The construction of international order in the 1930s: polyphony of technocracy in McDougall’s ‘Economic appeasement’ (1936)

This paper contributes to our understanding of how international order was produced in the economic discourse around the League of Nations of the 1930s. Important aspects of the role of the League of Nation’s economic and financial ‘machinery’ in the renegotiation of international order in the interwar period have been well reconstructed, prominently by Clavin in Securing the World Economy. Yet, what existing studies have in common is that they provide

macro-historical accounts of intellectual traditions, political objectives and actor constellations of international economic governance, including the historical shape of the ideas of liberal internationalism and their commitments to technocracy. What they do not cover is the micro-picture, the underlying semantic fabric that makes the world. This is where this working paper

steps in. This paper presents the findings of a micro-analysis of the 1936 Memorandum ‘Economic Appeasement’, written by Frank McDougall for the League’s Economic and Financial Organization. The analysis shows that the international order constructed through McDougall’s Memorandum does not arise from a single, coherent principle but from the layering of heterogeneous registers. The economy is simultaneously cast as organism, machine, and force-field; cooperation functions both as technical mechanism and as civilisational marker; poverty is framed both as statistical variable and as existential danger.

These overlapping codings are not contradictions but coexisting logics that stabilise the discourse. Furthermore, the analysis shows how the semantic fabric of the Memorandum generates distinct discursive effects that recast the landscape of the political in multiple ways. It does not only formulate proposals but produces hierarchies of actors, defines the temporal logics of politics, and establishes the epistemic conditions under which action appears possible. It reconstitutes ‘the masses’ as indicators rather than actors, positions colonies as

reserves and developmental objects, and assigns governments the monopoly of responsibility. It ties welfare to security and recasts political decision-making as technical necessity. Notably, in an intriguing discursive move international organisations arise as the manifestation of ‘Western civilisation’, which, in turn, is not about cultural identity but is the institutional framework that ensure ‘world peace’.

Reference

SELCHOW, Sabine Ulrike, The construction of international order in the 1930s : polyphony of technocracy in McDougall’s ‘Economic appeasement’ (1936), EUI, HEC, Working Paper, 2026/01, ECOINT - https://hdl.handle.net/1814/94584