This article reintroduces the Scandinavian perspective on interwar internationalism by mapping and analysing the Scandinavian staff in the League Secretariat. Combining quantitative and qualitative sources, the article explores how the Scandinavian members of staff were viewed by and situated in the institutional topography of the League Secretariat; how they were related to and positioned towards the national foreign policy establishment; and what the postwar trajectories of the Scandinavian League staff looked like. With these perspectives, the article offers three key insights: First, the interplay between the League Secretariat and the foreign policy strategies pursued by the Scandinavians, was highly productive, and the international issues that different Scandinavian countries engaged with through the League staff was substantially determined by the institutional setup of the League. Second, we note clear differences in terms of strategy and commitment between the three countries' Ministries of Foreign Affairs (MFAs). Third, the careers of the Scandinavians working in the Secretariat show a clear continuity of Scandinavian internationalism across the Second World War. The experience, prestige and networks gained from working in the League Secretariat often translated into key positions in postwar IOs or within the new multilateral parts of the MFAs.

The role of regional integration in trade creation has been an integral part of the theoretical debates on the birth and expansion of the Common Market. 1 Its resulting role as a generator of transport services, however, is a rather neglected theme in European studies. 2 Thus, the insights of maritime history occupy only a marginal place in the field of European integration history. At the same time, the study of European Economic Community (EEC)/ European Union (EU) enlargement, and integration history more generally, has only recently begun considering the transformative role of outsiders, 3 and remains largely neo-institutionalist in its focus on the negotiations within the EC or between member states and applicants. 4 This article studies the response of two outsiders towards a prospective Common Shipping Policy (CSP) during the 1960s and the 1970s, adopting a business perspective and focusing on the shipping sector in Greece and Norway. In line with the objectives of this special issue, then, this article explores the fact that two leading shipping nations found the EC's CSP limiting-fearing a protectionist and dirigiste mode of capitalism-both in times of growth and in times of crisis, and how the prospect of membership in the EC was used as a launch-pad for divergent business strategies both in the 1960s and 1970s, as a response to a global economic crisis and the emergence of new modes of capitalism. Drawing on a wide range of archival material from the regional, state and business level, from multiple countries (Britain, Greece, Norway, US), we aim to show the usefulness of studying the business sector from the periphery as a way of understanding European integration. The article offers three overall insights, and these structure the article. First, it demonstrates why the prospect of a CSP was too regional and restrictive for Greek and Norwegian shipowners. Rather than being a story of peripheries reacting against an allencompassing centre, it provincializes the Community, and places it within the global shipping strategies of two peripheral European countries. 5 Moreover, the article shows that the cooperation and coordination of shipowners and their national organisations transcend the member/non-member-dichotomy. 6 A historiographical argument is, therefore, that a sectoral

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This article reintroduces the League of Nations Secretariat as a fundamentally significant object of historical study. By drawing on key insights from three generations of historiography on the Secretariat, the authors explore how historians can use a Bourdieusian conceptual framework to study this first major international administrative body. Each generation of literature has emphasized one of three professional archetypes – the bureaucrat, the diplomat and the technocrat. Moving beyond these archetypes, and applying Antoine Vauchez's concept of ‘weak fields’ and the notions of import, brokering capacity and hybridity, we see how the professional templates that were being imported into the Secretariat were culturally specific (mainly to Britain and Northern Europe) and how they were merged and reinvented to secure the smooth running of a multilateral, multinational and multivalent organization given charge of a series of new functions, thus producing new, specific forms of expertise exclusive to the Secretariat. Accordingly, we capture both the complexities of what kind of professional cultures came to dominate the Secretariat and the novelty of some of the types of expertise it rested upon: an important step towards a deeper understanding of the characteristics and role of international public administration in international politics in the twentieth century.

This introduction outlines the possibilities and perspectives of an intertwining between European integration history and the history of capitalism. Although debates on capitalism have been making a comeback since the 2008 crisis, to date the concept of capitalism remains almost completely eluded by historians of European integration. This introduction thus conceptualizes 'capitalism' as a useful analytical tool that should be used by historians of European integration and proposes three major approaches for them to do so: first, by bringing the question of social conflict, integral to the concept of capitalism, into European integration history; second, by better conceptualizing the link between European governance, Europeanization, and globalization of capitalism; and thirdly by investigating the economic, political and ideological models or doctrines that underlie European cooperation, integration, policies and institutions. Finally, the introduction addresses the question of the analytical benefits of an encounter between capitalism and European integration history, focusing on the case of the 1970s. This allows to qualify the idea of a clear-cut rupture, and better highlight how the shift of these years resulted from a complex bargaining that took place in part at the European level.