1. Introduction
Most people remember the League of Nations as the interwar organization constituted by the Treaty of Versailles, formed at the insistence of American president Woodrow Wilson and diplomats such as Lord Robert Cecil, and inspired by their ideal of liberal internationalism. Its covenant was accepted in April 1919 and represented a belief that peace could be guaranteed through a body that would execute a postwar settlement, mediate international disputes, pursue disarmament, and secure world peace. In these tasks, there is no denying that the League ended in catastrophic failure and it has struggled to escape from the historiographical shadow of its performance in mediating relationships between sovereign states.Footnote 1 Yet, besides its core business in the realm of international relations and international law as traditionally defined, there also are less popularly acknowledged covenanted activities of the League that concerned ‘technical’ or ‘economic and social’ duties through which it intervened in international health, economics, and communication.Footnote 2 Commenting on these ‘economic and social’ duties of the League, an early appraisal suggested that:
They covered every aspect of international relations: as time went on, they were concerned more and more intimately with the ordinary problems of the life of individuals as well as of nations – with health, housing, nutrition, wages, taxation, emigration, education . . ..Footnote 3
One such duty comprised the campaign against trafficking in women and children. This brought the League into contact with a nefariously imagined world of pimps, madames, souteneurs, and traffickers, who gravitated around brothels. These brothels were, in turn, presumed to create both the supply of, and the demand for, prostitutes. The League helped to institute a change in mindsets and practices regarding prostitution and trafficking by de-racializing the ‘white slave trade’ rhetoric in an attempt to force a recognition of the complexity of global trafficking and its impacts on women, whether white or not, as will be elaborated on below.Footnote 4 This is partly evident in the international conventions and national laws it inspired, but is also evidenced by the images, data, questions, questionnaires, and campaigns it produced. These interventions went beyond the domain of sovereign juridical commands, legally binding conventions, and clear territorial borders. Rather, they etched out the possibilities for international, consensual, regulation in an increasingly globalized world.
The League's responses to these ordinary problems of individual and national lives were consensual in two senses: first, governments consented to the League's authority even though it lacked the equivalent coercive powers of a domestic sovereign, and thus it continued to rely on state-level compliance; second, the League launched normative projects that sought to alter terms of debate (e.g., defining ‘trafficking’ or a ‘brothel’) and thus to penetrate domestic governments and populations through encouraging the consensual acceptance of its discourse and norms.
These two senses of consensual compliance also play on the ambivalence at the heart of the ‘international’. This term traditionally refers to relations ‘[e]xisting, constituted, or carried on between different nations; pertaining to the relations between nations’, but it also refers to a sense of affinity and affiliation across national borders, common standards of measure, or membership of bodies such as the Communist International or, as shall be argued here, the League of Nations.Footnote 5 One can see two different kinds of ‘population’ at play here in the ‘international’. In the Westphalian tradition, the population of the international was a family of sovereign states. In the twentieth century, the populations within the sovereign states themselves became the objects of international discourses and regulation – the family undergoing a transition from a model for the international to a mechanism of international intervention into everyday life.Footnote 6 Indeed, the populations targeted by the League were twofold: they encompassed the family of nation-states typically studied by international relations and international law; but they also envisaged a global population that could be targeted by the transnational circulation of norms and advice. That is what, in the quote above, is referred to as ‘the life of individuals as well as of nations’.
