The economic and social impact of the LoN and the ILO. Protection and education of children and young people

Book Chapter

Reference

The economic and social impact of the LoN and the ILO. Protection and education of children and young people

DROUX, Joëlle, HOFSTETTER, Rita

DROUX, Joëlle, HOFSTETTER, Rita. The economic and social impact of the LoN and the ILO.

Protection and education of children and young people. In: Hidalgo-Weber, O. & Lescaze, B.

100 years of multilateralism in Geneva. From the LoN to the UN.. Suzanne Hurter, 2020. p. 298-313

Available at:

http://archive-ouverte.unige.ch/unige:145882

Disclaimer: layout of this document may differ from the published version.

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100 ^YEARS

OF MULTILATERALISM IN GENEVA

FROM THE LoN TO THE UN

The foundations of the UN and its peacebuilding efforts

CENTENARY OF THE LoN

HISTOIRE

EDITIONS SUZANNE HURTER

THE

HISTORICAL

REFERENCE BOOK

VOLUME 1

P ^ART I: T ^HE L ^{EAGUE OF} N ^ATIONS

Chapter 1: The origins of the LoN The Birth of Multilateralism (1815–1918) The Peace Conference and the Birth of the LoN Choosing the headquarters

The organization of the LoN

Chapter 2: The LoN’s mandate and achievements

Switzerland and the LoN

The United States and the LoN

The LoN, a testing ground for international security

The refugee issue

Chapter 3: Universality?

The LoN and the Middle East The LoN mandates in Africa

Latin American countries and the LoN The LoN and Asia

The battle against slavery and forced labour

Chapter 4: The economic and social impact of the LoN and the ILO

Peace and social justice

The ILO and tripartism: negotiating social progress Economic and monetary achievements

Protection and education of children and young people

Epidemics, public health and drugs

Geneva, crossroads of women’s mobilization

Chapter 5: The rise and fall of the LoN The Palais des Nations

From the League to the United Nations The ILO in exile in Canada

The LoN Secretariat was originally housed in the Palais Wilson, now the home of the OHCHR.

The League of Nations: a singular experience in multilateralism

Edited by Olga Hidalgo-Weber & Bernard Lescaze

President Woodrow Wilson.

P ^ART II: T ^HE U ^NITED N ^ATIONS

Chapter 6: Post-1945 multilateralim: a second wind Birth of the United Nations

The United Nations and the Cold War Major ad hoc meetings

Decolonization

Chapter 7: The work of the United Nations in Geneva

The battle over human rights within the UN system

Disarmament in Geneva

The Economic Commission for Europe The United Nations Conference on Trade and Development (UNCTAD) and the Global South Chapter 8: Specialized and Related Agencies Migration and refugees

Telecommunications

Innovation, Creativity and Intellectual Property

Creative Entry

Founding of the World Health Organization

VOLUME 2

Conference at the ILO.

P ^ART III : T ^{HE FUTURE}

OF M ULTILATERALISM AND OF THE U NITED N ATIONS

IN G ENEVA

Chapter 9: Tackling new challenges Climate and sustainable development

The International Labour Organization, social dialogue and globalization

Digital challenges Chapter 10: Geneva

NGOs, the United Nations Organization and human rights

Geneva’s role in contemporary global governance

Multilateralism in transition

Palais des Nations, Geneva.

The United Nations: the resilience of the multilateral system

Edited by Olga Hidalgo-Weber & Bernard Lescaze

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Joëlle Droux, Rita Hofstetter A slow maturation process

When the Peace Conference talks began in January 1919, the issue of children’s rights to protection and education was not new. There had been plenty of national debates about children’s issues since the early nineteenth century, particularly the need to protect children from the risks to which the industrial labour market was exposing them.

Governments had gradually come to see this as an imperative. Many people were realizing that children were withering away in factories under the weight of tasks beyond their strength and in unhealthy, insalubrious environments. By the 1830s, most industrialized countries were calling for human resources to be managed more sparingly, and bills were drafted to make children’s work more suited to their abilities (by setting a minimum age for entering the labour market, limited working hours and rules for night work). Yet even when they were adopted, these measures were not widely applied. Inexpensive child labour allowed entrepreneurs to produce at low cost and thus stay ahead of the competition. Despite a nascent awareness of the

issue, child labour continued to be rampant in factories.

