Experts without borders

This chapter presents liberal varieties of technocratic internationalism from the interwar years. The first section sketches the tumultuous situation at the end of the First World War to set the stage for this discussion. Wartime cooperation among the Western allies became a point of reference for internationalism of the executive top-down type. The work of two British internationalists, James Arthur Salter and H. R. G. Greaves, illustrates this type of internationalism, and is the focus of the second section. These authors envisaged the economic and technical branches of the League as a continuation of the wartime ‘executives’ among the Western allies. The American Pitman B. Potter linked his vision of international expert administration to otherwise Wilsonian ideas about an international rule of law and the primacy of security. The third section is devoted to the more utopian kinds of technocratic internationalism of the interwar years. They are represented here by Leonard Woolf and G. D. H. Cole who applied ideas of functional government to the domestic and international level alike. The final section of the chapter turns to David Mitrany who developed the functional approach to international organization more systematically. It shows how Mitrany combined the pragmatic and utopian elements of technocratic internationalism into a new synthesis.