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Experts et expertise dans les mandats de la société des nations : figures, champs, outils

 | 
Philippe Bourmaud
, 
Norig Neveu
, 
Chantal Verdeil

Conclusion

Mandatory Expertise after the League of Nations Mandates: Interconnections and New Directions

L’expertise sur les mandats après les mandats de la Société des Nations : interconnexions et nouvelles pistes

Simon Jackson

Résumé

Prenant comme pivot une mission économique en Syrie de la Banque internationale de Reconstruction et de Développement (BIRD), prédécesseur de la Banque mondiale, en 1954, cet essai de conclusion cherche à la fois à identifier les conséquences et l’influence — à l’époque de la décolonisation, de la guerre froide et de l’Organisation des Nations unies — de l’expertise mandataire analysée dans cet ouvrage, et à proposer des pistes pour le développement de la recherche à venir. Pour atteindre ces deux buts, l’essai se concentre premièrement sur la question de la rupture et de la continuité dans le domaine de l’expertise internationale autour de la Deuxième Guerre mondiale. La deuxième section aborde la question de la constitution de l’espace par l’expertise coloniale ainsi que la question de la recherche d’une approche méthodologique capable de traiter à la fois des dynamiques locales et transnationales. La troisième partie concerne les armées et l’environnement capitaliste comme lieux de production d’expertise et comme objets de recherche sous‑estimés. Enfin l’essai s’achève par une méditation sur les années 1950 comme intersection fructueuse de l’histoire environnementale et naturelle et de l’histoire de l’expertise coloniale et mandataire.

Note de l’auteur

My thanks to the editors, and particularly to Philippe Bourmaud, for incisive comments on drafts of this essay. I would also like to thank the editors for convening the conference at the root of this volume, “Experts and Expertise in the League of Nations Mandates: Figures, Fields and Tools”, held at Inalco, Paris, March 26‑27 2015. Finally, I am grateful to the Leverhulme Trust’s Early Career Fellowship scheme, which supported the research and writing of this piece.

Texte intégral

  • 1 In addition to several chapters in this volume, on the Syrian Mandate see Schayegh  & Arsan, 2015.
  • 2 See, for example, Gibb & Partners, 1947; and for the Mandate period Jackson, 2013.

1In early February 1954, a mission from the International Bank for Reconstruction and Development (IBRD), the forerunner of the World Bank, arrived in Syria “at the request of” its government. It remained for three months, travelling extensively around the country, which had achieved independence in 1946 after a quarter of a century of rule as a French Mandate territory.1 The mission, one of many similar endeavors that marked the period, consisted of ten European and North American men, described in the report as “advisers,” “economists,” and “experts,” and of two North American women who worked as its secretaries.2 Its task, to which it dedicated the next two and a half months, was to

  • 3 International Bank of Reconstruction and Development (henceforth IBRD), 1955, p. vii. See also Ala (...)

undertake a general review of Syria’s economic potentialities and to submit recommendations designed to assist the government to formulate a long‑term development program for increasing Syria’s productive resources and raising the standard of living of its people.3

  • 4 Martin, 2015, p. 143 and passim.
  • 5 On the World Bank and politics see Ferguson, 1994.

2On 25 February 1954, during the IBRD’s stay in the country, the Syrian army overthrew the country’s leader Adīb al‑Shīshaklī in a move that gave way to a period Kevin W. Martin has called Syria’s “democratic years.”4 The IBRD report, however, does not mention al‑Shīshaklī or the coup against him at all, avoiding any direct political commentary in keeping with the IBRD’s self‑appointed role as a center of external and technical expertise.5

  • 6 Vitalis, 2016.

3This volume has introduced the reader to all manner of experts and to the diverse forms of expertise that proliferated in the context of the League of Nations Mandates. The contributors have rightly foregrounded the question of experts’ intellectual and professional certification and of their consecration and recognition within various social fields, political institutions and intellectual networks. Crucially, several chapters also highlighted the difficulties faced by unconventional or heterodox forms of counter‑expertise as practiced by the people of the Mandate territories themselves. For example, Arab women in Nova Robinson’s essay struggled mightily to secure recognition for their expertise within institutional circuits where white men set and policed the limits of expert status, and indeed where white men established subtending academic disciplines, such as international relations (IR), in order to maintain global white supremacy (chapter 5).6 International experts’ whiteness in turn often allowed them to deploy racial categories, as Christine Winter shows above in the case of New Guinea, to trump both nascent national affiliations and individual claims to rights (chapter 8). Expertise, then, was always established and maintained within wider social and political fields, even as it varied widely in kind.

  • 7 For an extended approach to this issue see Jackson & O’ Malley , 2018.
  • 8 Tooze, 2015, pp. 487‑507.

4Drawing this wealth of case studies together neatly is accordingly not straightforward, given their empirical richness and conceptual sophistication. Nevertheless, in the following pages I explore the 1954 IBRD mission to Syria both as a mean of sketching some of the afterlives of Mandate expertise in the era of the United Nations (UN), and as way of suggesting some possible paths forward for scholars seeking to build historical interpretations that connect the modes of expertise practised in the Mandates context with those of the post‑1945 world.7 Of the two goals, the task of sketching afterlives is more difficult than that of suggestion, interdependent though the two are. As the editors rightly underline in their introduction, Mandate‑era expertise is not readily grasped simply as the first incarnation of the policies later applied in the Global South after 1945. We cannot, therefore, simply see the ghost of Mandatory expertise, with new ideological marrow in its bones, haunting the era of decolonization. Instead, argue the editors, Mandate‑era expertise is best understood in terms of the dynamics that hedged in the circulation of experts: namely, the norms, networks and affinities that opened opportunities for protagonists able to wed knowledge and power. In their turn, these norms, networks and affinities were shaped by the shifts of international politics in the Mandate period: the onset of the Depression and the global turn to the political economy of autarky and economistic reasoning was just one such.8 The specificity of the Mandate period, in other words, militates against any simple transposition of its dynamics to the post‑1945 era.