The first real turning point came when public school systems were put in place. In the second half of the nineteenth century, many nations made education compulsory to prepare children for their roles as citizens and producers. Governments set an age limit (which varied from one country to the next) before which the child’s place was no longer at work but in school (age 12, 13 or even 14). Gradually, this became more than just preventing child labour at an early age. Other categories of vulnerable minors saw their rights reaffirmed by law (orphans, abandoned, ill-treated or neglected children and juvenile delinquents). It was now recognized that childhood came with specific rights to protection and education, and almost everywhere, States accepted a duty to ensure that those rights were respected.

4.4 Protection and education of children and young people

Children working in a mill in the USA in 1909.

A young worker in 1924.

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Why then did the international organizations established in the wake of the Treaty of Versailles invest efforts in children and young people? Had the nation states not already undertaken to protect them?

In fact, during the interwar period, many international organizations focused efforts on children: firstly, the International Labour Organization (ILO), but also a specific body of the League of Nations (LoN) established in 1925, namely the Child Welfare Committee (CWC). Various international networks were just as concerned, so much so that it would be impossible to mention all the initiatives that sprang up at the time. What these many agencies had in common, the hope that they shared, was summarized in 1925 by British activist Eglantyne Jebb, co-founder of the International Save the Children Union: “Rapid progress might be anticipated towards a reasonably high degree of child care and protection throughout the world, if all governments could accept in principle certain minimum obligations laid down by the League, and if the League could then support their endeavour to attain the standards which they had thus set before themselves by giving them all necessary advice and information”.

For Jebb, the main role of international organizations was not to act directly for the world’s children. That was rightfully a national prerogative. States had the sovereign right to determine and meet the needs of their young generations, in conjunction with their own partners in the field (private charities in particular). Intergovernmental bodies had a different task: not to replace States, but to develop instruments to help guide their action towards effective and functional mechanisms and practices.

As a result, when assessing the impact of the LoN and its associated bodies in the area of childhood, we should not expect the type of spectacular results or dramatic rescues deployed by today’s non-governmental organizations in the face of a humanitarian emergency. We should look for a more discreet role. As a process, the internationalization of children’s issues essentially consisted of promoting and facilitating exchanges of information so that countries would become open to reforms. The process was not identical everywhere. As we will see, many international agencies and stakeholders were involved.

The ILO: the normative path

Returning to our review of the history of child labour, we saw above that by the end of the nineteenth century this was already covered by many laws that intertwined school enrolment with the prohibition of child labour. This even went from being a national to an international objective. In 1890 in Berlin, then in 1914 in Bern, the main European powers recognized the need to ban child labour in factories and mines below a threshold that varied from 10 to 14 years old depending on the country. The lack of consensus on the age limit for this protective framework heralded disappointments to come. As the ILO worked towards a convention during the interwar period, the age limit became an obstacle.

The issue of child labour was discussed at the first International Labour Conference in Washington in 1919, since the peace treaty clearly mentioned the abolition of child labour as one of its objectives, in line with pre-war congresses. There was a lively first debate, not on the principle of banning child labour per se, but on the question of the age at which it should be banned. Age 14 was taken as a threshold for the purposes of the debate, but several delegations expressed reluctance.

India, in particular, invoked its own unique circumstances to demand a lower standard. In the end however, ILO Convention No. 5 adopted 14 as the minimum age for admission to industrial employment by 92 votes to 3, even though only 9 of the 39 countries represented in Washington already had a threshold of age 14 (in the others, it was younger). Rather than enshrine the existing situation, the aim of the convention was to herald a better future, and this choice of age 14 would prove decisive in how the instrument was subsequently received.

Despite their flexibility, the conventions garnered few ratifications: only 18 in 1919 for the convention on industrial labour! Moreover, ratification does not necessarily mean application, as one Czech correspondent at the ILO highlighted in 1927: “We ratified the Convention to protect children who are still in compulsory education, yet they are used by our unscrupulous employers as their cheapest source of labour”. The fact that employers were reticent also points to another major problem:

inconsistencies between labour law provisions and school regulations.

In many countries, the upper age limit for compulsory schooling did not coincide with the age-14 threshold imposed by ILO conventions.

Eglantyne Jebb, (1876-1928).

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If the ILO standard were ratified, what should be done about children leaving school at 12 or 13 and who are not allowed to work? Not only would the family still have to pay for their upkeep, but they would be unable to contribute to the household income and, most importantly, they would have to be supervised.

