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.

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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.

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Scandinavia (Denmark, Norway and Sweden) is frequently seen as a democratic ‘island of peace’ in international politics and the three states are seen as ardent supporters of an ‘international community’ under the umbrella of the United Nations as well as its predecessor, the League of Nations. This article seeks to challenge this idealised, unitary conception of Scandinavian peace politics by exploring how different strands of internationalism, as transnational phenomena, developed from the outbreak of the First World War until the three states became members of the League. Initially, that development was more or less independent of official foreign policy. The article explains how and to what degree new internationalist ideas were eventually merged with traditional neutralist Scandinavian foreign policies.