weimar Germany as a “disavowal of the master narrative of the Republic in the name of the eclectic experimentalism of Weimar.” Fritzsche moved past Peu- 3 Detlev J.K. Peukert, The Weimar Republic: The kert’s fi xation on Weimar’s dualism to draw the logical conclusion Crisis of Classical Modernity that since “historical actions appear more indeterminate and open- (New York, 1993), xiii. ended,” the Third Reich was also a “legitimate, if extreme, outcome” 4 Peter Fritzsche, “Did of the Republic’s freedom and experimentation.4 Fritzsche himself Weimar Fail?” The Journal of Modern History 68, no. 3 saw the roots of a National Socialist consensus emerging during the (Sep 1996): 631. republican years, and he turned to continuities beyond 1918 or 1933 5 5 Benjamin Ziemann to reframe the question of Weimar’s failure. Other historians includ- and Claus-Christian W. ing Nadine Rossol have been wary of treating Weimar as merely the Szejnmann, “‘Machtergrei- fung’. The Nazi Seizure of “antechamber of the Third Reich,” but all of these innovative histo- Power in 1933,” Politics, rians have been keen to rescue Weimar from older historiographies Religion & Ideology 14, 6 no. 3 (Sep 2013): 326. of fragility and collapse. 6 Anthony McElligott, Another institution trapped in historical narratives of failure was Weimar Germany (2009), as quoted in Nadine Rossol, the League of Nations. Both the League and the entire postwar in- “Performing the Nation: Sports, Spectacles, and ternational settlement brought about by the Paris Peace Conference Aesthetics in Germany, have been seen as doomed from birth. Woodrow Wilson himself set 1926-1936,” Central European History 43, no. 4 up this narrative of failure when he campaigned for the League by (Dec 2010): 616. promising it would bring peace: “I can predict with absolute certainty 7 Woodrow Wilson, “Appeal that within another generation there will be another world war if the for Support of the League nations of the world do not concert the method by which to prevent of Nations,” accessed 7 August 7, 2019, https:// it.” The League was Wilson’s solution to prevent war, and by his www.mtholyoke.edu/ metric, the League failed. However, like Weimar scholarship of the acad/intrel/ww40.htm. last few decades, scholars have recently turned to reconsider the bad 8 Patricia Clavin, Securing reputation that has tarnished the League and interwar diplomacy more the World Economy: The Reinvention of the League broadly. Historians including Patricia Clavin and Susan Pedersen of Nations, 1920-1946 have focused on the League’s involvement in promoting eco- (Oxford, 2013); Susan 8 Pedersen, The Guardians: nomic development and in unwinding empires through mandates. The League of Nations Scholars such as Glenda Sluga and Mark Mazower have written the and the Crisis of Empire (Oxford, 2015). League into much longer narratives of internationalism and global 90 BULLETIN OF THE GHI | 65 | FALL 2019 Forum Conference Reports GHI News governance that understand the organization in a longer context that looks beyond the supposed failure of preventing the Second World War.9 Scholars of interwar internationalism, therefore, have taken similar historiographical steps as historians of Weimar: reevaluating an overarching narrative of failure by looking for continuities beyond the bookmarks of catastrophic world wars.10 This article will bring together an interest in the Weimar Republic 9 Glenda Sluga, Internatio- with the world of international interwar diplomacy, both histori- nalism in the Age of Na- tionalism (Philadelphia, ographies that are currently very much in fl ux. Although Weimar 2013); Mark Mazower, historians are oft en less inclined to ask research questions that look Governing the World: The History of an Idea, 1815 beyond the borders of interwar Germany, Weimar scholarship tends to the Present (New York, to emphasize the rich world of experimentation during the 1920s 2013) 11 and 1930 more so than historians of the interwar global arena. The 10 Akira Iriye, Global Commu- historiographic rescue of the League of Nations has been to put it in nity: The Role of Interna- tional Organizations in the dialogue with late nineteenth-century internationalism or the work Making of the Contempora- of the United Nations; however, the interwar years were also replete ry World (Berkeley, 2002). 12 with new ways to think about diplomacy. There was interwar fl irta- 11 See, for example, a recent tion on the international stage with the principle that diplomats and conference report on Wei- mar historiography where delegates should represent the people, who were seen as sovereign in only one panel touched more countries than ever before. Some countries explored dispatch- on transnational topics: Sebastian Schäfer, “Ta- ing the people’s representatives — elected parliamentarians — to gungsbericht: Die Wei- 13 marer Republik als Ort der international conferences, which this article will explore in depth. Demokratiegeschichte,” This contribution will take a page out the Weimar historians’ com- H-Soz-Kult, July 29, 2019, mitment to explore interwar “eclectic experimentalism” on its own https://www.hsozkult.de/ conferencereport/id/ terms in considering how interwar Europe’s diplomats also experi- tagungsberichte-8381. 14 mented with new forms of diplomacy and representation. 12 Glenda Sluga and Patricia Clavin, eds., Internationalisms: I. Interwar diplomatic experimentation: The Assembly of the A Twentieth-Century History League of Nations (Cambridge, 2017). 13 Mai’a K. Davis Cross, The First World War was the moment when the “old diplomacy” — The European Diplomatic secretive, behind-the-scenes negotiations led by aristocratic pleni- Corps: Diplomats and Inter- national Cooperation from potentiaries — faltered. Nineteenth-century practices in which Westphalia to Maastricht noble diplomats represented princely houses and honed their skills (New York, 2007); Keith Hamilton and Richard traveling between Europe’s royal courts had failed to prevent a cata- Langhorne, The Practice clysmic world war. By 1918, a
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