Speaking the peace: Language, world politics and the League of Nations, 1918-1935

Focusing primarily on the League of Nations, this thesis examines the prominent but problematic role that language questions and concerns played in international efforts to construct a new global political framework that would effectively prevent war between 1918 and 1935. While scholars have explored broadly the cultural and linguistic turn in these years, this project argues that there was also a linguistic turn in international politics that has been overlooked and that provides important insights into how the League of Nations functioned and ultimately failed. The First World War's highly publicized global violence created a sense that the world might not survive another conflict of its kind, but that the earth's peoples were so precariously interconnected that peace had to be universal or it would not last. When the Great Powers sought strategies for creating an international political body to manage world peace, the war's lessons in the force of propaganda and communications as modes for exercising power across greater distances came to the fore. Thus after 1918, the linguistic determinism that attributed to language the capacity to shape reality had a political counterpart; Wilsonian rhetoric proposed a new global order in which the word would replace the sword in organizing international relations.;The Covenant of the League of Nations posited that international discussion, conciliation, and arbitration conducted openly before and aiming to influence world public opinion could supplant the perceived secretive and undemocratic world of armed rivalries that had combusted in 1914. However, language was not a neutral medium but rather a politically charged marker of national identities in a global system in which great powers fought to retain control. Thus, looking at the politics of language at the League from the mechanics of discussion to failed disarmament efforts reveals deeper conflicts at work in international relations. Finally, the thesis argues that during the unstable years of 1933-1935, the linguistic tools designed to preserve the peace became weapons in the arsenals of belligerent governments actively preparing for war.