Economic and Financial Organization of the League of Nations

Add links
Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
Economic and Financial Organization of the League of Nations
Organisation économique et financière
AbbreviationEFO
SuccessorUnited Nations
Formation1920 (1920)
Dissolved1945; 79 years ago (1945)
Parent organization
League of Nations

The Economic and Financial Organization (EFO, French: Organisation économique et financière) was the largest of the technical arms of the League of Nations,[1]: 6  and the world's first international organization dedicated to promoting economic and monetary co-operation.[2]: 466  It took shape in the early 1920s and was in activity until the creation of the United Nations in 1945. It has been described as having had seminal influence on postwar economic institutions, notably the International Monetary Fund (IMF).[1]

Background

The establishment of the EFO took place in the aftermath of unprecedented transnational cooperation initiatives among allied powers during

Paris Peace Conference established a Supreme Economic Council to manage the postwar economic emergencies, but that was soon undermined by a growing division of views between France and Italy on one side, advocating a continuation of the wartime joint action, and the UK and U.S. on the other side, preferring a rapid return to market-oriented business as usual.[3]

In late 1919, Dutch financial community leaders

Brussels Conference that would be held in September–October 1920.[3]

Establishment and setup

Arthur Salter was the head of the EFO during its heyday from 1922 to 1931

In 1919, a prefiguration team of the League, located at 117 Piccadilly in London, had started to collect and publish economic statistics,[1]: 27  which remained the initial focus of the Economic and Financial Section that was soon established within the League Secretariat,[2]: 470  and spent much of 1920 preparing the conference.[4]: 436  Walter Layton led that fledgling team and moved with it to Geneva in the course of 1920. Per Jacobsson joined the staff in April 1920. In 1922, Salter took over from Layton's acting successor Frank H. Nixon,[1]: 6  and led the EFO until 1931, expanding its staff from seventeen to sixty during that period.[2]: 475  By then, it was significantly larger than any other section of the League Secretariat.[5]: 303 

Following a recommendation of the Brussels Conference,

Assembly, which dealt with all so-called technical issues (under the formal authority of the League's Council) and met once every year in September.[2]
: 478 

In 1923, the Provisional Committee was made permanent and divided into an Economic Committee, dealing primarily with matters of trade and industry organization and composed mostly of government officials, and a Financial Committee focused on monetary and fiscal issues with a greater participation of central and private bankers.[6]: 13-16  The two committees' setup was flexible and inclusive enough that American delegates participated in them from 1927 despite the fact that the U.S. was not a member of the League. Similarly, Japanese delegate remained on the two Committees for some time after Japan withdrew from the League in 1933.[2]: 472  The Economic Committee was granted permanent formal status within the League in 1927, initially with a membership of 15 that grew over subsequent years, and the Financial Committee in 1937. In the meantime the Financial Committee kept a smaller size of 10 members, who typically came from central banks and finance ministries of member states and the U.S.;[2]: 473  Belgium, France and the UK were represented in it by finance ministry officials, while Switzerland and the Netherlands delegated private-sector and central bankers.[1]: 16 

There were also a number of sub-committees of fixed duration, frequently including leading economists of the time, and standing committees on fiscal and statistical matters. The organisational setup of the EFO, like that of the League of Nations in general, was deliberately obscure as the related opacity of decision-forming was viewed as helpful to manage the sensitive matters of economic and financial diplomacy.[2]: 470-474 

Financial Committee membership

As of late 1923, the Financial Committee's members included

A decade later, the Committee still included Janssen (as Chair), Niemeyer, Strakosch, and ter Meulen, as well as

Niemeyer, Strakosh and ter Meulen, who had been core committee members from the outset, all resigned in 1937, together with Młynarski.[9]

The other individuals who sat on the Provisional Economic and Financial Committee between 1920 and 1923 and/or on the Financial Committee between 1923 and 1931 were

International financial and economic conferences

The EFO was the linchpin of the four interwar

banking supervision, in part a reflection of the fact that the United States, which had the most advanced supervisory practices of the time, was not a member of the League.[11]: 22  Partly for that reason, the European banking crisis of 1931
shattered the 1920s orthodoxy, leading to the complete failure of the London Conference in June 1933 after which the League made no further similar attempts.