  • 9 Dimier, 2014; representatively on the 1950s see Cooper, 1996, and on the 1960s and 1970s see Ogle, (...)

5Notwithstanding these challenges, below I evaluate first the broad question of continuity and rupture between the era of the League Mandates and that of the UN, emphasizing the ways in which colonial expertise was, in Véronique Dimier’s apt term, serially “recycled” and repurposed in complex ways for use under the new global dispensation, as the years of post‑war reconstruction and Asian decolonization gave way first to the Cold War and the “imperialism of knowledge” in the 1950s, and then to African decolonization after 1960 and an effervescent decade or more of high independence and national development schemes in the Global South.9

6I then turn, second, to the question of space and scale, and to the status of the “local” in the politics of expertise. Here I emphasize, in the wake of the volume’s editors, the significance of the circulation of experts as they rotated ceaselessly from the Mandate territories to the distant stages of liberal internationalism, such as Geneva, or to the hives of imperial capital, such as London. Within this fluidity, I also trace the reproduction of harsh hierarchies of international, national and local forms of knowledge, and thus suggest, for historians, the methodological possibilities a simultaneous emphasis on the multi‑local and the transnational might permit.

  • 10 See suggestively Sasson, 2016. For an overview see Kramer, 2016, p. 346. My thanks to Tamson Piets (...)

7In a third phase, I build on the remarkable range of expertise and counter‑expertise covered in this volume to highlight for further investigation two institutional constellations: capitalist private business and late/post‑imperial militaries, not least in terms of the overlaps between the two. As recent developments in the historiography of capitalism and United States (US) empire have shown with special force, away from the more established focus on international organizations and non‑governmental organization (NGOs), imperial or national states, and foundations such as the Rockefeller or Ford, business and military organizations offer both a means to nuance our understanding of the political and institutional location of post‑Mandatory expertise and a way to grasp its intellectual debts to a greater diversity of expert domains than is often supposed.10

  • 11 Steffen, Grinevald, Crutzen & McNeill, 2011, p. 845.
  • 12 My thanks to Philippe Bourmaud for his insight here.

8Finally, I close with a brief meditation on the simultaneous fall of the Mandate system and the start of the Anthropocene’s “Great Acceleration:” the moment of “post‑World War II worldwide industrialization, techno‑scientific development, nuclear arms race, population explosion and rapid economic growth.”11 Through this overlap we can perhaps begin to investigate how the Cold War tended to extend the dialogical and competitive logic of Mandate rule by repurposing keywords such as “development” and thereby prolonged the purview of established patterns and targets of expertise, blinding experts to the rise of radically new problems, such as those of the environment.12

Continuity and rupture: mandate expertise after 1945

  • 13 Pedersen, 2015, pp. 45‑77.
  • 14 Whereas Jamālī served two terms as Prime Minister of the Iraqi monarchy, however, Lieftinck became (...)
  • 15 On De Wilde see “World Bank Group Archives Oral History website”, Transcript of Interview with Ger (...)
  • 16 The other members were H. H. Bagnall, a British industrial analyst, Jean de Fargues (adviser on wa (...)

9Who, then, were the experts of the 1954 mission to the former French Mandate territory in Syria? The gendered character of the mission scarcely suggests a rupture with the era of the Permanent Mandates Commission—more a regression perhaps, given the role on the latter of Anna Bugge‑Wicksell and Valentine Dannevig.13 Nor did its members boast particularly unorthodox careers or credentials. It was led by Pieter Lieftinck (1902‑1989), a Dutch lawyer and economist, trained partly in the Columbia University Economics Department in 1929‑30, where he was a direct contemporary of Fāḍil Jamālī (1903‑1997), the Iraqi education expert discussed above by Hilary Kalisman (chapter 13).14 Other notable members of the mission included John C. de Wilde (1910‑2000), a US economist who was in 1954 “Economic Adviser to the Department of Operations, Asia and Middle East” at the IBRD, and Feliks G. Bochenski, also an economist at the IBRD and later at the United Nations Industrial Development Organization (UNIDO), and who was a veteran of similar missions to Egypt and Lebanon in 1948‑49.15 Finally, we should note the presence of Constantine Doxiadis (1914‑1975), the mission’s Greek “adviser on Housing and Community Planning.” A leading neoliberal urban planner of the Cold War, Doxiadis was a globally influential theorist, consultant and architect, responsible for the planning of cities including Riyadh and Islamabad.16

10As should be clear from this selection, most of the IBRD experts patrolling Syria in 1954 had been born around the turn of the twentieth century, had been educated in the university systems of the core North Atlantic countries, and had already begun their careers during the interwar years, whether in late colonial administration or in the economic bureaucracies of the Allied powers during the Second World War. In short, these exponents of developmental expertise in the early Cold War, these suited white men, were products of the Mandate period, their habitus shaped by its institutions and their thinking drenched in its normative assumptions and categories of analysis.

  • 17 For a systematic approach to this issue see Jackson & O’ Malley, 2018.

11In approaching the fate and influence of Mandate era expertise after the demise of the Mandates system, then, the call of radical continuity is siren‑strong. But should historians resist it nevertheless?17 As Patricia Clavin noted of the World Bank’s forerunner, pointing out its functional similarities to the League’s Economic and Financial Organization (EFO):

The IBRD, despite its title, was focused less on funding post war reconstruction than on generating private funding to that end, and on generating investment in the world’s less developed economies in much the same way that the EFO had for Austria, Hungary, Bulgaria and Greece after 1919.

  • 18 Clavin, 2013, pp. 305‑307; See also Ekbladh, 2015. On UNICEF’s antecedents see Baughan, 2014 and o (...)
  • 19 Clavin, 2013, p. 307. For a thorough appraisal of the wartime pivot see also Wertheim, 2015. See a (...)