This paper will argue that we should consider the powers of the League through its technical interventions into the lives of individuals, rather than simply its work as an international security organization. This necessarily means thinking about the ‘international’ not only beyond its traditional subjects (sovereign states), but also beyond the traditional juridical mechanisms of regulation (diplomacy and conventions) to considering the broader informal techniques through which the language and mechanisms of internationalism spread across the globe. This provides a new insight into what Foucault has referred to as biopolitics (‘an explosion of numerous and diverse techniques for achieving the subjugations of bodies and the control of populations’Footnote 7) as a political technology different from what he called sovereign or juridical power. Moreover, I will argue that Foucault's work on ‘governmentalities’ provides us with a useful analytical toolkit to consider international negotiations of sovereign- and bio-power. The argument is developed in three parts. The first section will introduce the terms of governmentality and biopolitics and situate them in the ongoing re-evaluation of Foucault's appreciation of the role of law in modern forms of power and government. It will be argued that governmentality provides an analytics for thinking beyond juridical frameworks associated with sovereign power, without jettisoning an appreciation of the role of law. The second part will suggest that we can think about ‘League governmentalities’ as international manifestations of modern government through the League's technical duties and manifestation of biopolitics, which augmented but did not supplant the place of sovereign powers of international relations and international law within its work. Section 3 uses the case study of trafficking in women and children to show how laws and norms, sovereign powers and bio-powers, were brought together in League campaigns for both legal conventions and greater understanding of the mechanisms and morals of trafficking and tolerated brothels.
2. Governmentalities and (international) law
In attempting to retheorize the history of power relations in the West, Michel Foucault's famous injunction to decapitate the sovereign's head of political theory and move beyond an obsession with law has been much commented upon, challenged, and tested on empirical case studies.Footnote 8 The origin of the contestation lies with Foucault's juxtaposition of governmentality with an older sovereign power that works through spectacle, force, deduction, subtraction, seizure, and juridical acts of forbidding. Sovereign power in this sense is summarized by the now totemic phrase ‘to take life or let live’.Footnote 9 Identifying emerging bio-powers by their productive, rather than deductive, force, governmentality refers to the rationalities that blend sovereign powers with newer disciplinary powers over individual bodies and biopolitical regulations over a population. Biopolitics, as such, refers to ‘the right to “make” live and “let” die’.Footnote 10 These logics (rationalities) and practices (technologies) combine extractive, constraining, and delimiting (sovereign) techniques with the powers of observation, suggestion, and stimulation (regulation, or the conduct of conduct) at the level of individual instruction (discipline) and of the population (biopolitics).Footnote 11
Governmentalities’ interventions relate not to whether one transgresses a law, but to how closely one conforms to a norm. In the nineteenth century, two senses of the norm emerged: the empirically average and the desirably good.Footnote 12 Foucault termed the latter norm-ation and associated it with disciplinary power.Footnote 13 The former he termed normalization and associated with attempts to secure population processes through governmentalities. But, vitally, he did not dissociate either form of normativity from law, rather arguing that there is a normativity intrinsic to any legal imperative, while techniques of normalization develop within, around, and against the law.Footnote 14
While this detailed investigation of law and the norm has emerged from recent lecture translations, interpreters of Foucault have long argued that legal and normative modes of power and their specific regulatory mechanisms are not mutually exclusive. François Ewald, for example, argued with regard to the League's successor body, the United Nations, that it not only functions through the force of international law, but also attempts to conduct the conduct of states via more informal instruments: ‘At the United Nations, for example, arguments have been made for “resolutions” and “recommendations” that do not have the binding force of treaties and serve instead as points of reference for evaluating the conduct of states.’Footnote 15
Ewald made this argument in a pivotal paper at the beginning of a long campaign to show how Foucault appreciated the role of law in modern societies.Footnote 16 Such a perspective is more recently complemented by research on the expansive and indispensable nature of law in Foucault's early worksFootnote 17 and the imbrication of law with ‘governmentalities’ in his 1970s lectures.Footnote 18 The key questions provoked by this reassessment are: how do governmentalities relate to or encompass other modes of power, notably sovereign or juridical powers, and how does such an understanding allow us to break down a false distinction between ‘norms’ (associated with governmental power) and ‘laws’ (often solely associated with sovereign power)? The case study of trafficking will be used here to show that, while the older, sovereign forms persist (legal conventions) alongside newer forms (commissions of enquiry, statistics, and descriptions), the content of the activities blends legal and normative techniques. This draws upon the work of Foucault and the ongoing commentaries of his interpreters.
