The Great Power Struggle in East Asia 1944–50, Britain,America and Post-War Rivalry

New Zealand's participation in the League of Nations in the 1920s and early 1930s was greatly influenced by the issue of money. Though an original member, New Zealand regarded the League as a distraction at best and at worst a threat to the British Empire. Unsympathetic conservative governments begrudged the cost of membership, in both representation and dues. Obliged to send delegations to the annual League Assemblies, New Zealand governments handicapped their delegates by refusing to give them the resources to represent their country adequately. However, once at Geneva, the dominion's delegates led campaigns to control the League's budget with the aim of reducing the amount the members had to pay as annual contributions. Ironically, New Zealand's determination to keep its distance from Geneva led to its obsession with the League's finances.     

An Exemplary Leader?: New Zealand and Decolonization of the Cook Islands and Niue

ABSTRACT

New Zealand is proud of its decolonization record: Prime Minister Peter Fraser’s role in developing provisions for non-self-governing territories in the United Nations; New Zealand’s support for the 1960 declaration on colonialism; its leadership on decolonization in the Pacific; the innovative decolonization solution of self-government in free association with New Zealand adopted by the Cook Islands in 1965, and similar arrangement by Niue in 1974. This record is ascribed to a New Zealand belief in self-determination. Closer examination shows many officials, ministers and parliamentarians were opposed to self-government for the Cook Islands, and concerns lingered about Niue. The arrangements reached reflected New Zealand’s reluctance to let go. Yet self-government was granted, in the context of a reassuring New Zealand view of itself as the centre of the South Pacific region. With new competition for influence in the region, it is important that New Zealand does not seek to constrain the Cook Islands’ and Niue’s self-government and potential future self-determination.     

Much Lost,Little Gained? Contemporary Trade Agreements in the Pacific Islands

At the close of the 20th century, it was increasingly clear that Pacific Island countries would struggle to remain competitive in international commodity and merchandise trade. As governments worldwide embraced free trade, many Island exporters looked set to be displaced by more efficient producers elsewhere. Island policymakers also faced pressure from more powerful states to renegotiate trading arrangements to bring them into alignment with the rules of the World Trade Organization. This article explains how Pacific Island countries responded to the overlapping challenges of globalization. It considers strategies pursued by Island states in negotiations with the European Union (EU), and with Australia and New Zealand. In both cases, Pacific Islands pressed for agreements that would take account of their unique trading circumstances, and arrangements that would allow more Pacific Islanders to work abroad. After nearly two decades of talks, however, final results proved disappointing. A proposed regional Economic Partnership Agreement with the EU was essentially abandoned, and a regional trade agreement with Australia and New Zealand was concluded without the signature of Fiji or Papua New Guinea – the two largest Pacific Island economies. Ultimately, contemporary trade agreements in the Pacific achieved little to ameliorate the competitive disadvantages Pacific Island states face participating in international trade.     

国联和平解决国际争端机制研究

一战期间,欧美相关政治力量在通过建立国际联盟(以下简称国联)和平解决国际争端维护世界和平上,达成共识并进行了相关的筹划。一战后召开巴黎和会,协约国在借鉴一战期间关于国联各种构想的基础上,建立了国联及其和平解决国际争端机制。但该机制并没有从根本上改变以往国际政治的结构,加之在自身设计上存在很多漏洞,使得国联和平解决国际争端机制在调处一战后国际争端中所发挥的作用有限。     

Imperialism and Internationalism in Early Australian International Relations: The Contribution of W. Harrison Moore

Depicted as an imperialist by historians, William Harrison Moore, law professor, initiator of international relations teaching in Australia, government expert and League of Nations delegate, is shown to have held a positive view of the role and potential of international institutions, a fact hitherto disregarded yet the key to his thought. He clearly regarded the Empire as making a valuable contribution to the society of states and to Australian interests, but also maintained that the creation of the League had transformed the international system especially in relation to security. In particular, he held that Australia derived undoubted advantages from League membership. Consequently, his internationalism must be seen as the wider context for his imperialist sentiments.     

Sex Trafficking to the Federated Malay States 1920–1940: From Migration for Prostitution to Victim or Criminal?

ABSTRACT

This article analyses the relationships between the colonial government in the Federated Malay States (FMS), international social movement organisations, the League of Nations and sex trafficking. While there is considerable scholarship on social movement organisations and the League of Nations, far less is known about the links between internationalism, colonialism and sex trafficking.