12And yet—as Clavin herself notes in her study of League financial and economic expertise—the role of the EFO, and the League more largely at the close of World War Two was less one of enduring, if transmuted, perpetuation, and more that of a wizened “support and critic.” Despite the more complete institutional handover of certain other League bodies to the UN, such as the Child Welfare Council, which became the United Nations Children’s Fund (UNICEF), or the marked influence of the 1936 League report on nutrition for the formation of the Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) in 1943, at Bretton Woods the League of Nations was, broadly speaking, present as a witness and to supply a “historical narrative and definition of an interconnected world economy against which the novelty of the new institutions was set in vivid contrast.”18 “One world order,” Clavin insists, had indeed been “subsumed” by the next in the year between the battle of Stalingrad and the Normandy Landings, and the experts of the Mandate era would have to adapt to it, even as they supplied many of its models and precedents based on prewar, League experience.19

  • 20 Grandin, 2006; Connelly, 2003.

13The UN period, moreover, would feature its own constant evolutions, as the hopes of the mid‑1940s, stoked by a wave of national independence in Asia and by the legacies of Franklin D. Roosevelt’s policy in Latin America, gave way first to the tensions of the Cold War in the 1950s and the reinforced concern of the great powers to enforce the prerogatives of sovereignty against international supervision, and then later to the rise of the anti‑colonial majority in the UN General Assembly in the years after 1960.20 As these evolutions took place, and the League slipped a little further into the past, its history as an international institution would be re‑narrated in new ways to suit new agendas, and its experts would shift into new institutional roles and different intellectual frameworks.

  • 21 Pedersen, 2007, p. 1091.
  • 22 Terretta, 2012, and Burke, 2010.
  • 23 Kurz, 2018, pp. 90‑110.

14Immediately post‑1945 scholarship, as Susan Pedersen has noted, either abandoned the League altogether, merely described its fall, or else carried out “analytical postmortems intended to reinforce ‘realist’ analyses of international relations.”21 Beyond the academy, however, the League’s memory lived on and was molded in various directions. One example is the UN Trusteeship system, in which arguments raged across a spectrum running from the disappointments of West African petitioners and jurists, to Jan Smuts’ failed effort to annex parts of South‑West Africa outright on behalf of a South Africa turning to apartheid after 1945.22 Examples and precedents from the Mandates period supplied political and intellectual resources to a very wide range of groups. As Nathan Kurz, for example, has shown, Jewish activists at the UN in the 1940s and 1950s worked towards the right of individuals to petition the UN against states by drawing on the legacies of the 1933 Bernheim petition, which had been brought to the League against Nazi Germany. Activists in the late 1940s, Kurz notes, explicitly “focused on how the UN could build on the League’s limited experiment in allowing vulnerable groups to direct their often‑aspirational rights claims against states towards an international body.”23

  • 24 Hodge, 2007, pp. 5‑14.

15Likewise, in the European imperial capitals from where the Mandate territories had mainly been ultimately governed, the war marked an incomplete pivot in the politics of colonial expertise. Joseph M. Hodge notes, for instance, in the context of British colonial agricultural development expertise, that though “experts played a critical role in the growing institutionalization and globalization of colonial scientific knowledge and authority in the 1930s, 1940s and 1950s,” we should note that “the Second World War acted as a further catalyst for the revolution of metropolitan thought.” It created “new pressures for state planning and social engineering both on the metropolitan home front and in the colonies, which heightened the sense of urgency and the demand for action.” Hodge therefore identifies an intense revival, reformulation, recruitment and re‑tooling of technical expertise in the British world at the close of the war and under the Marshall Plan period, as blue‑prints were developed for a bold new era. But he also qualifies the impact of this reboot, noting how quickly plans evaporated, and the effective opposition the battalions of experts encountered at the hands of “senior officials, who viewed the growth of the advisory committees and subject departments with alarm, as undermining the importance of local knowledge and experience.”24

  • 25 IBRD, 1955, p. 81, 385, 443. See also Thomé, 1953.
  • 26 IBRD, 1955, p. 241, p. 450.

16In assessing, then, the general question of the degree of continuity between expertise in the late Mandate period and at the outset of the Cold War, the importance of the geopolitical framework that favored the rise of the US and USSR at the expense of the European colonial empires must remain at the forefront of analysis. More empirically, however, in the IBRD report of 1954, we find the Mandate past only rarely cited explicitly. Some references were negative, but the criticism was attached to the hamstrung national governments the French created, for instance in terms of the “Syrian government’s” failure to establish an industrial bank in 1929. Other citations simply acknowledged the novelty of independent Syria’s commercial treaties, due to the limits previously set in this respect by the League’s commercial “Open Door” in the Mandate period, but without conjuring a political judgment on that older framework. Other mentions of the Mandate past took slightly more critical positions, dismissing the “outmoded” regulatory frameworks on transport of the Mandate period.25 For the most part however, the Mandate period and its expertise is an iceberg in the IBRD report, analytically submerged but constantly influential nevertheless, as when the report noted dryly that “obligations for external payments, hitherto unspecified, may arise from compensation to be paid to the former owners of the nationalized power companies,” or when it observed, misleadingly concise and neutral, that the Aleppo tramway system was “established in 1929 by a French company under a monopoly concession.”26

  • 27 IBRD, 1955, p. 75. My italics.

17One final reference to French influence in the IBRD report is perhaps more telling for this argument. Discussing agricultural reform, it notes that in the 1950s, the “French Technical Assistance Mission in Syria,” alongside the FAO, would be best placed to implement the use of high‑yield cereal crops and deploy “machinery experts,” given “the shortage of trained Syrians may continue for some time.”27 At stake here is the same question of local knowledge that Hodge mentions above in the post‑1945 British imperial conjuncture. For our purposes, this question raises the importance of the scalar politics of knowledge that fissured every field of Mandate‑era expert intervention and that continued to generate hierarchies of local, national and international expertise after 1945. It is to this question I now turn, by considering the role of spatial hierarchies of expertise and the significance and potential of transnational networks and methodologies.