As Rose and Valverde argued, when Foucault called for an analytics of power beyond the code of law,Footnote 19 his target was actually ‘juridical’ thinking, which operated through sanctioning and forbidding types of action, not ‘law’ itself.Footnote 20 Hence, his argument was that our understanding of law would have to expand to include its productive power too. As suggested above, Foucault insisted that normalization had led to a proliferation and transformation of ‘law’, through which norms themselves circulate, even as law can still operate through constraining and coerced compliance.Footnote 21 Hence, Rose and Valverde refer to legal complexes as ‘the assemblage of legal practices, legal institutions, statutes, legal codes, authorities, discourses, texts, norms and forms of judgement’,Footnote 22 which includes but is not limited to law or juridical thinking. In addition, they formulate four analytical foci for investigations of the legal complex from a governmentality perspective: (i) authorizations, which addresses how centres of authority are created by threats of legal action or assuming the power to encode standards or responsibilities; (ii) normalizations, which focuses on how individuals or institutions are encouraged to act in accordance with norms; (iii) subjectifications, which addresses how legal systems create subject categories and encourage self-subjection;Footnote 23 and (iv) spatializations, which exposes how spaces are made governable through encouraging rules or routines.
In terms of the subjects and objects of regulation, these foci of a governmental analytics range beyond the traditional understandings of the state to encompass not only municipalities, civil society, and families, but also regional political unions and international corporations or institutions. Whereas Foucault first and foremost focused on the domestic realm, and governmentality has been criticized for methodological localism and nationalism, recent work has shown that he had considered, briefly, the international in terms of law. In 1979, he lectured on early modern spaces of free competition in maritime law that contributed to the ‘juridification of the world’,Footnote 24 building on his previous lectures regarding the ‘balance of Europe’ and European military–diplomatic apparatuses.Footnote 25 But, recently, governmentality studies have been pushed into new territory by exploring its relationship with the international, the supranational, and the global. In their path-breaking volume, Global Governmentality: Governing International Spaces, Larner and Walters introduce global governmentality as ‘a heading for studies which problematise the constitution, and governance of spaces above, beyond, between and across states’.Footnote 26 Similarly, Neumann and Sending recommend using Foucault to decentre the state as the actor in international politics, bringing attention to bear on governmental practices, norms, and forms of liberal behaviour across and between states.Footnote 27 While doing groundbreaking work in transposing the debate on governmentality to the international realm, much of the extant literature on governmentalities beyond the nation-state often focuses on the era of ‘globalization’ since the 1990s. The current article broadens this agenda by arguing that if we can think of international law, we can also think of international governmentalities that emerged with this type of law, but also around, through, and against it. They take on the broader forms of governmentalities more generally but are tailored by circumstances, and organizations, as the League governmentalities explored below will illustrate.
