Pearl Harbor demonstrates that war can occur when coercion (e.g., economic sanctions) works too well. To investigate this dynamic, we also engage another important, but controversial, question in this case – namely, whether the United States (US) president Franklin D. Roosevelt (FDR) deliberately sought war with Japan as a way to enter the war in Europe. Contrary to some scholars, our analysis concludes that FDR was aware of the total oil embargo that Acheson implemented and that FDR wanted war. Indeed, the US made only one serious attempt to avoid war – the modus vivendi proposal. FDR supported the proposal because he thought it would give the US more time to prepare. Tojo may have entertained the proposal, but he never received it because Chiang Kai-shek and Churchill vetoed it. The latter needed the US to intervene in the war to increase their chances of winning. This is yet another example of alliances promoting war – in this instance, by vetoing a peace proposal. Finally, we consider why Japan was willing to attack the US, even though it knew the US was more powerful.

After the First World War, the nations of Europe faced exchange-rate volatility, high national debts, and inflationary pressures. In response, many sought to stabilize the economies through extensive fiscal and monetary reforms. One of the key figures in the reconstruction effort was Henry Strakosch. As the Bank’s informal adviser, he was responsible for devising restructuring plans across Central Europe and the British Empire. Leveraging his connections at the League of Nations, the Bank of England, and the City of London, Strakosch led negotiations that resulted in the establishment of both the Austrian National Bank and the South African Reserve Bank. His work exemplified the institutionalization of economic orthodoxy in circles of influence and heralded the rise of the international financial expert. More broadly, Strakosch’s interventions contributed to the state-building process in the interwar years, as new nations drew on expert knowledge to establish their political legitimacy.

The relationship between states, cities and international organizations is a useful prism to assess broader trends of the development of the international system. Engaging with sub-national actors like cities and their networks adds a level of complexity to the question of how independent an organization is and how it relates to the preferences of its member states. This chapter provides historical context to this current debate. It looks at how a conceivable international role of cities became an issue in the interwar era. In particular, it looks at how the ‘Union Internationale des Villes’, founded in 1913, sought some form of formal recognition from the League of Nations, but also fostered more modest ties with the International Labour Organization (ILO). This historical episode might not equip us with straightforward ‘lessons’ for today. But it might help us to adopt a more nuanced and informed perspective on current debates about international institutional reform and the promise that cities and their associations and networks can play in this regard.

During the 1920s Jewish organizations in the USA developed a strategy for guarding the global security of Jews. The strategy was based on economic assistance, international diplomatic pressure, and emigration. The Nazi accession to power fundamentally upset that strategy.

The Paris Conference assigned the League of Nations the task of continuing to construct the new international order. This in turn would restructure the international system. Through administering institutions and adjudicating issues, the League sought to reconcile the liberalism of Wilsonianism with the realities of geopolitics. Mandates, never colonies in a legal sense, posited an alternative to colonialism, however much the mandatory powers wanted to administer them as imperial domains. Minority protection sought to re-engineer citizenship itself, so that minorities could preserve the attributes that made them minorities while enabling them to become full members of the national communities of the successor states to the multinational empires. The record of the League proved the most troubled in international security, its broadest but most ill-defined area of responsibility. In Manchuria and Ethiopia, the League proved unable to prevent determined imperial expansion on the part of Japan and Italy, two founding members. The work of the League is best assessed not in categories of ‘success’ or ‘failure’, but in the new ways it posited creating a global legal order.

The League of Nations was the first permanent international organisation with a general mandate. Its establishment is widely regarded as having had a significant, if elusive, impact upon international law, which became centred on international institutions. These three aspects of the League – its permanence, the generality of its mandate, and the ’institutional turn’ it brought to international law – lie at the heart of the assumed significance of the League for contemporary international lawyers. They are regarded as the League’s principal innovations and central components of its legacy, often without much interrogation and rarely subject to sustained analysis. This chapter offers analysis and interrogation to nuance claims about the League’s innovations. It presents the League as an institution whose grand designs often failed, but which innovated quietly and gradually. Above all, it shifts the focus away from the perceived ’breakthrough’ of 1919, and highlights the evolutionary nature of the League, which adapted throughout its life.

