The Australians at Geneva: Internationalist Diplomacy in the Interwar Years

By James Cotton

After the dubious justice of the Treaty of Versailles and the turmoil of the interwar years, the League of Nations is mainly remembered as a body that failed to create mechanisms that might have forestalled the horrors of Nazism, fascism and the Second World War. It has understandably been overshadowed by the United Nations, that larger, more globally representative body which grew from the League, and which was founded on more unequivocally noble principles in the aftermath of a clear-cut victory of good over evil.

But as the limitations of the United Nations become ever more apparent, we can look with more sympathy at the League and consider what we might learn from the endeavours of those driving this first attempt at global governmental coordination.

As James Cotton relates in this illuminating account, a surprising number of Australians lent their talents and enthusiasm to this internationalist project, and Australian interests were prominently represented. Former Prime Minister Stanley Bruce was there, along with numerous other Australian men and women who made important contributions to international deliberations on questions of global organisation and interaction. This deeply researched and carefully realised story will recast understandings of both the League itself and the place within it of prominent interwar Australian internationalists.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Melbourne University Publishing Ltd
• Release date: Nov 1, 2022
• ISBN: 9780522879001

James Cotton

Novelist. Currently working on my series, Summers Run: An American Boyhood, set in contemporary Pennsylvania. A "feel good" read from where I was raised. Return to Summers Run will be published soon.Interests include country living and lifestyles, rural themes and issues, family farms, sustainable agriculture, Little League baseball, grandparenting, birdwatching, back roads, and books relating to interesting firearms, the "new west", outdoor activities and treks/travel, child actors of the past. Like art featuring landscapes, Americana, American primitive/outsider art. Musical tastes include classical, new age, and bluegrass.Former editor of farm magazines and a livestock photographer. I maintain a website at www.alongcountryroads.com and blogs at http://summersrun.wordpress.com and afeelgoodnovel.blogspot.comI collect diecast vehicles related to farming, and enjoy cooking, carpentry, and home improvement. My wife and I live in the Bitterroot Valley of Montana. We have four sons and two grandchildren.

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MELBOURNE UNIVERSITY PRESS

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First published 2022

Text © James Cotton, 2022

Design and typography © Melbourne University Publishing Limited, 2022 This book is copyright. Apart from any use permitted under the Copyright Act 1968 and subsequent amendments, no part may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted by any means or process whatsoever without the prior written permission of the publishers.

Every attempt has been made to locate the copyright holders for material quoted in this book. Any person or organisation that may have been overlooked or misattributed may contact the publisher.

Typeset by Sonya Murphy, Adala Studio

Cover design by Nada Backovic

Cover image courtesy Australian War Memorial, Members of the Australian Delegation to the League of Nations, Geneva, 1926, P03757.005

Printed in Australia by McPherson’s Printing Group

9780522878998 (paperback)

9780522879001 (ebook)

CONTENTS

Preface

Glossary

Introduction

1The Geneva institutions and interwar Australia

2William Caldwell and the International Labour Organization in Australia

3Raymond Kershaw: Seeking international justice in Geneva and London

4H. Duncan Hall: From global drug controls to threats to collective security

5Non-official delegates in Geneva: Site of peace or site of conflict?

6Completing the cast

Conclusion: Australians and internationalism in Geneva

Appendix: Where in Geneva?

Notes

Bibliography

Index

PREFACE

Work on this book has proceeded over the past ten years while other projects have been in hand. During this time I have accumulated many debts, especially to librarians and archivists. Those at the National Archives of Australia, the National Library of Australia (Petherick Room), the archives of the Rhodes Trust Oxford, Balliol College Oxford, New College Oxford, the British Library, the British Library of Political and Economic Science at the London School of Economics, the Butler Library, Columbia University, and the library of the University of New South Wales (ADFA), Canberra, deserve special acknowledgement.

Extensive use has been made of the League of Nations Archives, located at the Geneva Office of the United Nations. M. Jacques Oberson has been exceptionally helpful in guiding my access to these materials on multiple visits. The materials are cited either by box number or by section/dossier/folder: a projected visit to Geneva in 2020 in order to check on a more unified system of citation had to be abandoned. In addition, at the International Labour Organization Archives, Geneva, M. Jacques Rodriguez greatly facilitated my work.