The local and the transnational

  • 28 On scale see Legg, 2009. On localism Yun‑Casallila, 2007.
  • 29 Immerwahr, 2015, p. 13.
  • 30 See also Burke III, 1973, pp. 175‑186.

18Local forms of expertise, and their mobilization in relation to colonial and international forms—or scales—of expertise are, the preceding chapters make abundantly clear, an important way to develop the study of the legacies of the Mandate system after the turning point of 1943‑44.28 Under the Mandate system insurgent and heterodox experts laid siege to the bastions of international and imperial expertise, notably in Geneva. Women and colonial subjects, both groups who had to fight hard for any minimum acknowledgement of their expertise, thus appear regularly above, for instance in the case of Nour Hamada, cited by Nova Robinson in her work on the movement for women’s rights. Other cases include the “local” educational experts cited by Hilary Kalisman, in contra‑distinction to British imperial experts, or else the Syrian and Lebanese engineers and customs officials Geoffrey Schad discusses. But, as Kalisman notes, to become powerful, expertise must be claimed on a basis of specific knowledge or experience and then more or less recognized and legitimated in given fields—and such fields were marked out by a vertical hierarchy that absorbed local knowledge only in specific ways. Such dynamics continued in new forms after the Second World War. As Daniel Immerwahr has suggested of the Cold War period, the process of qualification and consecration of local expertise formalized and standardized “vernacular knowledge and local ways of doing things” after 1945—precisely in order to insert the local into a global hierarchy of forms of knowledge in which the local could be measured, managed, instrumentalized and found wanting.29 This assertion of local knowledge’s inherent incompleteness was, however, already a hallmark of expertise in the Mandate period, and indeed it shaped experts’ need to circulate between occupied colonial territories and the imperial metropoles in order to generate mastery of “the local.” As Julie d’Andurain notes in her chapter, still older precedents molded Mandate‑era experts in this respect: Robert de Caix, later a key figure in the administration of the Syrian Mandate, had learned in the case of the Moroccan Protectorate how a knowledge of the colonial social and military situation was incomplete without a command of the bureaucratic and ministerial terrain in the imperial center (chapter 2).30 The culmination of this logic was the constitution of the local as a screen onto which colonial fantasies of expertise could be projected: as Christine Winter notes above, imperial “political desires were often projected onto fictional ‘natives’ as experts” (chapter 8).

  • 31 Immerwahr, 2015, pp. 9‑11; Gilman, 2003. On colonial science in the French case Singaravélou, 2011 (...)
  • 32 IBRD, 1955, p. 96.

19In the era of the United Nations and the Cold War, the supplanting of “colonial science” by Political Science, International Relations, Area Studies and Development Economics, disciplinary arenas in which knowledge production was particularly haunted by state power and infiltrated by modernization theory, led to the formalization and instrumentalization of “the local” in ways that could remake it as a means of counter‑insurgency or as way to cement existing social hierarchies.31 This dynamic is much more clearly visible than the French Mandate itself in the 1954 IBRD mission to Syria. The IBRD report recommended that for “village improvement”, the recruitment of “community workers” was indispensable in helping “villagers in mobilizing their resources for self‑help.” Envisioned as a government employee but with no formal administrative duties, “his [note the gender] sole function should be to encourage and crystallize the villagers’ desire for improvement.” In fact, the IBRD mission saw the Syrian community worker in 1954 as a broker—someone with the social capital and political deftness of touch to deal with officials. But notwithstanding his possession of such “elementary” skills, the report noted, reasserting the hierarchy of expertise, “the knowledge of the community worker need not be profound […] he would be able to call upon the specialized services of the government for advice and assistance in dealing with problems with which he himself cannot cope.”32

  • 33 Ibid., p. 440.
  • 34 Seers, 1962, p. 334.
  • 35 Mitchell, 2002, p. 15. See the introduction to this volume for a discussion of the limits of Mitch (...)

20The cult of “the local” is manifest here in the prescriptions of the IBRD, but the ceaseless emphasis on its limits also secured the political basis for external intervention from higher up the Cold War hierarchy of expertise. National regulatory state specialists and their accompanying international level advisors and creditors—in both cases often, though not always, veterans of the circuits of colonial expertise—were the particular beneficiaries of this enforced local vulnerability, as were the comparative statistical methodologies international experts increasingly deployed. Indeed, Roser Cussó observes above such comparative trends already taking shape in the Mandate years, as the harvesting of ever more survey data enabled a cascade of statistically supported argument to saturate the politics of the Mandated territories’ “progress” (chapter 7). By 1954, the IBRD, in a discussion of Syrian state investment in road networks, could band Syrian expenditure comparatively, noting that it “compares not unfavorably with that of some other countries [Iran, Egypt, Surinam, French West Africa] in similar stages of development.”33 The legitimation of international and national expertise (and of their combination) operated, therefore, through the characterization of local knowledge as non‑technical, non‑expert and essentially social rather than technical or scientific. This was an understanding of local knowledge that would eventually be catalogued and dramatized by Dudley Seers in his famous paper of 1962, “Why Visiting Economists Fail,” even as he insisted on maintaining a distinction between the consensually technical character of economic debate in the United States and United Kingdom, as opposed to its “fundamentally social and political character” in “newly independent countries.”34 Seers’ bedrock commitment (despite his sustained criticism of the quotidian operation of development economics) to locating social scientific expertise in its “pure” form in Europe, hews well to Timothy Mitchell’s influential argument that “the place and the claims of expertise are constituted in the separation that seems to open up, opposing nature to technology, reality to its representation, objects to their value, and the economy to the science of economics.”35

  • 36 Mitchell, 2002, p. 15.
  • 37 Schayegh, 2011, p. 304.