After the First World War, trafficking became the focus of social movement organisations and the League of Nations, but colonial regulation of prostitution and tolerated brothels complicated international responses to trafficking. Colonial administrators saw prostitution as an essential service, whereas feminist and international social movement organisations saw prostitution as an impetus for trafficking. This article engages with newspaper reports, colonial correspondence and Chinese petitions, archival material from social movement organisations, and reports by the Association of Moral and Social Hygiene, the League of Nations and the Chinese Secretariat to extend the literature on the historiography of trafficking and the British Empire.     

Beyond the Australasian Single Aviation Market

This paper notes the emergence of the Single Aviation Market for Australia and New Zealand and considers issues relating to future external relationships facing both countries and their airlines as they move to harmonise their international aviation policies and border controls. In the Asia Pacific region, there is a range of views regarding the shape and pace of liberalisation of bilateral air service agreements. Will other countries follow the Australia-New Zealand move? Will the Australia-New Zealand agreement be widened to include others?     

The United Nations: past and present

The UN is approaching its seventieth birthday in 2015. Kofi Annan, its seventh secretary general, and the only incumbent not to have come from a national government, has written the most honest and insightful memoir of any occupant of the thirty‐eighth floor, Interventions. Despite terrible setbacks in Bosnia and Rwanda, the United Nations remains the most representative and successful international organization in history. As Mark Mazower points out in his Governing the world, an acutely penetrating history of international governance, the successes of the UN are more than the founders of the ill‐fated League of Nations could have dreamt of. Mazower's tour de force combines a history of the intellectual ideas of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and their eventual realization in the League of Nations and the UN. While his conclusions question whether faith in international institutions has been lost, the reality of universal membership of the UN and establishment of an International Criminal Court might suggest otherwise.     

Beyond an Imperial Foreign Policy?: India at the League of Nations, 1919–1946

ABSTRACT

This article argues that India’s role as the only non-self-governing member of the League of Nations provides a largely unexamined entry point into understanding the nature of Indian nationalism and public discourse during the first half of the twentieth century. Using previously unexplored archival documentation of India’s relationship to the League of Nations throughout the duration of the League’s existence, this article exposes the varied and contradictory perspectives through which imperial officials and Indian political figures engaged with international society within the framework of the British Empire. Through the distribution of League publications and the circulation of petitions seeking redress for imperial abuses, a wide range of Indians actively sought to stage India as a clearly defined nation at the level of the international in a way that was not possible within the subcontinent itself.     

‘We Have Been Making History’: The League of Nations and the Leticia Dispute (1932–1934)

This article sheds a historical light on the League of Nations’ role in the settlement of the Leticia dispute between Peru and Colombia (1932–1934). It first describes how the Geneva organization conducted the negotiations with the two opposing parties and reached an agreement for the establishment of a temporary territorial administration of Leticia. Then, it examines the work of the International Commission, scrutinizing the challenges the Commissioners had to overcome to fulfil their mandate. Based on the League of Nations’ archives, this research contributes to a more comprehensive understanding of the settlement of the Leticia dispute. It also shows the innovative character of the Geneva organization's intervention to maintain international peace.     

Equality of Women's Economic Status? A Major Bone of Contention in the International Gender Politics Emerging During the Interwar Period*

This study brings together the often disparate scholarship on the League of Nations and the ILO. It follows the interactions between the League, women internationalists, and the ILO, which evolved around the question of woman-specific labor legislation and the equality of women's status. These interactions resulted in a broadening mandate of international gender policies while deepening the institutional and legal distinction between women's ‘political and civil’ as opposed to their ‘economic’ status. The ILO insisted on certain forms of women-specific labor regulation as a means of conjoining progressive gender and class politics, and was anxious to ensure its competence in all matters concerning women's economic status. The gender equality doctrine gaining ground in the League was rooted in a liberal-feminist paradigm which rejected the association of gender politics with such class concerns, and indeed aimed to force back the ILO's politics of gender-specific international labor standards. As a result of the widening divide between the women's policies of the League and the ILO, the international networks of labor women reduced their engagement with women's activism at the League. The developments of the 1930s deepened the tension between liberal feminism and feminisms engaging with class inequalities, and would have problematic long-term consequences for international gender politics.     