Many scholars, most notably Jeremy Adelman, Tomoko Akami, Joan Beaumont, Frank Bongiorno, the late Peter Boyce, Ian Campbell, Joy Damousi, Moreen Dee, Patrizia Dogliani, Peter Edwards, David S.G. Goodman, Christopher R. Hughes, Brian Job, Matthew Jordan, David Lee, Tony Milner, Chad Mitcham, Kim Richard Nossal, Priscilla Roberts, Shirley Scott, Glenda Sluga, Ludovic Tournès and Garry Woodard have contributed to improving the author’s understanding with generosity and patience. I have also had the benefit of fruitful exchanges with family historians about some of the characters discussed in this book. The Harden family has been particularly helpful in explicating the fascinating career of Emilia Hernya, the Caldwell family has generously shared images and sources relating to William Caldwell, Sophy Kershaw has allowed me to access images and documents relating to Raymond Kershaw, and Ann Salwey has kindly shared information on the remarkable life of C.H. Ellis. Finally, I am indebted to the Melbourne University Press readers whose sympathetic and constructive comments have led to many improvements of expression and detail, and to Cathryn Game for a meticulous and improving stylistic edit.

James Cotton

Canberra, December 2021

GLOSSARY

INTRODUCTION

On 27 May 1939, League of Nations Secretary-General Joseph Avenol wrote to Stanley Melbourne Bruce at Australia House, London. Former Prime Minister Bruce had been, since 1933, resident High Commissioner and had also become identified with Australia’s presence at the League in Geneva. Avenol was facing, he explained, an ‘impasse’ as member states abandoned the organisation, increasingly turning for security to self-help or isolationism while diminishing its finances and standing.¹ Since Germany had departed the League in 1933, eleven states had withdrawn, the most recent to give notice of this intention being Peru and Hungary. Nevertheless, Avenol had been encouraged by a communication from US Secretary of State Cordell Hull, which, despite America’s formal absence from the organisation, had praised the League for its coordinating role in many areas of technical international cooperation and looked forward to further such joint activity especially in the ‘health, social, economic and financial fields’.²

Avenol wanted an expert high-level committee urgently to prepare a report for the League on practical means of enhancing technical cooperation with the world beyond the organisation that would especially appeal to such non-members as Brazil and the United States. As drafting the intended report would require ‘great skill’, the Secretary-General importunately requested Bruce’s services as chair and gave him freedom to choose appropriate members. Why was an Australian chosen to undertake this delicate and important diplomatic work?

In January 1938, the League Council had set up a committee to study ways of coordinating and enhancing the organisation’s welfare and economic work, with a view to shifting its chief mission from security—where it had proved incapable—to technical cooperation. Bruce chaired this committee (the Committee on the Structure and Functions of the Economic and Financial Organisation) as its mission accorded with many of his own views, expressed in speeches at successive sessions of the League Assembly.³ Its work, however, was disrupted by the disorders of the period. Bruce wanted advances in science to inform revolutions in nutrition and health that would mitigate many of the sources of global insecurity. To be sure, Bruce also considered that a world thus organised would be more receptive to exports of Australian agricultural commodities.

In retrospect, events in March and April 1939—from the German occupation of Prague, to the British security guarantee to Poland, to Mussolini’s invasion of Albania—set the final course for war. These developments were the immediate background to Avenol’s letter, and Bruce’s experience and standing determined his choice. Working with despatch, Bruce’s committee submitted their final report in August 1939, and it was published on the 22nd of that month.⁴

In the event, of course, Bruce’s work was aborted by the outbreak of war in Europe in September. The expulsion by the League of Soviet Russia for its invasion of Finland in December then seemed to bring the organisation’s tenuous claims to universality to an end. In 1940 Avenol himself abandoned the League and attempted to throw in his lot with the Nazi-sponsored Vichy regime in France. The record shows, however, that Bruce’s principles would lie behind the economic and social structures envisaged for the new United Nations organisation after the war.

For the purposes of this book, Bruce’s role in 1939 is noteworthy as an indication that, even at a time when Australia’s diplomatic machinery was in its infancy, Australians were present working not only with but also within the League of Nations and its associated bodies in the interwar years. This book gives an account of those Australians and their contributions, particularly emphasising those who lived in Geneva and devoted in some cases lengthy careers to its international institutions. In many cases these careers have remained unacknowledged.