21As Mitchell’s own work suggests, to identify the “strategies, structures, and silences that transform the expert into a spokesperson for what appear as the forces of development, the rules of law, the progress of modernity, or the rationality of capitalism,” historians building on the essays in this volume must continue to trace the trans‑national networks through which expertise operated to constitute “the local” as one spatial form among superposed imperial, national and regional spaces.36 Sarah Griswold has shown in this volume, for instance, how French and British archaeologists developed forms of inter‑imperial expertise and antiquities regulation that depended on intensive exchange between archaeological officials across the porous borders of Mandate territories—and on the circulation of expert practices in the wider Eastern Mediterranean region. The increased territorialization of expert rule in the Mandate, focused in this case on specific archaeological dig sites rather than on decontextualized objects, thereby drew on the elaboration of denser trans‑national and inter‑imperial circulations of experts and even of the objects of expertise, such as smuggled artefacts. As Cyrus Schayegh has argued in the context of drug smuggling across Mandate borders, “local patterns of territorialization created by linked actors and forces are as structured by political and economic orders as […] global movements of goods and people.”37

  • 38 IBRD, 1995, p. 213.
  • 39 A related tendency was that of experts broadcasting to multiple audiences simultaneously, in the w (...)

22Such dynamics would continue after independence. The IBRD report of 1954, for instance, noted in a section on Syrian customs receipts that “extended land frontiers, particularly in some of the more sparsely inhabited parts of the country, facilitate smuggling.”38 International institutions remained key nodes on these transnational circuits however—indeed they provided a point of intersection for otherwise largely parallel networks. As Geoffrey Gray shows above, for example, to build multiple audiences and cement the status of their discipline as a key metric of Mandate colonialism’s “effectiveness,” Mandate‑era administrative anthropologists such as E.W.P. Chinnery had taken to the road regularly, moving from imperial metropole to settler colony to Mandated New Guinea and on to the international arena of the League. But this practice was recalibrated and “jumped its existing rails” to connect to another, related geography after 1945, when Chinnery ended up playing a part in the UN Trusteeship Council, for whom he visited the former Belgian Mandate territories of Ruanda‑Urundi and the former British Mandate of Tanganyika (chapter 3).39

  • 40 A classic example here is Demangeon & Febvre, 1935. See also Rüger, 2010, pp. 656‑668.
  • 41 Zimmerman, 2010, pp. 173‑207.
  • 42 The influence of the USSR’s de‑nationalized political formation on the creation of Pakistan is ano (...)

23By tracing trans‑national networks across the frontiers of empires and nations, historians are also able to identify actors and themes occluded by the dominance and classificatory schemas of the colonial and national archives, which often naturalize the nation state and the binary of metropole and colony at the expense of other salient connections.40 Andrew Zimmerman, for example, has shown fruitfully how the 1901 Tuskegee expedition from the US South to German Togo laid the foundations for the creation of a global “New South” that would influence the colonial policy of Germany and the other European colonial powers.41 In this volume Kalisman’s chapter similarly concentrates attention on the salience of educational institutions in the US to shaping pedagogical expertise in the British Mandates of the Middle East, while the significance of the German challenge to the Mandates system allows for a similarly “cross‑cutting” mode of analysis in several cases, notably in the essays by Véronique Dimier, Alvine Henriette Assembe Ndi, and Roser Cussó.42

  • 43 Citino, 2014, p. 160. Citino shows how the struggle to render Cold War Jordan fiscally solvent, a (...)
  • 44 Monson, 2009. See generally on the historiography of development Hodge, 2015.

24To grasp the nature of expertise at the League and subsequently in the Cold War we must therefore start from a simultaneously multi‑local and trans‑national perspective to achieve a more complete and yet more concrete view of international expert practices, liberal or otherwise. In the case of the history of development, for instance, recent scholarship connecting Cold War Jordan to British Mandate rule in Transjordan has correctly emphasized the “importance of local factors in shaping the outcome of development projects,” and criticized the way “the transnational study of expertise shortchanges the distinct historical antecedents that prepared the ground for development programs in particular places.”43 Likewise, Jamie Monson, writing on the role of Chinese development efforts in South‑Eastern Africa, has taken a usefully decentered, multilocal approach to the history of the “South‑South” transmission of expertise during the Cold War, showing how the study of expertise in the Mandate era might also draw methodological lessons from approaches to the 1950s‑1970s.44

Guns and Butter

  • 45 Kramer, 2016, p. 346. See also Epstein, 2014.
  • 46 See, for example, Roman, 2018.

25If simultaneously trans‑national and multi‑local approaches to expertise are one fruitful methodology suggested by this volume, an object well suited to its application is perhaps the relatively unheralded role of businesses and militaries as producers of expertise during and after the Mandate period. As Paul A. Kramer has lately noted, military‑industrial complexes have furnished the new historiography of US capitalism with an apt way to question the fundamentally normative distinction between “civilian American capitalism” and “military resources, institutions and priorities” and the approach is likely to spread usefully to study of the League.45 Businesses and chambers of commerce were certainly key players in the orbit of the League of Nations, pushing for international regulatory frameworks on issues from double taxation to fluvial navigation, taking an active part in League conferences, and advocating armed repression as required to protect investments and profits.46 As Benjamin Gerig, a US diplomat active at the League and later a key drafter of the UN Trusteeship provisions, noted, in the Permanent Mandate Commission’s (PMC) heyday of the late 1920s, business organizations such as the French colonial pressure group the Union coloniale française (UCF) were fiercely engaged in lobbying Geneva. The UCF, Gerig observed, petitioned notably against the accession of Germany to the organization:

  • 47 Gerig, 1930, p. 119. My thanks to Jamie Martin for flagging this book to me. For Gerig’s view of t (...)

The Union coloniale considers it dangerous that a representative of a former Power possessing control there should supervise the administration of the Mandates […] a measure which is calculated to disturb the peace of the mandated countries […].47

  • 48 Gerig, 1930, p. 116.
  • 49 On the wider context to the “Open Door” see Rosenberg, 2003. On the League and the “Open Door” see (...)
  • 50 Seikaly, 2016; Abu‑Rish, Forthcoming.

