Popular internationalism and international organization: the effort to empower public opinion and its limits during the interwar period

Abstract

Much of contemporary global governance can be described as an elite-led enterprise that relies upon expert judgment to design and implement international policy coordination. While there have been many efforts to create more democratic forms of governance, much of global policymaking continues to be dominated by political elites and professional experts. This technocratic model of global governance, however, is by no means necessary nor inevitable. In the first half to the 20th century, there were several important movements to create more popular forms of international governance that balanced elite influence and expert judgment with popular participation in international decision-making. These movements advocated for several significant reforms to international institutions, including the creation of parliamentary assemblies at the global level, greater democratic control over foreign policy decision making, and greater incorporation of transnational civic associations into the governance activities of the League of Nations. This paper draws attention to this tradition, which I term popular internationalism, and develops a theoretical framework to explain why it failed to realize a popular model of international governance during the interwar period. Examining the reforms to the Social Committee of the League of Nations in the 1930s, I show how two competing traditions of internationalism, one technocratic and another popular, offered distinct models for serving the interests of the people and trace the factors that led to the partial eclipse of the latter by the former. Understanding the fate of popular internationalism during the interwar period promises to enrich our understanding of the factors which shape the different ways in which government and IOs respond to demands for popular inclusion in international governance.