The League also sponsored a less ambitious International Conference for the Simplification of Customs Formalities, which was held in Geneva from October 15 to November 3, 1923.[12]: 12 

Stabilization loans in the 1920s

Jean Monnet was the main architect of the League's loan framework pioneered with Austria in 1922-1923

Unlike the postwar IMF, which has significant resources of its own, the EFO itself had no financial firepower but could resolve

Baring Brothers.[1]
: 13 

Austria

A.R. Zimmerman, previously mayor of Rotterdam, was the League's Commissioner-General in Austria

The EFO's first real action came later in 1922 with the financial distress of Austria, which was considered desperate enough that the allied powers did not want to take responsibility for it themselves. Austria was buffeted between the competing interests of Britain (which had high credit exposure to it), France (which was obsessed with the prospect of German-Austrian unification), Czechoslovakia and Italy (which had competing designs on Austria as its respective neighbours on the north and south). Jean Monnet, by then the League's deputy secretary-general, convinced the Council to take on the challenge, in conjunction with eloquent pleas by Austrian Chancellor Ignaz Seipel.[1]: 14-15  Monnet had the intuition that the respective British, French, Czechoslovak and Italian interests could be leveraged into a cooperative plan, and had it conceived during a lakeside gathering with Salter and Basil Blackett. As he put it, "that real danger of foreign intervention could be literally flipped and transformed into a positive endeavor of joint action. It was about channelling the very forces that could have been tempted to take advantage of the crisis into contributing to the preservation of Austrian independence."[13]: 100–101  A special committee on Austria, formed to prepare the assistance program jointly with the Financial Committee of the League, brought together Seipel with Britain's Arthur Balfour, Czechoslovakia's Edvard Beneš, France's Gabriel Hanotaux, and Italy's Guglielmo Imperiali.[14]: 499 

The plan, finalized in three protocols signed in Geneva on 4 October 1922, entailed a fiscal and structural adjustment program in line with the principles which League staff had fostered at the Brussels and Genoa Conferences,

Montagu Norman. During the program's negotiation in 1922, Norman initially fought for the head of that institution to be a foreigner, but this met considerable political pushback in Vienna. In December 1922, the Austrian government unilaterally decided to appoint local banker Richard Reisch [de] as governor of the Oesterreichische Nationalbank, which was promptly established in January 1923. This conflict delayed the loan's issuance until a compromise was found in the spring of 1923, under which the League would appoint an "adviser" with extensive oversight powers over the central bank's decisions.[15] The £2 million loan was guaranteed by European governments and successfully raised in private markets in May 1923, underwritten by J.P. Morgan & Co. in New York and the Bank of England in London.[16]
: 661 

Other loans

After Austria in 1922, similar features were applied to the League-coordinated loans to Hungary (1924), Danzig (1925 and 1927), Bulgaria (1926 and 1928), Estonia (1927), and Greece (1924 and 1928).[16]: 661  There were thus nine "League loans" in total, in six countries, for an aggregate amount of £81 million. Of that, nearly half was provided by British investors and nearly one-fifth by American ones, the rest coming from Continental Europe.[14]: 524  The Hungarian loan was requested in August 1923 after the Reparation Commission had agreed on the amounts Hungary had to pay. Hungary was perceived to be in a less desperate position than Austria a year earlier, which allowed for issuance without any government guarantee.[16]: 666  The League's buildup of credibility made it possible to gradually lower the loans' costs.[16]: 667, 670  Portugal explored a similar agreement in 1928 but eventually balked at the onerous conditions,[17]: 599  as Albania had done earlier in the decade.[16]: 674-675  In Hungary, Danzig, and Greece, as in Austria, the loans entailed the creation of a new independent central bank, respectively the Hungarian National Bank, Bank of Danzig, and Bank of Greece. In Bulgaria and Estonia, the existing national bank was restructured and made more independent.

