STAFFING THE INTERNATIONAL CIVIL SERVICE The Influence of Nationality in Recruitments to the League of Nations Secretariat, 1922-1930

: This article examines how nationality influenced recruitment of the highest-ranking officials to three of the smaller, political sections in the League of Nations Secretariat during the organization’s most successful years between 1922 and 1930. From three, separate case-studies, it is shown that although the official policies favored the hiring of nationals from underrepresented member states, other factors such as the individual section’s autonomy and policy field further complicated the process of finding the right nationals for vacant positions. This meant that the established protocols for recruitment were oftentimes ignored or circumvented in attempts to guarantee the most suitable candidates.


Introduction
In April 1917 shortly before the United States' entry into the First World War, President Woodrow Wilson famously proclaimed that "The world must be made safe for democracy". 1 While the main intention behind this statement was to justify entering the war on the side of the Allies, it also reflected desires for a different post-war international order. Already in 1916, Wilson had shared his visions of a new era in global political cooperation which was to be spearheaded by a novel international organization with peacekeeping as its central objective (Mazower 2012: 122). Three years later these visions turned into reality at the Versailles Peace Conference with the formal establishment of the League of Nations.
The League of Nations organization came to be structured around three, institutional units: Two of these units, the Council, and the Assembly, were to be comprised of delegates representing their own nation. Whereas the Council's only permanent delegates represented the great powers post-WW1 (Britain, France, Italy, and Japan), the Assembly was structured as a parliament with representatives from all League member states. The Assembly was meant to be the driving force behind the League's activities with the Council providing the direction for its work (Walters 1952: 43-65). The third unit, named as the "Secretariat" in the official covenant, was, however, fundamentally different in its role, composition and capabilities compared with the Council and the Assembly. It was the only permanent body within the League institution and was responsible for administrative tasks in relation to the Assembly and the Council's work. Known as the world's first international civil service, the League Secretariat consisted of employees from different member states which, importantly, were employed to serve the institution rather than their home country.
Despite its employees serving the institution rather than following national interests, the Secretariat's national composition was still deemed important by the League's member states and the leaders of the Secretariat itself. This article highlights the importance of the Secretariat's composition of nationalities by investigating the process of recruitment to the League Secretariat.
For many years following the dissolvement of the organization in 1946, the League Secretariat received little, scholarly attention. Up until 1950 there were a couple noteworthy publications by former employees within the League institution. 2 In the four succeeding decades the League of Nations was deemed above all else as a failed, international security experiment. It was not until the transnational turn in the 1990's that scholars developed curiosity for exploring institutional and practical workings of the League institution and its Secretariat during its fruitful years. Recently, the institutional set-up, administration, and practices of the League institution have come to the forefront of research. Scholars have increasingly shown interest in core, foundational elements of the League. 3 The source materiel analyzed in this article describes the workings of the League Secretariat's Appointments Committee (AC); a sub-body of the Secretariat established in 1922 with the purpose of assisting and advising the Secretary General on recruitments to the Secretariat. By investigating an extensive collection of minutes which document the meetings of the AC between 1922 and 1930, I aim to explore how the aspect of nationality affected, constrained, and guided recruitment of the highest-ranking employees known as First Division Officials to the League Secretariat. It is important to note that the latter was not comprised as one, collective entity but was instead subdivided in several different, functionally specialized subsections. Therefore, the analysis of this article is separated into three parts, each covering recruitment to three, political sections of the Establishing protocols for bureaucratic recruitment (1919)(1920)(1921)(1922) Before answering the main questions of this article, I consider it necessary to first provide a brief sketch of the evolution in bureaucratic recruitment during the first years of the League's existence.
Although recruitment practices were dynamic and continued to develop throughout the organization's lifespan, it was during these early years that the ruleset for recruitment to the Secretariat were put in place. By mid-1922, the AC had been formerly established similarly to the protocols on which it was to evaluate candidates for vacant posts in the International Civil Service.
