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1 Introduction
Jonas Brendebach, Martin Herzer, and Heidi Tworek
As the Second World War raged towards its conclusion, American political scientist Dell G. Hitchner contemplated how to rebuild international affairs after the global conflagration had ended. A post-war international organizationâs âmain force will be publicity,â he concluded in 1944.1 Like other elites, Hitchner believed the world needed a new international organization that had learned from the League of Nationsâ failure to prevent war. One of the main lessons for Hitchner was that the League had spent too little on publicity, only about three percent of its budget in 1936. âIf an important aim of that institution [the League]âindeed, perhaps, a main measure of its successâwas the stimulation of thought about international life on a peaceful basis, it might well have expended ten times that amount,â wrote Hitchner.2 For Hitchner and many others, international organizations were unimaginable without publicity to foster public support.
Many politicians and publicists before and after the mid-1940s agreed with Hitchner about the importance of the media and publicity for achieving the political aims of international organizations.3 Since their foundation at the start of the nineteenth century, international organizations have meant many different things to many different groups. Some saw international organizations as the route to international peace and cooperation; others saw international organizations as a vehicle for national or imperial agendas. Liberal internationalism was but one variant of internationalism. Fascists and Communists had their own visions of international relations.4 But they all agreed that the media would be key for any international organization to enact its aims.
On the one hand, people around the globe learned about international organizations and their activities largely through the media and images created by journalists, publicists, and filmmakers in texts, sound bites, and pictures. Diplomats and politicians supposed that the existence and success of international organizations depended on media attention, communication, and publicity. References to âpublic opinionâ were ubiquitous, though its meaning often remained ill-defined. The term could refer to views issued by journalists in the media, to mass opinion as measured in public opinion polls emerging in the 1930s in the United States, or even to the lofty idea and vaguely moral category of a world public.5
On the other hand, there were limits to what media attention and publicity could achieve, as this volume shows. The public turned out to be an unruly construct. Sometimes the intended public was not interested or the intended message elicited an unexpected response. It is unclear whether the general public has ever really clamored for more information about international organizations. A cynical interpretation holds that international organizations turned to courting the public when they could not convince politicians or other decision-makers. More communications could not conceal political conflict or lack of will.6
In areas ranging from the United Nationsâ press and information policy to research on the European Union and a âEuropean public sphereâ inspired by JĂźrgen Habermas, scholarship has assumed that effective communication to the public will assure success and survival for international organizations.7 The classic model to assess communications created by Harold Lasswell in 1948 is similarly linear. Known as the 5W model, it divides communications into five parts:
- who;
- says what;
- in which channel;
- to whom;
- with what effect?8
Scholars have mainly disagreed on how to define and create effective communication. Consciously or unconsciously following Lasswellâs model, their main question seems to be how elites and experts can communicate with the public, rather than whether communications can achieve political goals in the first place.
This volume questions some of the basic assumptions about how international organizations could use media to promote or enable international governance. More information did not necessarily strengthen public or political support for international initiatives. Communications that reached a broader circle of recipients did not necessarily bolster international institutions. Our historical investigation into the interaction between international organizations and communications suggests that publicity did not and could not fulfill the exorbitant expectations placed upon it.
Diplomatsâ and international organizationsâ theories of public opinion often contrasted strongly with their actual practices of interacting with the media and producing information for the public and experts. The distinction between theory and practice is particularly relevant for communications. Diplomats and scholars still often rely on the rhetoric of communications to assess the influence of international organizations. But the practice of communications suggests a very different story, where publicity for international organizations was not always the most effective choice.
International organizations and the media in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries
International organizations used the media from the start. The first international organization is conventionally dated to 1815 when the Central Commission for the Navigation of the Rhine (CCNR) was established at the Congress of Vienna. The CCNR relied on newspapers and printing to convey its mandate and communicate its regulations along a river.
The number of international organizations grew over the nineteenth century. Mass communication emerged in the same period, spurred by the swift expansion of an urbanizing and literate readership as well as technical innovations like the telegraph and the steam-powered printing press in the second half of the nineteenth century. In fact, several of the earliest international organizations were explicitly tasked with regulating new international communications, like the International Telegraph Union (1865) and the Universal Postal Union (1874).