26Gerig presented the PMC in terms of its expert—as opposed to national—character, and thereby contrasted it with the League Council’s overtly “political” role, noting that the PMC’s expertise was rooted in the personal experience of its members and in their careful privileging of their “duty of cooperation,” in PMC member William Rappard’s terms, over affiliation to their respective governments.48 But on matters of economic regulation, where businesses focused their lobbying most intensively, the PMC and the League of Nations Council shared views on the key issues, rendering Gerig’s distinction moot. Shared priorities for the PMC and the League Council included a concern for “Open Door” regulation of commerce in the Mandate, the security of foreign direct investment, and the sanctity of foreign owned property beyond eventual independence.49 Outside Geneva, the influence of capitalist business on the politics of expertise was also felt regionally in Mandate territories. Recent work on British Mandate Palestine, and on French Mandate Lebanon’s political‑economic journey to independence, has shown how influential visions of the capitalist future played out in late Mandate contexts in the Middle East, and how these visions appealed in significant ways both to urban and rural notabilities and to the business and administrative middle classes.50 The end of the Mandate period, however, brought with it a wide variety of relationships between state and capital in independent nation‑states. Thus, though experts such as the technocrat Léon Mourad could draw on their Mandate‑era careers to manage crossborder business interests between Beirut and Aleppo, Lebanon pivoted to an oligopolistic, state‑managed regional role as a liberal entrepôt that was very different from Syria’s move towards land reform and a far higher degree of socialist and national direct control over economic life (chapter 4).

27Internationally, business also increasingly enjoyed an ability to produce forms of economic expertise within conceptual schemas established by macroeconomic theories of the firm that characterized investment decisions as relatively inaccessible to political interference and best aided by technical economic knowledge. Illustratively, the IBRD report on Syria in 1954 noted, in the context of the proposed establishment of an Investment Bank, that:

  • 51 IBRD, 1955, p. 112.

The extension of loans to industry calls for judgments on the technical and economic soundness of business enterprises and the exclusion of all political considerations, which is very difficult for any government. It requires scrutiny and supervision of borrowers, which can hardly be carried out by a government agency because private enterprise strongly resists such government control. In our opinion, a privately managed and privately owned investment institution would be in a much better position than any government agency to give industry the type of assistance which it needs at its present stage of development.51

  • 52 Tischler, 2013, pp. 153‑213; Showers, 2011. Thanks to Corey Ross for drawing this latter to my att (...)
  • 53 Speich Chassé; Frey, Kunkel, Unger (eds.), 2014.

28In this context, private business, notably in its multi‑national forms, also increasingly took on a role as consultant and even guide to post‑1945 international organizations, re‑purposing the lobbying of the League by the UCF for the context of Truman’s Point Four Program, and drawing on corporate research and development to influence wider development programs, such as in hydroelectric energy production.52 The predictive and forecasting apparatus of macroeconomic statistical production in the period of modernization theory certainly built, as Cussó shows above, on the steps first taken by international data harvesting in the Mandate period—and on macroeconomic theories built by Roy F. Harrod, Evsey Domar and others on the Keynesian foundation (chapter 7). Equally, development and aid bureaucracies, including those of the nascent European Commission, drew relentlessly on recycled colonial‑era networks and personnel to secure their goals (chapter 9). But, as Daniel Speich Chassé has noted, the enthusiastic global uptake of statistical tools such as Gross Domestic Product (GDP) across newly independent countries depended crucially on the decline of the discourse of colonial differentiation: here again, we must grasp continuity and rupture simultaneously.53

  • 54 Khalili, 2010; Jackson & Moses, 2017; Kuzmarov, 2012; Frakking, 2014.
  • 55 Neep, 2012; Bou‑Nacklie, 1993.
  • 56 Thomas, 2008; Martin, 2010.

29Meanwhile, as Laleh Khalili and others have shown, militaries too became key vectors of development expertise in the UN era, first making use of developmental conceptual schemas as part of late colonial counter‑insurgency campaigns in the 1950s, then delivering humanitarian and disaster relief in the 1960s, and later pioneering a new and toxic blend of socioeconomic development and counter‑insurgency after 2001, for instance in occupied Iraq and Afghanistan.54 If the role of the military in Mandate‑era expertise in Syria had been powerfully shaped by pre‑1914 dynamics, led by key military figures such as the French colonial commissars Lyautey and Gallieni, so likewise the legacy of Mandate military administration would endure after 1945, in the redeployment of auxiliary troops elsewhere in the late colonial theater, in the institutional production and trans‑national circulation of counter‑insurgency doctrine, and finally in the infrastructural effort to secure space and resources, for instance in the Sahara during the Algerian war of independence.55 As Julie d’Andurain points out in her contribution to this volume, if the politics of expertise in the Mandate period was in part a politics of information, then military and police intelligence gathering was already at the heart of the wider politics of late colonial expertise, as in Protectorate Morocco—a veritable case study for the formation of Robert de Caix as an expert. Well before the superpower intelligence agencies and the militaries of newly independent states began to instrumentalize Cold War development, the capacity of military organizations to gather information had made them a privileged resource for experts in search of data on which to build technical knowledge production.56 The historiography on Mandate expertise and its Cold War successors therefore has much to gain from investigating these systems of expert knowledge production, both as they operated relatively independently, and where they overlapped.

Conclusion: mandatory expertise and the “great acceleration”

  • 57 Bonneuil, Gemenne & Hamilton, 2015.