The four analytical foci proposed by Rose and Valverde provide a helpful analytical framework for the case study of trafficking later in this paper, as they allow us to address the different populations targeted by the League in its anti-trafficking campaign, as well as the different technologies applied. Contrary to many writings on Foucault and (international) law, this paper will not be an ‘exegetical’ or ‘interpretative’ analysis of law in his writings, but rather an ‘applied’ account of how Foucault's methodologies can help us arrive at a more critically incisive approach to international law.Footnote 28
3. The League of Nations and anti-trafficking
A Foucauldian framework enables us to move beyond the traditional conception of the League of Nations as an international security organization, to analyse another and often-neglected agenda of the League of Nations. This concerns its endeavours in the 1920s and 1930s to interpenetrate technical, individual, cultural, and political spheres.Footnote 29 Article 23 of the Covenant of the League of Nations charged the organization with a wide variety of tasks that move beyond mediating inter-state relationships as they are traditionally conceived. In the economic sphere, for instance, some of its goals included minimizing waste, the scientific organization of labour, standardizing products, simplifying transport systems, and securing higher standards of life.Footnote 30 These ‘technical’ or ‘socioeconomic’ activities included, amongst other things, improving labour conditions, the treatment of ‘natives’, trade in arms, communications, and disease. According to Article 23c, the League was also entrusted ‘with the general supervision over the execution of agreements with regard to the traffic in women and children, and the traffic in opium and other dangerous drugs’. Such endeavours went beyond the domestic and were referred to in a 1927 League report as ‘internationalised rationalisation’.Footnote 31 Age-of-consent debates, in terms of trafficking, fitted into wider concerns with population regulation and sexual reproduction, while other debates over cannabis production focused on individual economic productivity, mediated through a colonial lens.Footnote 32
Though planned as a minor part of the League's mandate, interwar crises of economy, disease, and refugees meant that such ‘technical’ work in practice accounted for over 50 per cent of the League budget by the late 1930s. This money was spent on data collection, travelling commissions, and forging agreements between member states. In Foucauldian terms, these could be identified as what I would like to call League governmentalities.Footnote 33
In this role, the League made a key contribution to the emergence of international welfare, health, and hygiene.Footnote 34 This emergence was marked by innovative collaborations between the League and voluntary, state, and corporate philanthropic organizations, experts, and professionals. Hence, this work also moved beyond the international to the global, including non-members and working extensively with non-state institutions. Dunbabin described the League's work with the Red Cross, the International Labour Organisation, refugees and epidemics in Eastern Europe, and financial reconstruction as amongst its most striking.Footnote 35 This work with an emergent international civil society increased in the 1930s as the League's diplomatic capacities collapsed in the face of growing geopolitical tension.Footnote 36 During what Walters termed the renaissance of the economic and social agencies between 1935 and 1939, these bodies specialized in establishing models for governments to accept themselves, rather than using formal treaties.Footnote 37 These included clauses that could be inserted into domestic legislation embodying norms regarding, for instance, working hours, age of consent, or spending on armaments.
In this context, it could be argued that the League was also central to an emergent transnational (if inherently Eurocentric) epistemic community investigating the causes of poverty and disease. National rivalries did, of course, inflect these relationships.Footnote 38 Yet, the economic and social institutions of the League also contributed to a fundamentally new and different focus on the lives of individuals as well as nations. These institutions focused on welfare, exchanging ideas, and influencing public opinion: ‘their primary attention was no longer concentrated upon the action of governments but directed towards the cares and interests of the individual and his family.’Footnote 39 This attention worked towards forming a ‘network of connexions’ between League offices, members’ administrations, and non-members.Footnote 40
One of the most emotionally evocative of these networks concerned the trafficking of women and children, the campaign against it being described by Indian League delegate Sir J. C. Coyajee as ‘the greatest in history’, which extended League work ‘from that of securing life and increasing its material endowment to the task of raising the value of life itself’.Footnote 41 The League honoured clause 23c of its covenant at the first meeting of its Advisory Committee for Trafficking in Women and Children (TWC) in 1922.Footnote 42
The TWC Committee worked through conventions and publications, to encourage legislation and policies that would reduce enforced prostitution and international trafficking. The campaign was one of ethical concerns and moral hygiene as well as a public-health project of social hygiene. The moral reform project fed, in part, on the broader debate the League was engendering regarding (sovereign) rights.Footnote 43 TWC thus became a debate about the rights of women not to be trafficked.Footnote 44 This humanitarian concern favoured a social-scientific investigation into the conditions of prostitutes and trafficked women, rather than the social-purist emphasis on repressing and policing prostitutes. This had been the dominant response to the hysteria over the ‘white slave trade’ at the end of the nineteenth century that had led to repressionist legislation like the British Criminal Law Amendment Act of 1912.Footnote 45 This reminds us that at the heart of many biopolitical projects are laws and debates over sovereignty. Literature on the League has tended to focus on the latter. The review below will show how these subjects are of vital importance, but also how they can be and need to be thought of in relation to the League's governmentalities. This will be demonstrated through an analysis of trafficking policy on the basis of the four analytical foci proposed by Rose and Valverde: (i) authorizations, (ii) normalizations, (iii) subjectifications, and (iv) spatializations.