*

In the past two decades the place of the League of Nations in historical inquiry has been revolutionised.⁵ Major studies have offered new and convincing accounts of topics as various as the functioning of the League’s mandates system, the health organisation, the Secretariat, the performance of the League in global financial regulation and the role of the League Secretary-General.⁶ The place of the League in the external policies of particular nations has also proved a fertile field for new research.⁷ The centenary of its associated body, the International Labour Organization (ILO), has also stimulated innovative scholarship.⁸ The copious records retained by the League have been exploited to produce detailed analyses of the activities of some members of the Secretariat and the potential for prosopographic studies to throw new light on the organisation has been recognised in recent times.⁹ This literature has informed the current study, in particular its focus on the backgrounds, roles and career of the League and ILO secretariats.

In Australia there have been some notable contributions to this movement,¹⁰ as this study acknowledges. However, work offering a more complete account of the Australian actors in the story has been less comprehensive in its scope, with the pioneering and scholarly book of Bill Hudson still the most complete.¹¹ Fiona Paisley, Nicholas Brown and Angela Woollacott, to take some notable examples, have published important studies of specific individuals or discrete movements,¹² but many of the individuals concerned remain either unacknowledged or their work insufficiently analysed. If Australian readers have any familiarity with the activities of their nationals in interwar Geneva, they are more likely to be able to name the fictional Edith Campbell Berry (based on a Canadian as opposed to an Australian original)¹³ rather than the real life Emilia Hernya or indeed William Caldwell. This book is intended to carry the revolution in League studies further into Australian historical inquiry.

*

This work is designed in part as a complement to the material contained in the relevant chapters of survey volumes devoted to Australia’s external relations between the wars.¹⁴ In outline, Australian government policy towards the League of Nations and its cognate institutions evolved principally as a result of learning on the part of policy-makers and officials and of the emergence of an epistemic community, the members of which over time became more aware of the character and possibilities of the League institutions.

At the outset, Australian national aims were set according to the narrow agenda of Prime Minister Hughes. The League was only useful to the extent that it could deliver New Guinea to Australian administration under an unfettered mandate, refrain from interfering with Australia’s sovereign rights to set differential tariffs on foreign imports, and adopt no policies (including on security) that might be used as a pretext to infringe the White Australia policy. However, as the agenda at Geneva broadened to include the codification of international law, preventive measures against epidemic diseases, the control of dangerous drugs, and improvements in labour practices, the government of S.M. Bruce adopted a more sympathetic approach to the League, although it remained wary of larger League ambitions, not least the trend towards ceding national policy regarding dispute resolution to the functioning of arbitration mechanisms.

In the 1930s hopes for disarmament and for further amelioration in the conditions of labour that centred on Geneva were progressively dashed by the impact of economic depression and by the associated turn towards authoritarianism and autarchy in much of Europe. In the same years, Australian policy-makers cooperated with the League’s (highly constrained) attempts to counter Japan’s aggression in Manchuria. With former Prime Minister Bruce then serving as Australia’s leading national delegate to Geneva (including chairing the League Council) greater attention was paid to the League and its associated institutions. However, engagement with the League ended in disappointment, Australia reluctantly following Britain to impose a (selective) regime of sanctions on Italian trade and financial contacts in response to the invasion of Ethiopia, and subsequently abandoning those sanctions after Italian arms overcame Ethiopian resistance and Italy weathered the criticisms voiced at Geneva.

This official Australian response to the work of the Geneva institutions provides part of the context for what follows. The principal intent of this book, however, is to follow in detail and for the first time the paths of a diverse but at the same time untypical group of Australians as they brought their talents, their initiative, their interests and (in some cases) their hopes to interwar Geneva.

The structure of the present book is as follows. Chapter 1 surveys Australia’s engagement with the League, foregrounding the policies of Australian governments and the actions of their agents who were regular visitors to Geneva, considering also the debates that their activities generated in parliament in Melbourne and then in Canberra. It also aims to provide an overview of the wider impact of the League on Australia and Australians.