In all of these loans except Estonia, a foreign official would control two key accounts on the League's behalf (this was a specifically appointed Commissioner-General in Austria, Hungary and Bulgaria; the League's High Commissioner in Danzig; and the pre-existing International Financial Commission in Greece[18][19]: 67 ). First, the external loan account held money provided by the foreign creditors for use by the borrowing government to cover fiscal deficits during the initial phase of transition. Second, the security revenues account held money collected in the borrowing country as so-called security revenues that served as collateral for the foreign loans, typically from customs and/or from state monopolies. In addition to controlling both accounts, the League's Commissioner usually had a veto right over government decisions deemed adverse to the good execution of the program. Separately and complementarily, the program entailed the appointment of a League Adviser to the (generally newly created) national central bank, formally an employee of the central bank but in effect a representative of the League. The Adviser's position was defined in the statutes of the central bank, which were typically drafted directly by the EFO's Financial Committee. It granted him a wide supervisory role over the management and operations of the central bank, sometimes including a veto on the bank's Board decisions. Finally, the program would designate Trustees to administer the security revenues in case of default,[17]: 596–597  except in Greece where it relied on the International Financial Commission.[14]: 525 

Countries that had recourse to similar borrowing schemes without appealing to the League's assistance, primarily Poland in 1927 and Romania in 1929, struggled to secure financing conditions as good as those under the League's framework,[16]: 671-674  despite the fact that both were advised by Monnet who was by then in private practice. The governance innovations pioneered by the League inspired other loan packages, including the 1924 Dawes Plan for Germany and those of Belgium and Italy in 1926.[16]: 676  Overall and from the standpoint of their aims of financial stabilization and economic recovery by means of fundamental change in the fiscal and monetary regimes, the loans were impressively successful.[14][17]: 600, 607-608, 618 

Officials appointed by the League

  • Commissioner-General in Austria: Alfred Rudolph Zimmerman [nl] (Dutch, December 1922 – 1926)[1]: 15 [20]: 143 
  • Adviser at the Austrian National Bank: Charles Schnyder von Wartensee (Swiss, 1923-1924); Anton van Gijn [nl] (Dutch, 1924-1925); Robert Kay (American, 1926-1929)[15]
  • Commissioner-General in Hungary: Jeremiah Smith Jr. (American, May 1924-June 1926)[21][22]: 297 
  • Adviser at the Hungarian National Bank: Harry Arthur Siepmann (British, June 1924 – 1926)[22]: 293 [23]
  • Commissioner-General in Bulgaria: René Charron [bg] (French, 1926-1932);[24] Jean Watteau (French, 1932-1934);[25] Pierre Cheysson (French, 1934-1940)[26]
  • Adviser at the Bulgarian National Bank: Jean Watteau (French, 1930-1932);[25] Nikolai Köstner (Estonian, 1932-1940)[27]
  • Adviser at the Bank of Greece: William Horace Finlayson (British, 1928-1937)[19]: 112 
  • Adviser at the Bank of Estonia: Walter James Franklin Williamson (British, 1926-1930)[28]