The scale of the issue and the complexity of the problems that it generated pushed many international agencies into action. Various overlapping surveys and studies fed into intensive discussions, particularly between the International Labour Office and its counterpart, the International Bureau of Education (IBE) (which will be discussed below), or the League’s technical bodies. Paradoxically, it was the economic crisis that would resolve the mismatch between schooling and working age limits on which these networks were working. By the early 1930s, young people were bearing the main brunt of the mass unemployment caused by the Depression. Having never worked, unemployed youths were not eligible for unemployment benefits (when they existed).

Idleness and poverty were highly likely to push young people to commit crimes. At least this was what many organizations feared (philanthropic groups, social services, youth movements, trade unions and teachers), who pressured the ILO to address this issue. In 1935, it adopted a recommendation setting out a catalogue of measures to curb youth unemployment. This text was a turning point because it advocated for consistency between how school systems were organized and how labour policy was implemented, in the name of effective child protection. The groundwork had already been laid in 1934 by an IBE recommendation on raising the school leaving age, which had a twofold purpose. Not only would it potentially relieve a saturated labour market by delaying the entry of the youngest jobseekers, but it also revived the protective goals of nineteenth-century legislation.

Admittedly, difficulties arose in applying these measures, with some countries proving reluctant because of the additional burden of building more schools and hiring more teachers. Nevertheless, the education sector showed so much support for integrating schooling and labour measures into a genuine protective system, as symbolized by the ILO and IBE’s joint efforts on the issue, that the ILO resumed work on a convention. This collaboration paved the way for raising the school leaving age to 14 (e.g. in France in 1936).

Jean Piaget (1896-1980), Swiss scientist,

Director of the International Bureau of Education

The son of Arthur Piaget, professor at the University of Neuchatel, Jean Piaget was twenty-two when he passed his viva for his scientific thesis (on molluscs). His interest in biology was the foundation for genetic epistemology; he based this on a theory of the cognitive development of the child, which is built through interactions with the physical and social world. In 1921, he was appointed Research Director of the Rousseau Institute where multidisciplinary investigations were carried out into infancy and early childhood education. Piaget set up his home base at the institute; he became Co-Director in 1932 and kept this role until he retired in 1971. At the same time, he took on other roles, including professorships in the History of Science, Experimental

Psychology, Genetic Psychology and Sociology at the Universities of Neuchatel and subsequently Geneva, Lausanne and Paris. He was also invited to lecture in many other universities worldwide. Piaget produced a phenomenal number of publications in these fields, as well on philosophy, biology and logic (80 books and 700 articles). In 1929, he became Director of the International Bureau of Education (IBE), which was established by the Rousseau Institute.

Assisted by Deputy Director Pedro Rosselló and Secretary-General Marie Butts, Piaget transformed the IBE into an intergovernmental institution in which an increasing number of States participated. International studies and conferences led to recommendations that aimed at improving school systems and programmes. When the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) was founded, synergies between the two organizations were established, as the IBE was recognized as a world centre for comparative education and pedagogical documentation. Piaget was Director of the IBE until 1968 and he carried out various functions at UNESCO: substitute for the Secretary-General, Director of the Education Section, Member of the Governing Body and Programme and Budget Commission, Member of the Governing Body of the UNESCO Institute for Lifelong Learning in Hamburg and President of the Swiss delegation to UNESCO. Piaget was an international diplomat in the field of education who promoted three key concepts: international understanding, active methods and high-quality education for all, the latter being an inalienable human right.

Rita Hofstetter

In 1967, Jean Piaget (1896-1980).

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On the strength of this, the ILO felt the time had come to revise its conventions on the minimum working age and increase it to 15 (Convention No. 59 on industrial employment). But that decision, in turn, proved problematic for States that had just voted to raise the school leaving age to 14.

The road to regulation was paved with good intentions but somewhat chaotic, and the effectiveness of this approach remains debatable. By setting a higher binding threshold, the ILO was forcing Member States to reflect on the status they conferred on their children and live up to ambitious expectations, but it did so without taking sufficient account of how schooling and employment ages were aligned at national level.

In fact, Convention No. 5 and the twin conventions that succeeded it established the conditions for their own non-application.

The International Bureau of Education (IBE): the path of intergovernmental dialogue

Schools were accused of being one of the culprits behind the Great War. Filled with nationalism and obsessed with obedience, schools had trained students to become brave little soldiers, ready to throw themselves dutifully into battle to perish as patriots. For the educators, intellectuals, pacifists and feminists who stood in judgement, peace on Earth would be built by “revolutionizing” education. Henceforth, the mission of schools should be to forge responsible, free and autonomous citizens, committed to the values of solidarity and world understanding.