The creation of the League and early recruitment The Permanent Secretariat was not given much attention by the League's founders during the process of creating its Covenant. A set of notes included in the British Draft Convention contained a proposal with suggestions on how the "Secretary-General" should be able to choose his staff of secretaries (Ranshofen-Wertheimer 1945: 42-43). Neither this nor other early proposals ended up eventually being included in the organization's foundational document. On the matter of the internal administration of staff, the Covenant simply stated that "The secretaries and staff of the Secretariat shall be appointed by the Secretary-General with the approval of the Council" (Walters 1952: 46-47). The primary authority in staff appointments was therefore initially put solely in the hands of the Secretary-General. Though the Council became equipped with the power of vetoing candidates, this never ended up as a huge constrain on recruitment to the organization. Many officials started working in the Secretariat before their appointment had acquired the Council's final approval (Ranshofen-Wertheimer 1945: 42-43).
With the absence of any a priori bureaucratic procedures for recruitment and given absolute authority to appoint whoever he saw fit, a large responsibility was put on the first Secretary-General, Eric Drummond, to shape the organization for the future. The former British Diplomat envisioned the League Secretariat as a truly international Civil Service where the officials would commit themselves to serve the institution rather than their own nation. In his view, the sections within the Secretariat should also not be structured around nationality but around different policy areas. Still, From its very creation, the maintenance of world peace had been designated as the League's most important task. Intrinsically linked with this objective was the notion of disarmament. Article eight of the Covenant stated that there could be no long-lasting peace without the "reduction in national armaments to the lowest point consistent with national safety" (Walters 1952: 48). It was therefore only natural that the League Secretariat should have a section devoted to the policy area of disarmament. Given the huge importance attributed to this issue, one might have expected the Disarmament Section in the Secretariat to become highly influential for the disarmament process.
This, however, did not end up happening. For the Great Powers, the issue of disarmament was a sensitive policy field, and they did not wish to cede any autonomy to an International Civil Service.
As a result, the Disarmament Section ended up becoming by far the least politically autonomous section of the Secretariat (Ikonomou 2021: 321-334).
It made little sense for the powerful League-members like Britain and France to keep a large representation in the Disarmament Section when any disarmament policies would be decided in their national governments rather than the League Secretariat. Therefore, the demand of the Great Powers for full national autonomy on disarmament policies ended up creating room for citizens of smaller powers to obtain leading positions in the Disarmament Section. All three of the section's directors throughout its lifespan were citizens of smaller powers, including the first Chief (and eventually Director) of Section, Salvador de Madariaga. During a discussion of his appointment at an AC meeting in the fall of 1922, Drummond stated that he considered the hiring of the Spaniard a good thing "from a political point of view", since he had been "continually receiving requests from Spain for the appointment of one of their nationality as director". 8 As noted by the Secretary General, it was fortunate that "the man best suited for the job had happened to be from Spain", since this made the appointment align with the objective of giving Spain a more adequate representation in the Secretariat. 9 Granting a leading role in the Disarmament Section to a citizen of a smaller and ex-neutral member state would appear as a significant action towards strengthening the Secretariat's international character. The reoccurring contract "renewals" handed out to Sloutzki is indicative of an employee whose work was highly valued. Much of the reason for this was the ex-Russian's contribution to the section's most important work. Throughout its publication history, Sloutzki was the chief editor of the Armaments Year-Book, a statistical data collection of national armaments published on a yearly basis (Lincove 2018: 507). In a section drained of political influence the yearbook became a way for the Disarmament Section to facilitate disarmament talks by providing public available information on armaments, a pledge initially agreed to by the member states and included in Article Eight of the Covenant (Walters 1952: 48). With this in mind it is easy to understand the desire to continually renew Sloutzki's temporary contract despite the fact that this circumvented the established protocols prohibiting citizens of non-member states to be permanently employed in Secretariat. Sloutzki's long "temporary" affiliation is also indicative of a section with relatively loose nationalityspecific constrains on recruitment. As mentioned earlier, the directorship was reserved for citizens of smaller member states. Although this did constrain recruitment to a certain extent, it also provided the opportunity to satisfy national governments and to work towards adequate national representation in the Secretariat as a whole. With most of the political section's work ending up as information dissemination, it allowed room for special cases of employment outside the institutionalized norms, which is illustrated by Nokhem Sloutzki's employment.
The Minorities Section was given the role of guarding the rights of these minorities and would effectively act as a broker in disagreements over the issue (Mazower 1997: 47-63). As the only year-round permanent body of the League organization, the Secretariat -and more specifically the Minorities Section -naturally ended up performing different tasks associated with this responsibility. The administrative work in the section was centered around the petition system; national minorities had the opportunity to send in complaints in case their rights had been violated. These petitions would then be assessed by the Minorities Section with regards to whether the case was to be discussed by the Council or Colban did what he could to reassure the AC of his hard attempts to find other suitable candidates.