Samoa on the World Stage: Petitions and Peoples before the Mandates Commission of the League of Nations

One of the innovative aspects of the mandates system of the League of Nations, the oversight regime applied to the former German and Ottoman territories seized by the Allied Powers in the First World War, was that it included a right of petition. Inhabitants of any territory governed under mandate, or any interested outsider, could petition the League of Nations if they believed that the stipulations laid down in Article 22 of the League Covenant or in particular mandate texts were being violated. This article explores the origins, development, politics and scope of the practice of petitioning under the mandates system, arguing that it was much more significant, extensive and consequential than has previously been recognised. Petitions rarely offered petitioners redress; instead, they made visible the assumptions about racial and civilisational hierarchies, and the realities of power, on which the system was based. Yet petitions were not only revelatory of political relations but also altered those relations in turn, as petitioners used the opportunity of appeal to learn the skills of claim-making, international lobbying and political mobilisation. The article looks closely at one dramatic case—that of the mass movement against New Zealand's administration of the mandated territory Western Samoa in the late 1920s, which involved numerous petitions to the League—to illustrate these points.     

Signposts: A collection of articles on the Russian intelligentsia

Jan Smuts was one of the key figures in the creation of the League of Nations, the first international organisation with truly global pretensions. However, Holism and Evolution, the most philosophical of his works, and one that illuminates his views on international organisation, has remained in a state of relative academic neglect. This paper turns to that work for a richer understanding of the background assumptions of those who contributed to the creation of the League. To do so, this paper lays bare the main ideas of Holism and Evolution, emphasising those elements most relevant to Smuts's proposals for international organisation, and situates his thought within broader currents of liberal imperialism. Such an examination of Holism and Evolution aids greatly in our understanding of some of the most contested issues in the debate over the nascent League of Nations: sovereignty, imperialism, self-determination, and the conception of politics in organic terms.     

The Varying Role of Vertebrae in Pacific Fishbone Analysis: Comparing Tropical Versus Temperate Midden Assemblages

Archaeologists working in the tropical Pacific have demonstrated the feasibility and value of including fish vertebrae in midden analyses, and recent New Zealand studies draw similar conclusions. This work provides an illustrated guide to the identification of vertebrae from key New Zealand fish taxa and shows the effects of including vertebrae on a large fishbone assemblage from southern New Zealand. We note major differences between New Zealand and tropical Pacific assemblages resulting from the inclusion of vertebrae. Unlike the Indo‐Pacific taxa of the tropical Pacific, no New Zealand species have been shown to be sensitive to the inclusion of vertebrae. In both places, including vertebrae results in changes in relative abundance and rank order; but in New Zealand, this is a function of processing practices, not fishing behaviours. This work serves to highlight changes in the Polynesian fishing adaption following the colonisation of New Zealand. Copyright © 2017 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

‘An Alternative to Imperialism’: Leonard Woolf,The Labour Party and Imperial Internationalism, 1915–1922

This article examines writings by the British Labour Party theorist Leonard Woolf on international government, imperialism, and the League of Nations. Woolf was a leading member of a group of party officials who supported a deepening commitment to the League of Nations in the immediate post First World War period. Woolf, and his colleagues in the Labour Party, argued that transforming the practice of economic imperialism in European colonies would help to ease tensions between the European powers. The result of such arguments was to present empire as a canvas for displaying an improved sense of European virtue. In particular, abandoning the practice of economic imperialism could instead allow colonial powers to meet their responsibility to ready colonial peoples for self-government and full participation in the global economy. The reforms proposed by Woolf and his Labour Party colleagues could be considered a last gasp of early twentieth century British imperial internationalism.     

Claims to protection: the rise and fall of feminist abolitionism in the League of Nations' Committee on the Traffic in Women and Children, 1919–1936

This article examines the League of Nations Advisory Committee on the Trafficking of Women and Children (CTW) to assess the impact of international feminists on the interwar anti-sex trafficking movement. It argues that women who were firmly embedded in the transnational and international women's rights movement built a coalition on the CTW to ensure the prominence of the feminist abolitionist position of sex trafficking in the 1920s. This position was defined by calls for equal standards of morality between the sexes, resistance to laws that treated prostitutes as a group and infringed on their human rights, and unwavering demands for the abolition of state-regulated prostitution. Changes in the personnel and bureaucratic structure of the CTW and the rising tide of nationalism served to undermine the feminist abolitionists' position in the League in the 1930s.     