At the dawn of the 1920s, internationalist educators were defiant. Why was it that children did not have a dedicated international agency, like the ILO for workers or the International Institute of Intellectual Cooperation (IIIC) for intellectuals, working to solve global education issues through international cooperation?

Seeing that the LoN had no plans to establish such an organization itself, the fervently pacifist intellectuals and educational psychologists gravitating around the Rousseau Institute of educational sciences founded the IBE in Geneva in 1925. Explicitly inspired by the spirit of the LoN and the reformist movement of the 1920s, this new agency set itself the task of building peace on Earth through science and education.

It began as a private foundation supported by a committee of patrons chaired by Albert Einstein, of which many members were already

prominent figures in Geneva’s international agencies (including the LoN and the ILO). The IBE sought to federate all like-minded educational associations worldwide, but the other internationalist organizations refused to recognize this supremacy as they too sought to become legitimate in their own right.

In 1929, to avoid bankruptcy and build a stronger, more efficient organization, the IBE was reconfigured so that its main partners became the nation states, who were responsible for governing their national education systems. To guarantee its scientific credibility and ensure that it had an audience, the agency was placed in the hands of Jean Piaget (1896–1980). The psychologist wrote that when he agreed to take on the role, he saw it as somewhat of an adventure. Clearly, he was soon converted to the cause. With the support of Deputy Director Pedro Rosselló (1897–1970) and a small but effective staff, Piaget ran the IBE for almost 40 years. They turned the IBE into the first intergovernmental agency in the field of education, a precursor to the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO). The two organizations began collaborating in 1946 and the IBE was fully integrated with UNESCO in 1969.

Five governments signed the IBE’s founding document in 1929: Geneva, Ecuador, Poland, then Spain and Egypt. Switzerland did not join until 1934. Gradually, the IBE’s tireless canvassing brought in other Member States (16 in 1939, 20 in 1950, 68 in 1968). Beyond this, any interested government could join in the IBE’s work, and in the 1930s it already had over 200 correspondents in more than 70 countries.

The IBE aimed to centralize documentation on public and private education and to address global education issues through international cooperation. The agency boasted strict and—in its words “absolute”—

scientific objectivity and neutrality when it came to national, philosophical, religious and above all political views. In the twentieth- century context of exacerbated nationalism, hegemonic empires, another world war and independence movements, this was quite a challenge.

The IBE opted for the path of intergovernmental dialogue, organizing the annual International Conference on Public Education (ICPE) from 1934 onwards. These Conferences brought together representatives of Member States, observers from international agencies (LoN, ILO, IIIC) and delegates from other interested countries.

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A liaison committee was set up with the ILO and then with the IIIC to facilitate scientific collaboration and a “harmonious distribution of tasks”. From 1946 onwards, these became synergies between UNESCO and the IBE, with the latter becoming the equivalent of a UNESCO technical agency that contributed to the Education Section’s projects.

The ICPEs were then held under the joint auspices of UNESCO and the IBE. Ever the pragmatic diplomat, Piaget called it a trial marriage, and by 1948, UNESCO Assistant Director-General Clarence Edward Beeby remarked that it was a marriage of convenience that proved to be a marriage of affection.

The Conferences were designed as a platform for governments to present and discuss the “highlights of the educational movement” in their countries, in order to “gain an idea of global progress on education”

(ICPE, 1946). Many of the key priority issues were related to access to education: compulsory education and raising the school leaving age;

admission and then equal access to secondary schools; the organization of special and rural education; and women’s access to education. There was also a focus on school curricula from the outset, with a view to broadening access to culture and promoting greater international awareness. Teachers’ working and training conditions were one of the main concerns, with the quality of education being seen to depend on the status and qualifications of teachers.

The recommendations that States examined and adopted at these Conferences were not binding, as the obsession with avoiding any interference in the strictly national prerogative of education prevailed.

Subtle arguments were used to turn this freedom into a responsibility. It was in every government’s interest to have the best possible educational system to guarantee the country’s intellectual and economic performance.

It was enough to simply foster emulation and invite each country to learn from the experience of others to improve its own education system. All delegations were free to state their positions, propose amendments or oppose the recommendations, and the implications of this freedom were made clear. By attending, by speaking or making written submissions and voting on recommendations, national delegates were committing the governments they represented (ICPE, 1934). The fact that the commitment was voluntary made it all the more serious. Over the four decades that Piaget and Rosselló were at the IBE’s helm, more than a Pedro Rosselló (1897-1970), Deputy Director of the International

Bureau of Education.