Chapters 2, 3 and 4 discuss three individuals who were practitioners of the League’s internationalist diplomacy in Geneva: William Caldwell (at the ILO 1921–40), Raymond Kershaw (in the League Secretariat 1924–29) and H. Duncan Hall (in the League Secretariat 1927–38).¹⁵ Caldwell’s impact on Australia—where he returned regularly and was an influence on the views of John Curtin and H.V. Evatt—is shown to have been considerable and hitherto unacknowledged. Kershaw’s role illustrates an Australian at work at the heart of diplomatic machinery that had major consequences for European political dynamics. In Kershaw’s case, some attention is paid to his subsequent career in an attempt to understand the fundamentals of his thinking. Duncan Hall’s initial contribution to the League is illustrative of its potential to frame the terms of global governance, as he was well aware. His later disillusion with the League underlines the global trends of the later 1930s, which especially moulded the views of those in Australia who had been keen supporters of the promise of Geneva for peace and security.

In differing ways, Caldwell, Kershaw and Duncan Hall all sought to define and enlarge an international sphere in which systems of rules (or regimes) would be both constructed by states and constrain their behaviour. They were practitioners of the novel form of internationalist diplomacy that animated the League, especially in its first and most hopeful decade.

Australians visited Geneva for many reasons. Chapter 5 is devoted to the activities and views of those who were there as ‘non-officials’ and therefore were most likely to form and express views beyond the often narrow confines of government policy. The focus is therefore on female delegates to the annual assemblies of the League and on the employer and employee delegates who were included in the annual conferences convened by the ILO. Chapter 6 seeks to complete the cast: other individuals worked for the League for lesser periods of time, or as ancillary staff, or otherwise contributed to its activities and outreach. C.H. Ellis, an Australian working for MI6 who authored a major work on the League, is included in this group, although his official role was unacknowledged. These chapters permit an enlarged view of what the League and its aspirations meant to Australians. The conclusion reviews the nature and degree of the internationalist views held by all the individuals considered in this book during a pivotal period that marks the foundation for the idea of global governance that is now dominant but also contested.

1

THE GENEVA INSTITUTIONS AND INTERWAR AUSTRALIA

Geneva was a world away from Australia in the years between the wars.¹ To travel to Geneva required a major commitment—the fastest passage took no less than three weeks, with the cheapest fares equivalent to a working man’s wages for two months—and while the Australian press reported, at least periodically, on events there, only with the extension of the medium of radio in the later 1920s did Australians begin to hear directly of the League of Nation’s efforts for international peace. Yet a surprising number of Australians made that commitment, and some stayed for lengthy periods or even pursued careers in the League itself. This chapter seeks to explain how a distant Swiss city could command the attention of so many Australian students of and actors in the international affairs of that era.

The League and global politics beyond the Empire– Commonwealth

With the formation of the Australian Commonwealth, the new nation adopted a constitution that imparted to the federal government the power to manage ‘external affairs’ (Section 51, xxix), and one of the original departments of state had that name and something of that function. However, Australia was far from being the practitioner of anything approaching an ‘independent’ foreign policy, a notion that was explicitly rejected by the early prime ministers of Federation. Australian political leaders were confident that the nation’s prosperity, security and even cultural identity were best protected and promoted through membership of the British Empire. Nevertheless, they did chafe at instances of British neglect or indifference, especially in the Pacific. In colonial times the activities of France and Germany in New Caledonia and New Guinea, respectively, had been regarded with apprehension. In 1907, at the Colonial Conference held in London, Alfred Deakin complained that British interests had not been properly asserted in the New Hebrides (now Vanuatu), the joint protectorate having been established with France in 1906 without adequately consulting Australian opinion.²