30One key form of information generated in part through military‑industrial intervention at the close of the Mandate period is the development and first use of nuclear weapons, a topic often absent from studies of expertise within international organizations. Such weapons, though an iconic aspect of Cold War geopolitics and culture, are increasingly also seen as marking—literally, through the radionuclides spread around the world in 1945—the onset of a new era that coincides with the establishment of the UN: that of the “Great Acceleration” of the Anthropocene.57 Still regularly cantonized within environmental historiography, arguments over the step change in human impact on the environment that the 1950s brought are a useful closing point when considering the legacies of Mandate‑era expertise for the period that followed. For if the advent of the “Great Acceleration” would appear to support the chronological case for rupture after 1945 developed above by reference to Patricia Clavin’s work on the League of Nations EFO, the Fordist systems of industrial extraction, production and consumption in the North Atlantic countries that gave rise to the increased human impact on earth systems in the 1950s transparently had their immediate (if certainly not their deeper) roots in the Mandates period. More particularly this increased impact was driven by the various state‑sponsored, growth‑oriented attempts to combat the Great Depression, efforts that culminated in the Second World War itself.

  • 58 Hecht, 2011; Teaiwa, 2014; Anghie, 2007.

31Exploring the global environmental history of the early Cold War, therefore, whether through commodity chains such as Togolese uranium and Nauru phosphates, or through the shifting techno‑politics of nuclear testing in the Pacific Marshall Islands, (which passed from use for coaling stations under the Japanese League of Nations Mandate to a role, from 1946, as the main testing ground, by megaton yield, for US nuclear weapons), is therefore likely to cast greater light on the legacies of forms of expertise elaborated in the Mandate period. Such an approach will also allow research on Mandate‑era expertise to contribute to discussion of the irreversible environmental rupture the Great Acceleration marked, notably by examining the reasons for expert blindness to it.58

  • 59 Macekura, 2015, p. 3.
  • 60 Mishra, 2013, p. 303; Iriye, 2008, pp. 643‑646; Macekura, 2015.
  • 61 Callendar, 1938, p. 236. See also Levene, 2013.
  • 62 Meadows, Meadows, Randers & Behrens III, 1972, pp. 70‑74. On responses see Bardi, 2011, pp. 49‑62; (...)

32As Pankaj Mishra has recently underlined in the case of Asian anti‑imperialism, “the institutions and practices of the nation‑state” certainly proved irresistible to “postcolonial elites almost everywhere” with “economic growth through industrial capitalism or socialism” to the fore. Simultaneously, in the “second half of the twentieth century […] global environmental initiatives would frequently conflict with national sovereignty in a world where power was increasingly being allocated to nation‑states.”59 As such, there is a role in the future development of the historiography on late colonial expertise for new periodization, connecting, for example, G. S. Callendar’s landmark 1938 study of fossil fuel consumption, atmospheric carbon dioxide, and global temperature changes, with the better known United Nations Conference on the Human Environment of 1972 and the publication of the “Limits to Growth.”60 In that 1938 paper Callendar, an amateur climatologist alongside his expert work as an industrial steam technologist, concluded, with an optimism that now rings strangely, that rising temperatures might expand the arctic margin of crop cultivation and delay “the return of the deadly glaciers […] indefinitely.” Tellingly, however, even his general findings about humans’ impact on global temperatures were dismissed by the meteorological experts who commented on his paper.61 34 years later, the Limits to Growth report detailed rising atmospheric carbon dioxide levels due to fossil fuel burning, and hoped that “if man’s energy needs are someday supplied by nuclear power instead of fossil fuels, this increase in atmospheric CO2 will eventually cease, one hopes before it has had any measurable ecological or climatological impact.” Such warnings would again be dismissed by most experts, such as the neoclassical economist and growth theorist Robert M. Solow.62 The Cold War tended in this respect to extend the dialogical and competitive logic of Mandate rule by repurposing keywords such as “development” and thereby also prolonged the purview of established hierarchies and targets of expertise, blinding experts to the rise of radically new problems.

  • 63 On law see Siegelberg, 2015.

33Methodologically, then, future studies on this question will find much of value in the preceding chapters, not least in the insistence, registered by the editors in their introduction, that while the Mandates never, with the exception of their impact on international law, constituted a homogenous field of colonial knowledge, they certainly catalyzed expanded knowledge production across a wide range of pre‑existing fields, in a context of the marked growth of international organizations and of their reach.63 In this respect the networked, globally significant yet locally varied intersections of natural history with the social, cultural and political history of expertise, in the Mandate period and after, are likely to present an ever more relevant site of critical inquiry in coming years.

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Notes

1 In addition to several chapters in this volume, on the Syrian Mandate see Schayegh  & Arsan, 2015.

2 See, for example, Gibb & Partners, 1947; and for the Mandate period Jackson, 2013.

3 International Bank of Reconstruction and Development (henceforth IBRD), 1955, p. vii. See also Alacevich, 2011.

4 Martin, 2015, p. 143 and passim.

5 On the World Bank and politics see Ferguson, 1994.

6 Vitalis, 2016.

7 For an extended approach to this issue see Jackson & O’ Malley , 2018.

8 Tooze, 2015, pp. 487‑507.

9 Dimier, 2014; representatively on the 1950s see Cooper, 1996, and on the 1960s and 1970s see Ogle, 2014.

10 See suggestively Sasson, 2016. For an overview see Kramer, 2016, p. 346. My thanks to Tamson Pietsch for drawing this latter work to my attention.

11 Steffen, Grinevald, Crutzen & McNeill, 2011, p. 845.

12 My thanks to Philippe Bourmaud for his insight here.

13 Pedersen, 2015, pp. 45‑77.

14 Whereas Jamālī served two terms as Prime Minister of the Iraqi monarchy, however, Lieftinck became a social‑democratic politician in the Netherlands and then spent several decades in the World Bank and IMF. See on the Columbia Economics Department, Rutherford, 2011.

