In the decades before the First World War, Europeans developed new institutions and information networks to try to understand and manage a rapidly changing world economy. This was a diffuse organizational web without a clear institutional centre, but it was grounded in an increasingly standardized and professionalized set of treaty practices. This chapter traces Lucien Coquet, Hubert Llewellyn Smith, Bernhard Harms, and Richard Riedl as they began to build careers in a globalizing economy that was marked by sharp social and political tensions.

In the long history of international trade politics, the League era was a complex period of transformation. Export growth slowed in the 1920s, especially in Europe, but this was not a straightforward rollback of pre-war globalization. Many functional relations of trans-border economic interdependence remained and many intellectuals, business leaders, and public officials were deeply committed to expanding those linkages even as they embraced more assertive national, regional, and imperial programmes. League collaborators used convergent multilateral methods to pursue sharply divergent visions of international order. Much of their conflict stemmed from the inconclusive 1919 Peace Settlement, which left openings for competing institutional programmes to develop. The regulation of foreign trade became a central platform for world-ordering impulses, but no single individual or government was strong enough to impose a unified vision of the world economy on the League. Llewellyn Smith arguably came closest during his brief period of dominance in the early Economic Committee.

Peace planning intensified starting in 1917, as the Russian Revolution and Wilson’s decision to join the war raised its ideological stakes. There were several competing projects for cooperative control over raw materials and for international free trade, but these plans were undermined by conflicts over resource sovereignty and imperial preference. The final League Covenant included a barebones commitment to ‘equitable treatment of foreign commerce’ In the 1920s, Llewellyn Smith, Harms, Coquet, and Riedl used this legal placeholder to revisit the work that was left undone at the peace conference, drawing on the new organizational structures that developed around foreign trade policy during and after the war.

When war broke out in 1914, both sides initiated elaborate efforts to shift the world economy to a war footing. The war divided trade partners and exposed dependence on imports of strategic materials, prompting efforts to exploit enemies’ commercial vulnerabilities through the tools of blockade and submarine warfare. As the belligerents struggled to secure their supply lines, they also began to devise new legal and institutional safeguards to ensure permanent access to strategic materials in peacetime. Lucien Coquet, Hubert Llewellyn Smith, Bernhard Harms, and Richard Riedl participated in the operation of the war economy and helped initiate planning for the future transition from war to peace. Their stories show how the experience of economic warfare was framed by the trade institutions and information networks inherited from the belle époque.

The interwar period marked the end of a dramatic expansion in international trade. The First World War did not destroy the commercial networks that had underpinned nineteenth-century globalization, but it did reroute and repurpose them to serve military ends. It transformed the legal and geopolitical context of international trade by precipitating the collapse of continental empires across much of Eurasia and decentring Europe in global markets.1 From 1913 to 1928, Europe’s share of total world trade dropped by roughly 16 per cent, due to a relative decline in direct imports and exports as well as transit trade.2 In an attempt to give structure to a world economy in flux, many Europeans embraced new multilateral methods in the 1920s, using the League of Nations as their institutional canvas. They disavowed the laissez-faire liberalism of the past, concluding that markets would have to be actively propped open using international rules and institutions.

After Llewellyn Smith initially set the League Economic Committee on a cautious course, Franco-German conflict helped stimulate the development of a more ambitious trade agenda that found expression in the League’s 1927 World Economic Conference. Bernhard Harms participated by demanding a more broadly institutionalized international economic regime that would include the United States and would cover sensitive issues skirted by Llewellyn Smith, including reparations, raw materials, and colonial markets. Harms had a prominent bully pulpit from which to promote this vision, as the director of the IfW. He used his position to facilitate ongoing policy dialogue among a large community of League collaborators and critics. He helped establish a novel think-tank environment that spanned business, academia, and government and became an important base of support for the League. In recognition of his pivotal role in international information networks, Harms was asked to coordinate a massive economic bibliography for the League at the end of the 1920s, with backing from US philanthropic societies. This abortive project revealed the limits of Harms’s strategy of transatlantic outreach.

In the early 1920s, Hubert Llewellyn Smith took the lead in developing a new framework for multilateral trade policy in the Economic Committee of the League of Nations. He integrated the existing bilateral treaty regime into the League by imposing new forms of international oversight and standardization – most notably by codifying the most-favoured-nation norm. He also crafted a new rule-making routine to support the development of standalone multilateral agreements on key topics such as customs administration. Llewellyn Smith worked hard to preserve the status of the British Empire as an autonomous but segmented sub-unit within the League but he also understood that doing so would constrain Britain’s leadership capacity. Consequently, he aired on the side of caution, seeking consensus, working incrementally, and avoiding bold provocation. His limited ambitions allowed him to focus on crafting a new multilateral process, with important consequences for the subsequent history of international trade policy in the interwar period and beyond.

In 1927, when Coquet launched his movement for a European customs union, Riedl initiated an elaborate programme to use the League to bring about Anschluss gradually by embedding Austro-German bilateral economic integration in a multilateral system. He sought to bypass the formal treaty constraints that prevented the Austrian and German governments from pursuing this course by facilitating low-level administrative rapprochement through business organizations, using the Vienna Chamber of Commerce and the International Chamber of Commerce (ICC). By the time Riedl arrived in the ICC in 1927, it had already become an important organizational auxiliary to the League. Up to that point, the ICC’s engagement in League trade policy had focused on specific areas of business regulation, such as commercial arbitration and trade credit. Riedl pushed the ICC into a more political role by intervening in debates about the fundamental architecture of trade treaties. In the process, Riedl provoked new debate about the League’s authority to mediate relations between national governments and international business.

As Bernhard Harms pushed demanded a more global League trade policy, Lucien Coquet tried to establish firmer European substructures. Coquet embraced regional trade policy as a means to address unresolved Franco-German tensions over security. In effect, he was trying to reimpose the temporary constraints that had been placed on German commercial rights through the Treaty of Versailles by applying them to the rest of Europe as well. To advance this goal, he helped rally French politicians and business leaders in a new organization that was simply called the European Customs Union (Union Douanière Européenne, or UDE). Working in close partnership with the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Coquet built out national branches of the UDE across Europe. Coquet and Riedl joined forces in 1929 to promote a proposal for European federation from the French Minister of Foreign Affairs, Aristide Briand, and a parallel plan for a League-sponsored tariff truce. This marked a brief moment of unity when diverse League collaborators tried to work together to respond to the onset of the Great Depression through concerted European tariff reduction. This cooperation quickly lost momentum as the Great Depression advanced, however.