4. League governmentalities
4.1. League authorizations: Geneva and New York
The Traffic in Women and Children Advisory Committee to the Social Questions branch of the League marked a new form of enquiry and implementation. Its expert investigations and recommendations saw it contribute to an international assemblage of normative concepts, measures, and opinions. In its role in supporting international governmentalities, however, the League would continue to experiment with traditional agreements, based on a sovereign model of power and legal conventions established by congresses and conventions, such as those concerning the ‘white slave trade’. These formed one core of authorizations based in Geneva, while American authority was also felt through the more diffuse influence of the New York-based Rockefeller Foundation. These two examples will be explored below.
Evidencing the links between sovereign power and biopolitics, law, and norms, anti-white slave trade conventions helped establish many of the governmentalities that would target trafficking, while, at the same time, the TWC's origins and objects were very clearly informed by civil society and social scandals. As an example of the way in which the TWC's activities and ideology were informed by civil-society groups, the TWC's 1927 ‘Report of the Special Body of Experts on Traffic in Women and Children’ made it very clear that the movement to suppress the trade in women and children, of which the TWC was itself a part, was inaugurated by a congress held in London in 1899. This congress was organized by Alexander Coote, secretary of England's National Vigilance Association, and Senator Bérenger from France in order to co-ordinate policies against the ‘white slave trade’.Footnote 46 Arising out of this conference, an association to suppress the supposed trade was established that had branches across Europe, with the UK committee being co-ordinated by the National Vigilance Society. As the League's 1927 report claimed:
These Committees, which were independent of the Governments but acted in agreement with them, had at their disposal the copious information supplied by the vast network of organisations for preventative work and the protection of girls which already existed in the Old World.Footnote 47
Many of these civil-society organizations had emerged from purity campaigns such as those of Josephine Butler against the British Contagious Diseases Acts (1864–86). Building on the 1899 London Congress, the French government called an official conference in Paris in 1902, which led to the International Agreement for the Suppression of the White Slave Traffic of 1904. This was signed by 16 nations, including the majority of the major European powers. Though this gave the anti-white slave trade movement the kudos of official recognition, the co-signatories were only consensually committed to establishing modes of surveillance at ports and stations, encouraging the repatriation of foreign prostitutes and investigating the traffic of women and children. This latter activity involved the appointment of central authorities within each nation charged with co-ordinating relevant information regarding trafficking. A further diplomatic conference held in 1910 committed signatories to adjust their domestic legislation to punish traffickers if the victim was under 20 years old, even if travelling under consent, and to punish procuration by force or fraud. Growing concerns about a trade in women and children was reflected domestically in, for instance, the United Kingdom's Criminal Law Amendment Act (1912), which provided powers to punish pimps, traffickers, and procurers. This Act subsequently became a model for legislators throughout the British Empire. Acknowledging the increasingly international nature of the white-slavery discourse, the League's 1927 report recognized the influence of the 1908–09 United States of America Immigration Commission report on the ‘Importation and Harbouring of Women for Immoral Purposes’. This had led to the ‘White Slave Traffic Act’, or Mann Act, of 1910, which penalized the inter-state or foreign commerce of women or girls for immoral purposes.
In addition to these state-based acts and meetings, the institutions of an emergent international civil society organized gatherings on similar topics. In 1920 alone, The Shield (of the Association for Moral and Social Hygiene) could report three international conferences relevant to its work, namely a meeting of the International Council of Women, the International Abolitionist Conference, and the Conference of the International Woman Suffrage Alliance.Footnote 48 But the following year would see a convention passed that would establish the League as the broadest and most influential platform for influencing state policy and disseminating information that was of an increasingly abolitionist nature.