European integration advocacy

In the late 1920s and early 1930s, partly in response to the surge of U.S. protectionism followed by tariff escalation between the United Kingdom and its European neighbors, the EFO developed tentative ideas about European integration, foreshadowing developments two decades later that would lead to the establishment of the European Coal and Steel Community.[5] Salter and Italy's Pietro Stoppani, who had joined the EFO staff in 1923, reflected on the parallel between Europe and the United States and the case for a large integrated market delivering beneficial economies of scale; Salter used the expression "United States of Europe" in his own writing. In their view, the realistic way to promote that aim was to agree on exceptions to the most favoured nation principle among some or all European countries, a form of trade regionalism,[5]: 308  also stimulated by the landmark call for a "European Union" submitted by France's Aristide Briand to 27 European member states of the League in September 1929, and the responses it elicited.[29] In September 1930, the League's Assembly decided to set up a Commission of Inquiry for European Union (French: Commission d'Études pour l'Union Européenne) to elaborate on Briand's proposal, which was chaired by Briand but soon met stalemate in 1931, contributing to Briand's downfall as French foreign minister in January 1932.[30] The EFO's legitimation of European regionalism played a role in stimulating two stillborn projects, the Austro-German Customs Union publicized in March 1931 and the Ouchy Convention of June 1932 between the Belgium–Luxembourg Economic Union and the Netherlands.[5]: 311 

Policy developments in the 1930s

After Salter left the League Secretariat in 1931, the negotiation on the appointment of its successor led to the division of the EFO Secretariat into an Economic Section, headed by Stoppani, and a Financial section headed by Britain's Alexander Loveday, who had joined the fledgling League staff at inception in 1919 and had led its statistical endeavors since then. The two sections were eventually reunited in 1939 together with the secretariat of the League's Communications and Transit Organization, under Loveday's leadership as Stoppani retired.[2]: 476  Meanwhile, the staff had developed a genuine supranational ethos, as illustrated by the fact that Stoppani ignored Mussolini's instructions to resign after Italy withdrew from the League in 1934.[2]: 491  Throughout the 1930s, the EFO displayed intellectual honesty and flexibility by abandoning some of its prior gold standard orthodoxy and advocating policies directed at full employment, echoing the contemporaneous theoretical work of John Maynard Keynes and the Stockholm School of Economics.[1]: 30-32 

Following the shock of the banking crisis of 1931, the EFO managed to mitigate some of the consequences in its program countries of the 1920s, e.g. Austria, Hungary, and Bulgaria.[31]: 800  The EFO persuaded existing lenders to apply forbearance and enlisting new ones to refinance the loans, while directly supervising some of the debt-servicing operations.[1]: 26 

In general policy matters, as the scope for wide international consensus had shrunk dramatically, the EFO adapted by experimenting with new forms of policy influence. For example, in a work stream on

raw materials.[1]
: 27 

Stoppani and Loveday agreed that matters of international trade and protectionism should be at the forefront of the EFO's agenda.[2]: 482  Building upon Salter's shift in 1929 towards acknowledgement of the validity of regionalism, they posited that genuine progress would not involve all member states at the same time but rather occur "between those States where there is a desire to do business" as Loveday put it in a 1938 address.[31]: 789  For that reason, EFO staff was wary about the organization of the London Economic Conference, which had been decided outside of the League framework at the Lausanne Conference of 1932 and indeed ended in comprehensive failure.[1]: 21  The EFO made renewed advocacy efforts in 1935 and 1936 for a reduction of trade restrictions on the basis of the most favoured nation principle, but that was rejected primarily by Britain, to the frustration of the United States which under Secretary of State Cordell Hull has swung back towards freer trade.[2]: 484-489 

Even so, the League's advocacy, which included a plea for devaluation of the gold bloc currencies, played a key role in the Tripartite Agreement of 1936. The agreement’s text repeated much of prior EFO reports' language, and facilitated the simultaneous French policy pivot towards a more liberal trade stance.[2]: 489-490  From 1937, after the Tripartite Agreement had only produced disappointing results, the EFO endeavored to secure more autonomy for itself within the League that would transform it into an autonomous agency along similar lines as the International Labour Organization, but to no avail in the League's fast-deteriorating environment.[2]: 477 