The Intergovernmental Conference on Rural Hygiene held in Bandung, Dutch East Indies, in August 1937 is often discussed as a precursor to the 1978 Alma-Ata Declaration on Primary Health Care. In this chapter, we investigate the Bandung Conference’s antecedents rather than its legacy. We view “Bandung” as a synthetic formulation of various Southeast Asian initiatives, experiments, and experiences in rural hygiene and social medicine, most of which were designed and developed in areas under colonial rule. Primarily focusing on French Indochina and the Dutch East Indies, we explore the meanings of social medicine and rural hygiene in Southeast Asian contexts, where health measures were tied to (colonial) economic objectives, health budgets were limited, and populations mostly rural. However, the delegates at the Bandung Conference proposed highly idealistic programs that could not possibly be realized. Consequently, all lofty plans turned into a mirage that symbolically absolved colonial administrations from their responsibility to safeguard their subject’s health. Social medicine at Bandung was a tool for colonial governmentality at a time when colonial empires were contested and weakened.

International Law, we are often told, ‘moved to Institutions’ in the early twentieth century. While recent literature has (masterfully, to be sure) explored the intellectual trajectories of some of the leading lawyer-diplomats or legal doctrines entangled in these international organisations, most accounts divorce their analysis from the seemingly banal histories of the ‘buildings, staffs, and letterheads’. This is particularly true for the history of the interim headquarters of international institutions. For the towering edifices specially erected to host these organisations, just like Rome, were not built in one day. For this reason, the early years of these institutions were shaped by the spatial constraints that their improvised and temporal dwellings imposed on them. For that reason, in this piece I shed light on the interim function of the Hotel National (1920–1937) and the Lake Success complex (1947–1952), as, respectively, placeholders for the League of Nations and the United Nations. By situating the everyday geographies of international law-making in these two precarious and unstable venues, I explore the tensions and hierarchies embedded within parochial modes of organisation that claimed the mantle of the international.

By focusing on the relations between the polity of Ethiopia and the institutions of international ordering – the United Nations and its predecessor, the League of Nations, chief among them – in this chapter I explore the problem of the ‘global colour line’ in relation to international institutions. In particular, I trace the lofty promises, and resounding disappointments, that the United Nations (as a proverbial White, and male, Knight) offered the racialised peoples of the world – and Ethiopia, in particular – in their attempt to challenge a racialised and hierarchical global order. The result is neither a blind celebration of the United Nations’ anticolonial potential, nor a resolute condemnation of its imperial lineage. Instead, I want to embrace the ambiguities offered by the metaphor of this racialised and gendered saviour trope – especially in relation to the racialised savage non-European other. For in any attempt to overturn the global colour line, the United Nations and its family of international organisations will prove to be both utterly indispensable and insufficient.

The accession of six British Empire member states to the League of Nations questioned the Empire’s constitutional structure, and whether it was one entity or many. The resulting debate would form the doctrine of ‘inter se’ that attempted to rationalise the Empire’s new situation. Chapter Three delves into the frictions caused by separating the Empire’s international personality, as imperial federalists attempted to control and harmonise the foreign relations of the Empire, whilst Dominion leaders sought to use their newfound seat in Geneva to pursue their distinct foreign policies. As the Dominions began to gain full statehood, the chapter examines how the gulf between their membership at the League and that of India’s began to widen.

‘An anomaly among anomalies!’ exclaimed David Hunter Miller, the United States’ legal representative at the Paris Peace Conference in 1919. For Miller, in the decision to admit the British Empire’s ‘self-governing’ colonies, such as Canada, to the idealistic new organisation to secure world peace, the League of Nations had stretched international norms. What aggravated this already-peculiar situation for Miller was the admission of India, a British colony with few self-governing and representative institutions, no independent foreign policy, and no discernible international personality.

This chapter examines the historical evolution of great powers’ efforts to manage their relations, foster international orders, and promote processes of peaceful change in international relations through the use of international organizations since the Congress of Vienna in 1815. The focus is on the mechanisms and dynamics of balances of power, concert, and collective security, as reflected in the practices of IOs, including diplomatic congresses and conferences of the nineteenth century, the League of Nations, and the United Nations since 1945. The main research question remains: Under which conditions do great powers use international organizations to promote processes of peaceful change in international relations? The relevant conditions include: a stable and agreed systemic distribution of power among the great powers; a certain degree of normative consensus among them; and a minimal agreement upon the “rules of the game” in the management of international relations. Among the findings drawn from the historical record, we can conclude that great powers tend to be status quo-oriented, and that IOs might thrive, prosper, and affect the behavior of great powers when the three basic conditions are in place.