In June 1921, the League organized an international conference in Geneva at which representatives from 34 nations discussed the means by which the organization would honour its commitments under section 23c, namely to offer general supervision over the execution of agreements with regard to the traffic in women and children. It was at this meeting that the rhetoric of the white slave trade was de-racialized to that of Traffic in Women and Children, an Advisory Committee on TWC was established, and the agreement reached that League nations should submit annual reports on conditions relating to trafficking, all of which were embodied in a draft convention. This draft convention subsequently became the International Convention for the Suppression of the Traffic in Women and Children that was put into effect at the September 1921 session of the League. Within six months, it had been signed by 33 states, some of which (Germany, for instance) were not even members of the League. Those states who had not signed the 1904 or 1910 white-slavery conventions were bound to enforce their provisions, to tackle trafficking in women and children (and acts deemed preparatory to such trade), and to allow for the extradition of persons accused of TWC. As will be seen below, the League persistently campaigned against trafficking throughout the 1920s, though this was largely an investigative and educative programme. However, following a conference in Geneva in October 1933, the League passed a convention that would augment the agreements of 1904, 1910, and 1921 by penalizing anyone who procured females of ‘full age’, even with their consent, for immoral purposes to be carried out in another country, whether or not those offensive acts were committed in different countries.Footnote 49 In addition to the vital abolitionist principle that consent of a trafficked woman was irrelevant, extra powers targeted attempted offences and preparatory acts, but did not remove the age bar or ban tolerated brothels, for which many campaigners outside the state sector had been campaigning. Their influence had, however, been significant.
It had long been clear that the TWC Committee would be just as dependent upon the representatives of charitable and voluntary associations as it would be attentive to the representatives of nation-states. As the Secretary-General of the League commented during his opening speech at the committee's first meeting, since the 1902 Paris conference, ‘international and national voluntary associations had remained in the forefront of the battle against traffic, and the Council accepted their co-operation on the Advisory Committee with the greatest pleasure’.Footnote 50 The second meeting received reports from various ‘international voluntary organisations’, including the Federation of National Unions for the Protection of Girls, the International Bureau for the Suppression of the Traffic in Women and Children, and the International Jewish Association for the Protection of Girls.
While the League received delegations from other organizations, it also sent representatives to meetings to put across its views and garner the impressions of other experts in the field. For example, in June 1928, Dame Rachel Crowdy, the head of the Social Section of the League of which the TWC Committee was a part, attended the Seventh International Congress for the Suppression of Traffic in Women and Children in London.Footnote 51 Crowdy praised the voluntary associations that had ‘blazed the trail’ against TWC over the last 50 years and stressed their continued importance in educating the public against the dangers of trafficking.
As such, it was clear that the League had inherited tactics and conventions from international law, but that it was just as indebted to non-state origins and their campaigning tactics. Geneva had established itself as the new centre for authorizing sovereign interventions into trafficking policies, which contained their own norms (regarding age of consent, for instance), subjects (the trafficker, woman, and child), and spatialities (the port and the station). It would remain the centre for authorizing more diverse trafficking governmentalities, with clearer definitions of the people, norms, and spaces at their heart. It was in this realm of education, broadly conceived,Footnote 52 that the League would find a domain of influence much wider than that which could be secured through the conventional legal commitments of sovereign states.