Harry Holland's ‘Samoan Complex’

ABSTRACT

‘Harry’ Holland, one of the early leaders of the parliamentary Labour Party in New Zealand, was an anomalous figure in early 20th-century New Zealand politics. In addition to a principled adoption of militant socialism, he stood apart from the rest of the House of Representatives due to his pronounced interest in Samoan affairs. This interest was so acute that one of his Labour colleagues, John A. Lee, remarked that he possessed a ‘Samoan complex’. This paper addresses the lack of critical attention paid to this facet of his career. Even though Holland's attitudes towards Samoa were sometimes couched in the same vocabulary as the coloniser, he always stood on the side of the colonised. His endorsement of Indigenous self-government was ahead of its time, and his campaigning played a key role in the Samoan struggle for independence. At a broader level, Holland was possibly the most significant of a cohort of colonial critics who questioned New Zealand's right to govern Pacific Islanders and who sought to rein in New Zealand's more overbearing Pacific Island administrations.     

At War with Bill Jordan: The New Zealand High Commission in Wartime London

For the government of New Zealand, the role of high commissioner in the United Kingdom was of paramount significance. The Labour government's 1935 electoral success was followed quickly by the appointment of William Jordan to fill this role. British-born and with a very visible loyalty to the Crown and the imperial idea, during the pre-war years he was nonetheless not averse to offering stringent opinions on British foreign policy. An active participant in the League of Nations, he believed passionately in the value of collective security and the need to forcefully deter the dictators. The war's outbreak in September 1939 hit him particularly hard but his support for the British Empire's greatest challenge remained resolute. His High Commission was blessed with an abundance of talent to handle all the key issues and despite the considerable distances involved, a regular stream of visitors from New Zealand were prepared to make the arduous journey, including among them Prime Minister Peter Fraser. Their host was a complex character who was noted for a ‘volcanic’ temper and clashed regularly with members of his staff, visiting political figures from home, fellow dominions' high commissioners and even British dignitaries. Yet, for the sake of the Commonwealth alliance, all this was kept successfully behind closed doors.     

A link in ‘the great chain of Empire friendship’: the Victoria League in New Zealand

With the objective of exploring New Zealand women's part in imperialism, this article focuses on the history of the Victoria League. Through its activities during war and peace, the League promoted New Zealand's place as a loyal part of the British Empire. The League in New Zealand was part of a ‘female imperialism’ whereby elite women in the ‘white’ settler societies performed gendered work to promote the strength and unity of the Empire. Women's work considered suitable for empire friendliness and unity ranged from hospitality and socialising in the ‘private’ female world, to the support of immigration and education. Wartime saw patriotic ‘mothers of empire’ in full force. The article covers the League's work into the second half of the twentieth century when, despite the ‘end of empire’, imperial loyalty endured, entwined with emerging national identities. Maternal imperial identity slowly waned, the legacy of Queen Victoria lasting until local challenges to the process of colonisation became vocal.     

Being international in times of war: Arthur Sweetser and the shifting of the League of Nations to the United Nations

Transnational actors are increasingly surfacing when it comes to understanding the global dimensions of the modern nation-state. Thinking of the modern state from the diversity of its personnel and its many intersections with private and semi-private actors or institutions with a transnational reach, the new diplomatic history acknowledges the embeddedness of states in border-crossing agencies. What has been conceptualized as ‘network diplomacy’ grasps both the role of transnational epistemic communities for the making of particular policy fields and the perception of diplomats as an integral part of transnational initiatives. Taking the League of Nations as a case study, this article analyses how its personnel attempted to spell out ideas of network diplomacy and to make their exposed position at the intersection of transnational civil society, state politics and international institutions work to effect political change. We focus on the transnational career of Arthur Sweetser (1888–1968) who, as a journalist, a long-term member of the League secretariat, the UN staff and the US administration, was at the forefront of developing new techniques of diplomatic practices beyond institutional mandates. Sweetser’s trajectory allows us to illuminate the mechanisms of network diplomacy by probing into multi-layered negotiation processes that engaged state practices, international institutions and the border-crossing agency of individuals. Characterizing him as transnational enables one to interlink his mobile trajectory with a particular scope of action that unfolded beyond the political demarcation of the nation-state and its instituted logics of rule and diplomacy. We further carve out the main features of a diplomatic practice that was formally non-existent yet crucial to the transfer of League principles, practices and personnel to the new United Nations.