The Norwegians' interest to hire the Spaniard to the vacant post in the section was not initially shared by the other committee members. The Italian committee member, Bernardo Attolico, wanted to appoint a South American, and Eric Drummond had also been against hiring a Spaniard due to Spain's already adequate representation in the Secretariat. The Secretary General eventually agreed to Colban's proposal for practical reasons; the workload in the section was "daily increasing", and the candidate was "entirely suitable" in every aspect but nationality. 21 The case shows that while it was the committee's intention to give utmost priority to the newly adopted nationality principle, compromises on this front were inevitable to maintain a well-functioning secretariat.
This was a complicated issue, however. The inherently sensitive nature of "sovereignty governance" in minority protection required the AC to grant the aspect of nationality additional consideration Drummond's suspicion indicates that nationality-preferences were held not only in the AC but also among national governments and minorities.
Returning to the vacant post of director in 1927, the Committee members unanimously agreed to the preferability of appointing a European, though they did not share similar views when it came to the specific European nationality of the candidate. Committee member Joseph Avenol repeatedly expressed that he himself believed personal qualifications of candidates should be deemed of higher importance than nationality, since the AC's task would otherwise be "considerably complicated". Therefore, candidates from ex-neutral countries of Western Europe, who weren't politically invested in the region nor the scheme, were preferable as opposed to other European and non-European candidates.

The Mandates Section
Unlike the Minorities Section which possessed a significant degree of autonomy, the Mandates Section was not itself charged with any of it. Instead, this section's role was to serve the Permanent Mandates Commission (PMC) in secretarial matters. The PMC was responsible for oversight with the Mandate System; the administration by certain former allied victor states over 14 different territories as laid out by Article 22 of the League Covenant (Walters 1952: 56-58). Some of these were former colonies of the defeated Central Powers while others were parts of now dissolved empires such as the Ottoman Empire. Essentially the system was an attempt by The Great Powers to align their aspirations for the continuation of empire with 20 th century liberal internationalism.
This was done by promising the mandated peoples of an indefinite path towards self-rule and by involving the League machinery. The PMC was to examine annual report on the mandated territories sent in by the mandatory powers. In addition, a petition system would be established similarly to the one existing for minority protection (Mazower 2012: 165-173 The nationality rule to "safeguard the full impartiality of the staff" was not to be circumvented.
Recruiting only "eligible" nationals to the section continued to be a matter of complication in the years that followed. The Italian Chief of Section considered it unnecessary to draw attention to the unspoken fact that the League was essentially a "League of Empires" with Canada as just one of several territories under the British Crown which had been given membership (Pedersen 2017: 113-138 For all three sections in question, the primary, nationality-related concern in recruitment was to favor candidates of non-adequately represented member states. Yet for both the Minorities and the Mandates Section, the nature of the minority protection scheme and the mandates system respectively added further nationality-related constrains to the recruitment considerations.
In the Minorities Section, a clear preference was had for Europeans in the First Division as opposed to non-Europeans. This is evident both from the composition of First Division nationals working in the section and from the AC-minutes. It was deemed necessary of candidates to possess significant knowledge about minority groups in Eastern Europe. This effectively made non-European citizens unsuited for the job while also drastically reducing the spectrum of suitable Europeans. The narrow range of appropriate nationalities made it difficult to recruit First Division officials to the section from a suitable nation in regard to the internationalization principle.
For the Mandates Section we find many of the same issues as mentioned for the Minorities section.
To uphold the legitimacy of the Mandate System it was necessary to keep the section clear of For the Disarmament Section, the biggest constrains from a nationality perspective surrounded the directorship of the section. Since the Great Powers did not wish to grant the section much political autonomy, it allowed for nationals of smaller powers to continuously obtain the post of director. In general, the nationality-based constrains on recruitment to the Disarmament Section were much less significant than for the two other sections due to its limited autonomy. The employment of the stateless Ex-Russian, Nokhem Sloutzki, is emblematic of this reality. For Drummond and the AC, the section's marginalized political role provided the benefit of being able to clearly prioritize the improvement of adequate national representation in the overall Secretariat when recruiting to the Disarmament section.

Literature
• Azcárate, Pablo de 1945: The League of Nations and National Minorities -An Experiment.
Carnegie Endowment, United States.