Economic research and statistics

The EFO kept employing numerous talented economists in its staff, such as Gottfried Haberler, Jan Tinbergen, John B. Condliffe, and Ragnar Nurkse. Canada's Louis Rasminsky had joined the EFO in 1930, and would stay until 1939.[1]: 7  James Meade served as specialist adviser on behalf of the British government.[2]: 477  Jacques J. Polak was on the staff from 1938 to 1943.[1]: 7  In the late 1930s, the EFO hired Oskar Morgenstern, Bertil Ohlin, and Jacques Rueff as outside experts for its influential work on economic depressions.[1]: 29  Other economists who worked at the EFO and would attain later fame, often at the IMF, included Marcus Fleming, Alvin Hansen, Folke Hilgerdt, and Tjalling Koopmans.[1]: 28 

Throughout the 1930s and early 1940s, similarly as the

World Economic Outlook.[1]
: 28 

Wartime relocation and postwar legacy

In May 1940, Switzerland was increasingly at risk of being encircled by the Axis powers. Loveday decided to move together with around two-thirds of the EFO staff,[1]: 6 , and eventually relocated the organization at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. The Institute's director Frank Aydelotte persuaded the U.S. Department of State about the move, deftly invoking the memory of Woodrow Wilson and his associations with both Princeton and the League, and secured funding from the Rockefeller Foundation.[32] At Princeton, the exiled EFO played a central role in shaping the work of the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration, established in 1943,[2]: 469  and had influence in the preparation of the Bretton Woods Conference and, beyond its own absorption into the United Nations in 1945, the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade in 1947.[32] Loveday attended Bretton Woods as an external observer, and several former EFO staff were among the national negotiators, including Rasminsky for Canada and Polak for the Netherlands.[1]: 33  In the assessment of Louis Pauly, "The final economic studies of the League contributed to a new consensus that ultimately found its authoritative expression in the 1944 Bretton Woods Agreement and in the 1947 Havana Charter".[1]: 31  That included, in particular, Nurske's landmark study on the macroeconomic history of the interwar period.[33]

The assessment of the EFO and its impact has ebbed and flowed since its absorption by the nascent United Nations in 1945. In a monograph published shortly afterwards, William Martin Hill, who had joined the EFO staff in 1927,[34] noted that "Consultation between officials engaged in framing and executing economic and social policies in different countries was rare before 1914; through the League it became an established practice".[35]: 3–4  The memory of the EFO and its partial successes was then somewhat obscured during the Cold War period by the incentives to emphasize the League's institutional limitations in contrast with the more robust western postwar order, including by Salter himself in his memoirs published in 1961.[1]: 34 

In his 1996 study, Pauly notes the parallels between the successes and limitations of the EFO and those of the IMF, noting that both had to adapt to major financial disruptions, respectively the 1931 crisis and

great depression, and the Nixon shock of 1971. He argues that both institutions pivoted towards analytical work following the respective setbacks, but also that the memory of the ultimate failure of the League helped the IMF find a new mandate in the 1980s when it played a central role in addressing the Latin American debt crisis.[1]: 39-40  He also notes that neither the League nor the IMF were allowed to intervene directly in situations deemed too critically sensitive by their most powerful stakeholders, such as the German reparations which were (mis)handled in a separate series of international conferences in which the EFO had little or no influence.[1]
: 38 

More recent scholarship, not least by historian Patricia Clavin, has emphasized the EFO's pioneering initiatives, its policy achievements including during the 1930s, and its role in fostering an epistemic community that would be critically influential in post-World War II developments.[3][36][37]