The experience of World War I transformed Australia’s place in the world. On the one hand, within the Empire it was agreed (on the initiative of the Canadian prime minister, later to be vociferously supported by Prime Minister Billy Hughes) that the self-governing components would have more of a voice in the formation of common policy, and soon the expression ‘Empire– Commonwealth’ emerged as a descriptor of the transnational British world. On the other, Australia, as a signatory of the Treaty of Versailles (28 June 1919), also became a member of the League of Nations, the formation of which—on the insistence of American President Woodrow Wilson—was one of the provisions of the Treaty. Although Britain was the most important power within the new organisation (and its largest financial contributor) after the United States decided not to join, Australia nevertheless assumed, through its new role, a position in the wider international society beyond the Empire–Commonwealth. In time this membership would impose new tasks and responsibilities, requiring Australian governments to consider as never before the nation’s interests beyond those customarily served by attachment to London.³ In short, engaging with the internationalist diplomacy of the League constituted a course of instruction in what Gareth Evans was later to term ‘international citizenship’; that is, the duties expected of nations acting in good faith as members of systems of ameliorative international norms and rules.⁴ This chapter explores important aspects of this experience, framing the accounts in later chapters of Australians who contributed directly to the League experiment.

The requirements of membership

When the United Nations was formed in 1945, it was proclaimed as a new international organisation. However, in its institutions as well as in the agenda it addressed, it copied many of the forms and practices of the League of Nations. Both were a response to a war that threatened to ruin civilisation, both sought to manage security issues and promote arms control—as well as to pursue an extensive economic and social agenda—and both were structured to be controlled by an executive (or ‘Council’) dominated by the major powers, which functioned alongside an assembly in which all member states were represented. The United Nations was the legatee of the League in more than one sense. Not only did the United Nations organisation inherit the property of the League—including its Geneva headquarters—but also some League agencies (including the International Labour Organization (ILO) and UNESCO) became elements of the UN system. The fiction of a new start was maintained to ensure that the United States and the Soviet Union were UN members from the beginning, given that neither were foundation members of the League.

The structure of the League was prescribed in a Covenant of twenty-six articles (as compared to the 111 articles of the UN Charter).⁵ As a member of the League, the most immediate consequence for Australia was participation in the annual gatherings of the representatives of the member nations. Generally in September, for a period of two or three weeks, the Assembly met at the seat of the League in Geneva. Each nation had a single vote in plenary sessions, being permitted to send up to three delegates (as well as a further number of alternates). Initially, the Commonwealth drafted officials or members of parliament who happened to be in Europe; later the choice of delegates became more considered, with the question going before Cabinet. Consistent with the principle adopted by the League—progressive for the time—that no position in the League would be closed to women, the decision was taken in 1922 that the Australian party dispatched to Geneva should contain at least one woman (this at a time when the Australian parliament consisted entirely of men).

The Assembly could debate a wide range of matters, from economic and social affairs to questions of security and disarmament. The practice developed that delegates from the Empire–Commonwealth (the British Empire Delegation: BED) met in preliminary sessions to discuss issues that might arise in order to avoid major differences between them being aired in public. In general, Australian delegates were happy to follow the imperial lead, but the record shows that they were willing to defend their national prerogatives when the occasion required.

The League recruited a permanent Secretariat, under the supervision of a Secretary-General (a position first held by the veteran British diplomat Sir Eric Drummond). Australians were among the early appointees to this new organ of international diplomacy, and the Secretariat consistently included three or four Australians among its number.

The pre-eminent League body was the Council, which consisted of representatives of the great powers, along with representatives regularly elected from the other nations (originally four, rising to eleven in 1936). Although initially content to follow the British lead, Canada became the first British dominion to take a national seat on the Council in 1927. In 1933 Australia joined the Council, a position held until 1936.

The larger League machinery included the ILO (in Geneva) and the Permanent Court of International Justice (PCIJ) (in The Hague). No Australians sat on the bench of the latter, but Australian delegations normally attended the regular ILO assemblies, delegations being composed of an individual speaking for the government, a representative of the employers and a worker delegate.

Finally the League initiated a number of international conferences and deliberations, from gatherings devoted to such social questions as the control of drugs of addiction, to problems entailed by the codification of international laws, to issues of economic cooperation and of disarmament. Australia sent delegates to many of these meetings, and although cooperation with the Empire–Commonwealth was usually the norm, there were occasions when specific Australian interests required a concrete response.

Through the many linkages these memberships and presences forged, Australia was required to contribute a national perspective to forums beyond the familiar Empire–Commonwealth circle, as some of the examples considered below illustrate.