Mass media and news agencies facilitated coordination across borders and spurred the establishment of international and transnational institutions. They also furthered European imperial expansion into Africa and Asia. International organizations and international expansion of the media contributed to the first wave of nineteenth-century globalization lasting until the First World War. This imperial world order saw economic development and military power between regions diverge more than ever before.9
Internationalism also emerged âin the age of nationalism.â10 International organizations functioned as discursive spaces for mainly Western politicians and diplomats to generate common vocabulary and standardized statistics on international problems. International organizations also offered an avenue to bolster national agendas. These were not always benign. Japanese officials suggested a League of Nations health bureau in Asia in the early 1920s not just to reduce infectious disease, but to learn about disease in China for military purposes.11
International governmental organizations were not the only expression of internationalism: wealthy philanthropists founded non-governmental organizations (NGOs) like the Rockefeller Foundation to promote their visions of how the worldâs problems should be solved. Categories like intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) and non-governmental organizations (NGOs) often overlapped.12 Both could be used as extensions of imperialism and colonialism like the International Colonial Institute in Brussels.13
Moreover, journalists themselves created international journalistsâ associations in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. These associations were part of a broader professionalization that paralleled other areas of working life like law or medicine in the West.14 At the same time as lawyers sought to codify common law in the United States, reporters developed guidelines for techniques such as interviewing and fact-based reporting. Like engineers, journalists created professional societies to cement their status, in this case as purveyors of news and truth.15
Some pushed back against imperial visions of an international order based on Western media. Muslim thinkers reacted to ideas about the unity of Western Christian civilization by envisioning a political order based on Islam that would transcend European categories of empire and nation.16 When Gandhi was in South Africa, he would launch the periodical Indian Opinion that pushed back against Western ideals valorizing the rapid dissemination of information that undergirded global empire.17 The professional norms of journalism offered only one way to gather news, interpret information, and spread publicity, though these norms came to dominate international media in the twentieth century.
Still, international organizations and mass communication expanded rapidly in the twentieth century. The winners of the First World War founded the League of Nations at the 1919 Paris Peace Conference, while the Soviet Union launched the Communist International as a world revolutionary counter-project. The League of Nationsâ foundation was based on a liberal vision of international relations that if the League and its associations along with nation-states could expose citizens to facts and rational explanations, those citizens would âsee the lightâ of the League. That âpublic opinionâ for peace would push politicians towards international cooperation. The press too would play its part by contributing to âmoral disarmament.â18
The Leagueâs liberal sponsor U.S. President Woodrow Wilson envisioned a new era of international relations based on cooperation and peace. For Wilson, public opinion and the media played a key role in safeguarding a system of collective security. Potential aggressors would be contained by a âworld courtâ of public opinion. The League followed a quasi-parliamentary model with public deliberationsâthe transparent âopen diplomacyâ Wilson had advocated in his Fourteen Points. Journalists flocked to Geneva to report on this new center of internationalism. The League built successful expert information networks on the international economy or global public health, but failed in its main purpose to safeguard international peace.
The League allowed Britain and France to cement their dominant positions in Europe and to expand their colonial holdings in an era when European imperialism faced increasing criticism. The Leagueâs mandate system disguised continued imperial rule, but also became a point of attack for anti-colonial nationalists harnessing international public opinion against European hegemony. A âglobal publicâ of media and civil society scrutinized imperial powersâ actions and limited their maneuvering space in mandate territories in particular. The public procedures of the mandate system enlisted âthe great powers in a drama of public accountability.â19 This fostered a transformation in imperial rule, although it happened slowly over decades.
Meanwhile, the United States remained involved through NGOs, particularly the Rockefeller Foundation. The Rockefeller Foundation provided extensive funding to various initiatives like the Health Organization, even though the United States had not become a member of the overarching organizationâthe League of Nations.20
At the same time as these institutions and politicians preached the power of international public opinion, their views were challenged by scholars as well as alternative forms of internationalism. The American political theorist and journalist Walter Lippmann argued in his 1922 book on Public Opinion that it was unreasonable to expect the press to inform the public about all political affairs and then to expect the public to act based on that information.21 In the 1930s, the outbreak of nationalist tensions and war in Asia and Europe showed that public opinion around the world was neither necessarily peace-loving nor pro-League.
The creation of the League and Comintern as well as the rise of fascist internationalism coincided with the emergence of new media technologies.22 Radio spread in the United States and European countries, becoming another key source for news and entertainment by the late 1930s. The interwar years also saw the breakthrough of film. Movies screened in cinemas attracted millions of viewers. Newsreels shown in dedicated newsreel theatres or cinemas became the primary audio-visual source of information for Americans and Europeans. The supposedly crucial role of propaganda in...