Rosselló was born into a family of farmers in Catalonia. He was educated in Madrid and then Geneva, where he was drawn to the emerging field of childhood and educational sciences developed by the Rousseau Institute. On his return to Spain, he became a school inspector, taught educational psychology at the educational museum and was head of the psychology department at the Institute of Career Guidance in Madrid. In 1924, he was appointed to the Rousseau Institute where he specialized in comparative education. Having obtained his doctorate in 1943 and published (in French) Marc-Antoine Jullien of Paris, father of comparative education and precursor of the International Bureau of Education, a foundational textbook of comparative education, he went on to become professor in this field in 1948. When the International Bureau of Education transformed into an intergovernmental institution, he became its Assistant Director, deputy to his friend, Jean Piaget. He remained in these roles until 1968.

Rosselló, with the support of Secretary-General Marie Butts, was the real kingpin of the International Bureau of Education for forty years. He contributed to the annual organization of international conferences on public education. He drafted the Bulletins of the International Bureau of Education, a quarterly publication that reported on the work of the Bureau, namely international educational movements.

They also included an international bibliography and provided information on the progress of the International Bureau of Education’s surveys. He created the International Yearbook of Education, which has been published annually since 1933 and is distributed worldwide. Rosselló used data provided by the International Bureau of Education’s partner States to produce a world overview of schools, which he analysed meticulously to develop a global vision of the “functioning of education worldwide”. He thus applied his theory of functional and explanatory comparative education, which seeks to identify the causes of global phenomena by comparing them with each other and to predict how they may change over time.

Rita Hofstetter

Pedro Rosselló (1897-1970).

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thousand articles were adopted in these recommendations, the sum of which constitutes a “charter of global aspirations for public education”.

At the IBE, Piaget the genetic epistemologist proved to be an outstanding diplomat for internationalism in education. With his deputy director Rosselló, he took the very methods of cooperation and self-government he discovered and theorized at the Rousseau Institute and applied them on an international and intergovernmental scale. Piaget demonstrated that these cooperation methods fostered a transition from egocentrism to reciprocity and from the individual to the universal. This internal solidarity was the path to rationality and truth and the basis for the construction of intelligence. “Understanding between individuals of different races or nationalities must be the primary aim of any educationist who seeks to contribute to an international rapprochement. […]. What we need is a spirit of cooperation whereby each will understand all the others—an ‘internal solidarity’ which will not eliminate individual standpoints, but will bring about mutual comprehension and establish unity in diversity. It is this correlation of standpoints that we call cooperation, as distinct from the establishment of uniformity or the Utopian search for an absolute viewpoint.” (Piaget, 1931, pp. 71–72).

The aim was both to promote these practices and principles in schools around the world and to translate them into the modus operandi of the IBE and its Conferences. These methods of international consultation and cooperation, as IBE advocates called them, would be transposed on an intergovernmental scale. In so doing, they established the IBE as an international centre of comparative education, and it was in this capacity that the IBE was fully integrated into UNESCO in 1969.

The LoN’s Child Welfare Committee: the emergence of international civil society

When the LoN began its work in 1919, very few delegates expected anything other than political or diplomatic issues to appear on its agenda. And yet, the LoN distinguished itself in various social fields.

From 1919 onwards, never again would debates on these issues be seen as purely national matters. Now, there was international involvement in the form of intergovernmental organizations and, most importantly, their international partners, networks and movements. Child welfare is one field that illustrates how these organizations went about obtaining a voice in these debates.

This internationalist movement was interrupted by the outbreak of the Great War, but it resumed in 1919. In 1921, the Association Internationale de Protection de l’Enfance (AIPE) was founded in Brussels. Its mission was to centralize information on best practices in child welfare, discuss and disseminate them through publications and periodic congresses and make the voice of private associations heard in national debates and international forums. At the same time, other organizations were being formed to reflect on the needs of young people in a post-war society disrupted by political and social crises. For example, the International Save the Children Union (ISCU) was founded in Geneva in 1920. Committed to humanitarian aid for children at risk of starvation in Central Europe, the ISCU launched a vast international mutual aid programme that transcended religious and political boundaries to implement many child relief initiatives such as school kitchens, food parcel distribution, homes for war orphans, etc. Its work was financed by foreign donors and implemented in the field by a whole host of organizations (Quakers, Red Cross Societies).

This transnational dimension was applauded by pacifists, for whom it embodied the collaborative, borderless momentum they were calling for to rebuild peaceful international relations.