See also

Notes

  1. ^
    SSRN 2173443
  2. ^
    S2CID 162061763
  3. ^ a b c Yann Decorzant (2011), "La Société des Nations et l'apparition d'un nouveau réseau d'expertise économique et financière (1914-1923)", Critique Internationale, 52 (3): 35–50
  4. JSTOR 2222869
  5. ^
    JSTOR 45344530
  6. ^ a b Yann Decorzant (2007), Private and public initiatives in the Economic and Financial Organization of the League of Nations in the early 1920's (PDF), University of Geneva Department of Economic History
  7. ^ Avis Slocum Cottrell (1931), The Effect of the Treaty of Trianon on Hungary (PDF), Boston University
  8. ^ "Report to the Council on the work of the fifty-first session of the Committee (Geneva, September 18th-26th, 1933)". National Library of Scotland.
  9. ^ "League Of Nations (Financial Committee, Resignations) Volume 328: debated on Monday 1 November 1937". UK Parliament - Hansard.
  10. ^ Michel Fior (2008), Institution globale et marchés financiers : la Société des Nations face à la reconstruction de l'Europe, 1918-1931, Peter Lang
  11. ^ Marcello De Cecco (1994), Central Banking in Central and Eastern Europe: Lessons From the Interwar Years' Experience, Washington DC: International Monetary Fund
  12. ^ Roser Cussó (2019). "International quantification and liberalism: the early statistical activities of the League of Nations' Economic and Financial Organization". In Brégianni, C.; Cussó, R. (eds.). Economic Policies of International Institutions. From the beginning of the 20th century to the current globalisation process. Paris: LaDéHiS / EHESS.
  13. ^ a b Éric Roussel (1996). Jean Monnet. Paris: Fayard.
  14. ^
    JSTOR 2144667
  15. ^ a b Nathan Marcus (2016), "Les conseillers étrangers à la Banque nationale d'Autriche 1923-1929 : contrôle ou coopération ?", Histoire, économie & société, 35 (4): 8–20
  16. ^
    S2CID 154676285
  17. ^
    JSTOR 3019413
  18. ^ Ioanna Pepelasis Minoglou (2014), The Greek state and the international financial community, 1922-1932: Demystifying the 'foreign factor' (PDF), London: London School of Economics and Political Science
  19. ^ a b Michalis Psalidopoulos (October 2019), History of the Bank of Greece 1928-2008: From government's banker to guardian of financial stability (PDF), Athens: Bank of Greece
  20. S2CID 157700178
  21. ^ "Jeremiah Smith Jr. (1870–1935)". Dumbarton Oaks.
  22. ^
    JSTOR 41274479
  23. ^ Matthew Bacon; Ruiyuan Cheng; Katherine (Xinyuan) Liu; William Ma; Gavin McElhennon; Dagny Patton; Elizabeth Qiao; Parth Thakkar (December 2022), Money Doctors from the 1800s to the Present (PDF), Johns Hopkins University Institute for Applied Economics, Global Health, and the Study of Business Enterprise
  24. ^ "Elisina Tyler to Mildred Barnes Bliss, January 30, 1944". Dumbarton Oaks.
  25. ^
    ISBN 9782821837034
  26. ^ "File R4583/10C/13517/1355 - Financial situation of Bulgaria - Services of M. Pierre Cheysson, Commissioner of the League of Nations". United Nations Library and Archives.
  27. ^ "Estonia and Bulgaria: 100 Years of Diplomatic relations". Embassy of Estonia in Bucharest. 2022.
  28. ^ "Eesti Pank". Estonian E-Repository.
  29. S2CID 248843607
  30. doi:10.3406/rhmc.1965.3168
  31. ^
    JSTOR 3019413
  32. ^ a b Patricia Meria Clavin (2009). "The League of Nations at IAS". Institute for Advanced Study.
  33. OCLC 5534836
  34. ^ "Sub-Fonds - Hill, William Martin". United Nations Library and Archives.
  35. ^ Martin Hill (1946), The economic and financial organization of the League of Nations : a survey of twenty-five years' experience, [Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. Division of International Law] Studies in the administration of international law and organization, Washington: Carnegie Endowment for International Peace
  36. ISBN 978-0-19-957793-4
    .
  37. ^ Sally Marks (September 2013). "Patricia Clavin. Securing the World Economy: The Reinvention of the League of Nations, 1920-1946. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013. xii + 400 pp. $125.00, cloth, 978-0-19-957793-4". H-Net Reviews in the Humanities and Social Sciences.
Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Economic_and_Financial_Organization_of_the_League_of_Nations&oldid=1220020237"