The Australian experience as a League mandatory

At the negotiations in Paris that issued in the Versailles Treaty, Australia’s claims were given strident voice by Prime Minister Hughes.⁶ Australian forces having occupied German New Guinea and Nauru in 1914, Hughes was determined to retain control of a region he considered strategically vital. British inaction in 1884 (despite agitation by the Queensland and Victorian colonial governments) had seen Germany annex New Guinea, and there must be no repetition. The great powers decided, however, that the colonial territories of the former enemy powers should become international ‘mandates’, governed by states charged by the League with the duty to protect the health and well-being of their populations while developing their natural resources in the interests of those populations. Even within the constraints of these principles, Hughes pressed hard and with some success for untrammelled control of New Guinea.

On the grounds that conditions within those territories varied widely, the League’s mandates came to be framed accordingly. In light of its low level of development and lack of national sentiment, New Guinea became a class ‘C’ mandate, governed in effect as an integral part of the mandatory power. Committee work in which J.G. Latham—on Hughes’s staff in Paris—was an important actor, ensured that Australia achieved virtual annexation. Unlike more developed territories, in the case of ‘C’ mandates, the mandatory had no obligation to accept trade or migration from other countries. It could not, however, fortify the territory or recruit the inhabitants for military service. While Hughes still achieved his main objective, which was strategic denial, Australia’s responsibilities nevertheless led to a continuing engagement with the League in which Australia was required to account for its conduct before international opinion.⁷

The accountability of mandatory powers was given substance when, in February 1921, the League formed the Permanent Mandates Commission (PMC). Although this panel of experts was drawn, in many cases, from personnel of the imperial powers, its chief role was to scrutinise the record of the mandatories and especially assess the funding and effectiveness of their programs of moral and material improvement. The PMC would send the Australian Government a highly detailed questionnaire on its administration in New Guinea and also in Nauru, and the practice became that each year a report was assembled and printed for submission to the PMC. Annually the PMC conducted hearings, and Australian officials were dispatched to Geneva to be questioned on these reports and on any other matters thought relevant. As a recent study has demonstrated,⁸ over time the remit of the PMC tended to expand and some nations became subject to critical and publicised PMC strictures, notably South Africa for its administration of South-West Africa (now Namibia) and Britain for its programs in the Palestine mandate. Australia did not entirely escape such criticism.

Concerning Nauru, administered by Australia under a mandate held by the ‘British Empire’, the PMC sought assurance when it appeared that the administration was more focused on the exploitation of the island’s phosphate reserves than advancing the health, welfare and well-being of its inhabitants, the duties required of all League mandatory powers. The three-nation agreement (Australia with Great Britain and New Zealand) on the latter was very specific as to modalities but made no mention of the indigenous inhabitants. Dispatched to Geneva, High Commissioner in London Sir Joseph Cook complained of the ‘very rough passage’ he had experienced before the PMC in 1922.⁹ In response, the Australian Government duly clarified the powers and responsibilities of the Administrator. Nauru’s remoteness and tiny population thereafter led to few difficulties, although Australian representatives later had to defend the extent of the mining royalties paid to the inhabitants, the nature of the education system, and the labour-recruitment practices that brought Chinese miners to the island, among other issues.

The administration of New Guinea, which imposed far greater difficulties, led to some searching questioning at the hearings convened by the PMC. Under the military administration that preceded the mandate, properties owned by German citizens had been expropriated, and their disposition was an issue repeatedly reviewed.

In 1923 the statement supplied by the Australian Government of the accounts of the territory revealed that the trading agency established to serve the needs of the territory had made a tidy £12 000 in profit, which was returned to the Commonwealth. The members of the PMC wanted to know why these monies were not retained to further the good governance of New Guinea, and Cook, who had again travelled to Geneva, had to improvise with some inventive explanations.¹⁰ Learning from this experience, for the 1926 meeting the Australian Government dispatched Joseph Carrodus (Head, Papua, New Guinea and Norfolk Branch, Department of Home and Territories), who was able to draw on first-hand experience in the territory, to assist Cook. Carrodus’s statement before the PMC of the aims and methods of the Australian administration was the most complete exposition to that time of the government’s strategies and objectives.¹¹

Beyond the larger structures of the administration’s role, the PMC inquired on a host of detailed matters, from the question of whether any compulsion was used in the recruitment of native labour—such practices were prohibited under the terms of the League Covenant—to such issues as the provision of medical services and the education of