5 - Studying the World Economy, from Kiel and from Geneva

Summary

After Llewellyn Smith initially set the League Economic Committee on a cautious course, Franco-German conflict helped stimulate the development of a more ambitious trade agenda that found expression in the League’s 1927 World Economic Conference. Bernhard Harms participated by demanding a more broadly institutionalized international economic regime that would include the United States and would cover sensitive issues skirted by Llewellyn Smith, including reparations, raw materials, and colonial markets. Harms had a prominent bully pulpit from which to promote this vision, as the director of the IfW. He used his position to facilitate ongoing policy dialogue among a large community of League collaborators and critics. He helped establish a novel think-tank environment that spanned business, academia, and government and became an important base of support for the League. In recognition of his pivotal role in international information networks, Harms was asked to coordinate a massive economic bibliography for the League at the end of the 1920s, with backing from US philanthropic societies. This abortive project revealed the limits of Harms’s strategy of transatlantic outreach.