Throughout the 1920s, new players such as the AIPE and the ISCU emerged. These networks attracted members from a broad range of sectors (the judiciary, senior civil servants, intellectuals, philanthropists) whose work was already focussed on children. The fields they targeted overlapped and these new networks did not always agree, and even competed at times. Nevertheless, they became a “third voice” on the international stage, that of civil society bringing its causes before governments and international agencies to be placed on the international agenda. One of the reasons behind their success was that many of their activists held significant sway in society and mobilized this for the cause. For example, one of the masterminds behind the AIPE was the Belgian Henry Carton de Wiart (1869–1951), a leading public figure and one of the “fathers” of the Belgian juvenile court model. Another was the French judge Henri Rollet (1860–1934), who spearheaded the reform of juvenile justice in France. As for the ISCU, it was backed by an elite group from the International Committee of the Red Cross in Geneva and by eminent members of the British establishment. Between 1921 and 1924, these two networks constantly lobbied the Council of

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the LoN to create a League body responsible for child welfare, a battle they won in 1925 with the creation of the CWC. Its mandate was to study the best child welfare systems and bring them to the Council’s attention so as to recommend them to the entire international community. This advisory body was composed of representatives of governments and associations (called assessors). It collaborated with other organizations that were represented by their own liaison officers (such as the ILO).

In 1925, the CWC had about 10 government delegates and six assessor associations who met annually for a session of about eight days. The associations on the CWC could not only contribute to its work but also channel information to and from the national level, where they sourced information for committee investigations and disseminated the findings.

Most of these self-proclaimed representatives of international civil society for children’s issues were prominent figures. As well as Carton de Wiart and Rollet, they included the German feminist activist and politician Gertrud Baümer (1873–1954), British feminist Eleanor Rathbone (1872–1946), active in the field of social reform, the American Grace Abbott (1878–1939), a social worker and the cornerstone of the Children’s Bureau, Léonie Chaptal (1873–1937), a French expert on the professionalization of nurses and social workers, and the Swiss lawyer and judge Alfred Silbernagel (1877–1938). All of them contributed to this international development of non-binding standards in the field of child welfare.

The CWC’s roadmap stemmed from an important text promoted by the ISCU: its “Declaration of the Rights of the Child”, a short text comprising five articles and a preamble, adopted by the General Assembly of the LoN in 1924. These concise articles establish a key premise that forms the basis of many subsequent international instruments on the protection of children’s rights: States have a duty to do everything possible to improve child and juvenile protection. As for the AIPE, it brought research topics from its own network to the CWC’s agenda: juvenile delinquency, juvenile courts, the protection and education of illegitimate children, placement schemes, educational cinema and assistance for foreign minors. Between 1925 and 1936, the CWC commissioned many studies on all these questions, amassing information from all corners of the world that illustrated what each nation was doing or planning to do to better protect its children.

During this brief decade, through its investigations, reports and recommendations, the CWC contributed to a range of work on existing or future mechanisms. However, there were also many failures.

Draft conventions aimed at improving aid for foreign children in their country of residence were discussed continuously at the CWC from 1925 to 1934, yet no

decision was ever reached. It lacked the time and resources to do more.

Also, the Council was put off at times by the committee’s appetite for investigating. When it established this advisory body, it had not intended things to go so far. But the General Assembly supported the CWC, and in 1936 it went so far as to recommend that it be turned into a Committee on Social Questions where all Member States were represented. In so doing, the LoN established a body to study social policies, with child and family welfare as its central concern. The Committee began meeting in 1937 and soon published some major reports on sensitive social issues that the CWC had already been studying over the previous decade (the protection of illegitimate children, the organization of juvenile courts, and child placement policies). This was until it collapsed along with the entire League structure in autumn 1939.

The CWC’s performance may have been limited, but it remains a remarkable effort in that it launched, within the LoN, a fruitful, tripartite dialogue between civil society, governments and international organizations that until then had mainly been the territory of the ILO. Moreover, it did so not through a binding process as the ILO had done but by institutionalizing an original form of consultation between State representatives and private organizations. This dialogue helped propel certain causes into the limelight, publicize and review certain mechanisms and disseminate and promote a whole catalogue of measures.

Expert committee on the traffic in women and children, 1921.

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Facilitating dialogue and building standards

Ultimately, throughout this period when an array of projects, mechanisms and institutions emerged, there was a whole range of discussions relating to children and their protection and education. By facilitating dialogue, initiating debates and setting standards, the organizations born under the LoN, with their diverse mandates and modes of operation, helped forge the kind of soft power that is now acknowledged as playing a crucial role in international diplomacy.

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