15 On De Wilde see “World Bank Group Archives Oral History website”, Transcript of Interview with Gerald Alter, Harold Larsen, John C. de Wilde, 21 July, 1961, http://oralhistory.worldbank.org/person/de-wilde-john (Access on 07 August 2016). Revealingly, in terms of the continuities between the 1930s and the 1950s across the watershed of 1945, Bochenski authored a 1950 paper in Middle East Journal that theorized the extension of the Depression‑era Tennessee Valley Authority development model to the Middle East. Bochenski and Diamond wrote in that paper that “in recent years […] technological progress in other parts of the world and increasing self‑consciousness in the Middle East have resulted in the growing conviction that an attempt should be made to improve the living standards of the region, and that this can be done by using human effort to press back the water barrier and to reverse the process by which man’s abuses of the soil have reduced the productivity of the Middle East.”, Bochenski & Diamond, 1950, p. 54. See also Mitchell, 2002, p. 44; Ekbladh, 2010.

16 The other members were H. H. Bagnall, a British industrial analyst, Jean de Fargues (adviser on water resources and power), Carl Fritzle (adviser on agricultural production), Richard Goode (economist), Johannes J. Hanrath (adviser on transportation) and V. Webster Johnson (agricultural economist), while the two secretaries were Mary Major and Alison Turner. On Doxiadis in Saudi Arabia see Menoret, 2016.

17 For a systematic approach to this issue see Jackson & O’ Malley, 2018.

18 Clavin, 2013, pp. 305‑307; See also Ekbladh, 2015. On UNICEF’s antecedents see Baughan, 2014 and on the FAO’s connection to the League’s 1936 report see Cullather, 2007, p. 7.

19 Clavin, 2013, p. 307. For a thorough appraisal of the wartime pivot see also Wertheim, 2015. See also the workshop “Global 1943: Political Imagination and Blueprints for the Future”, Heyman Center, Columbia University, 11 April, 2014, http://heymancenter.org/events/global-1943/ (Access on 07 November 2016); Sayward, 2006; Helleiner, 2014.

20 Grandin, 2006; Connelly, 2003.

21 Pedersen, 2007, p. 1091.

22 Terretta, 2012, and Burke, 2010.

23 Kurz, 2018, pp. 90‑110.

24 Hodge, 2007, pp. 5‑14.

25 IBRD, 1955, p. 81, 385, 443. See also Thomé, 1953.

26 IBRD, 1955, p. 241, p. 450.

27 IBRD, 1955, p. 75. My italics.

28 On scale see Legg, 2009. On localism Yun‑Casallila, 2007.

29 Immerwahr, 2015, p. 13.

30 See also Burke III, 1973, pp. 175‑186.

31 Immerwahr, 2015, pp. 9‑11; Gilman, 2003. On colonial science in the French case Singaravélou, 2011.

32 IBRD, 1955, p. 96.

33 Ibid., p. 440.

34 Seers, 1962, p. 334.

35 Mitchell, 2002, p. 15. See the introduction to this volume for a discussion of the limits of Mitchell’s chronological approach to expertise.

36 Mitchell, 2002, p. 15.

37 Schayegh, 2011, p. 304.

38 IBRD, 1995, p. 213.

39 A related tendency was that of experts broadcasting to multiple audiences simultaneously, in the ways Robert Gordon chronicles in this volume for South Africa’s use of the League’s platform in the context of the Bondelzwarts case.

40 A classic example here is Demangeon & Febvre, 1935. See also Rüger, 2010, pp. 656‑668.

41 Zimmerman, 2010, pp. 173‑207.

42 The influence of the USSR’s de‑nationalized political formation on the creation of Pakistan is another example, while Japan’s ambiguous relationship with the League of Nations and its turn towards regional ambitions is still another. See respectively Devji, 2013 and Burkman, 2008.

43 Citino, 2014, p. 160. Citino shows how the struggle to render Cold War Jordan fiscally solvent, a struggle that had also informed British Mandate Rule in Transjordan, shaped debates on Cold War agricultural development in Amman and the United States. Citino states that British failures in this respect under the Mandate “should have served as a cautionary tale” (p. 171) for the American experts who followed them, but surely this normative rebuke is less significant than what the American experts’ failure to do so tells us about the persistence of Mandate‑era dynamics of expertise and their continuing role in suppressing local influence or alternative modes of expertise.

44 Monson, 2009. See generally on the historiography of development Hodge, 2015.

45 Kramer, 2016, p. 346. See also Epstein, 2014.

46 See, for example, Roman, 2018.

47 Gerig, 1930, p. 119. My thanks to Jamie Martin for flagging this book to me. For Gerig’s view of the Trusteeship system see Gerig, 1948. On Gerig in the context of Ralph Bunche and the wider shifts of international law at the UN see Burra, 2017, a project that first drew Gerig to my attention.

48 Gerig, 1930, p. 116.

49 On the wider context to the “Open Door” see Rosenberg, 2003. On the League and the “Open Door” see Pedersen, 2015, pp. 234‑35.

50 Seikaly, 2016; Abu‑Rish, Forthcoming.

51 IBRD, 1955, p. 112.

52 Tischler, 2013, pp. 153‑213; Showers, 2011. Thanks to Corey Ross for drawing this latter to my attention. Note finally Chung, In Progress. For a brilliant counter‑argument see Chatterjee, 2019.

53 Speich Chassé; Frey, Kunkel, Unger (eds.), 2014.

54 Khalili, 2010; Jackson & Moses, 2017; Kuzmarov, 2012; Frakking, 2014.

55 Neep, 2012; Bou‑Nacklie, 1993.

56 Thomas, 2008; Martin, 2010.

57 Bonneuil, Gemenne & Hamilton, 2015.

58 Hecht, 2011; Teaiwa, 2014; Anghie, 2007.

59 Macekura, 2015, p. 3.

60 Mishra, 2013, p. 303; Iriye, 2008, pp. 643‑646; Macekura, 2015.

61 Callendar, 1938, p. 236. See also Levene, 2013.

62 Meadows, Meadows, Randers & Behrens III, 1972, pp. 70‑74. On responses see Bardi, 2011, pp. 49‑62; Solow, 1973, pp. 49‑50; Mitchell, 2011, pp. 192‑197.

63 On law see Siegelberg, 2015.

Auteur

University of Birmingham

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