But, if the channels of League action and the figures it targeted were diffuse, equally so were its sources of influence and funding. There is a substantial literature regarding international law and the influence of America, spanning historical writings on the absent presence of America's ‘global Monroe Doctrine’Footnote 53 to contemporary analysis of the American ‘Empire’.Footnote 54 But, in the interwar years, America also began to exert its influence over global biopolitics. In particular, the Rockefeller Foundation in New York used its vast wealth to inflect the emerging trajectory of international health.Footnote 55 Regarding prostitution, J. D. Rockefeller sponsored Abraham Flexner to tour European cities and report on their policies regarding prostitution. His resulting work thoroughly condemned tolerated brothels as justifying and stimulating trafficking.Footnote 56 The methodology of this work and its conclusions were extremely influential, but Rockefeller also intervened directly in the League (of which America was not a member). It is clear that the entire history of the TWC Advisory Committee would have been radically undermined without Rockefeller support. It was a US representative to the TWC Advisory Committee, Grace Abbot, who suggested a travelling commission of enquiry into trafficking at their second session in March 1923.Footnote 57 A body of experts was appointed in December of that year and met in April 1924 to consider the work to date of the TWC Committee. Thanks to a grant of $75 000 from the Rockefeller-funded American Social Hygiene Association, the League was able to fund the travelling commission, with Dr William F. Snow acting as personal supervisor and chairman. Snow was an American advocate of social hygiene who believed in the importance of the medical profession securing a prominent role in the campaign against venereal diseases but who also, like Flexner, understood the importance of education and moral guidance.Footnote 58
The enquiry had much in common with Flexner's methodology, but greatly increased his scope of investigations. The belief was that trafficking began in Western Europe and moved to Central and South America. The investigation, however, also spread to North America and Baltic countries, eventually taking in 28 countries and 112 cities, in which 6500 interviews were carried out, of whom roughly 5000 were with prostitutes or souteneurs. The Report of the Special Body of Experts on the Traffic in Women and Children was published on 18 February 1927 in two parts: the first contained an interpretation of the gathered facts and some conclusions and recommendations; the second contained excerpts from the mass of material gathered. Due, in no small part, to the sensationalist nature of the subject matter, the report became an instant best-seller, with 7000 copies purchased by the end of the year.Footnote 59 The report would also come to be widely circulated through reproductions and summaries, in journals such as the British Social Hygiene Council's Health and Empire and the Association for Moral and Social Hygiene's The Shield, which reprinted the entire conclusion of the report.Footnote 60
The 1927 report sent out clear messages about the characters and methods employed in TWC, then argued that the traffic actually existed, and suggested both the routes and nodes to blame. These arguments worked around relatively clear notions of trafficking, procurement, and brothels. These proved to be key planks in a broader nominalist programme of the League that set out to name and define the key targets in its campaign against TWC, which would then be used to educate the world about the dangers of trafficking. The report contains a wealth of information and viewpoints, not all of which can be done justice to here (e.g., sections on the type of women trafficked and the routes and methods of mobility). Many of these definitions found their way directly into the clauses of suppressionist legislation worldwide, forming the bases for national projects of normalization, and mark one of the most mobile yet influential governmentalities within the League techne.
4.2. Normalization and the definition of trafficking
For the purposes of this study, international traffic has been taken as meaning primarily the direct or indirect procuration and transportation for gain to a foreign country of women and girls for the sexual gratification of one or more other persons. This definition covers the cases in which girls have been procured and transported to become mistresses of wealthy men. It also covers certain cases of the procuring of women as entertainers and artistes, and exploiting them for purposes of prostitution in foreign countries under degrading and demoralising conditions.Footnote 61
Essential to a project of normalization is the definition of the objects under regulation and their forms of circulation, while compatible forms of norm-ation distinguish between the normal and the abnormal – such a definition establishes the terrain over which judgements and adjustments would be encouraged. The 1927 League report began with a chapter on ‘the character of the traffic’, which sought to address the beliefs of those people who thought that the white slave trade had died out following the conferences and conventions of the previous 30 years. On the contrary, trafficking had been found to exist, as defined in the above quotation. This referred only to international traffic, which was the specific remit of the League. The motive of the traffic was believed to be financial, and it was governed by the business law of supply and demand. Conscious that the de-racialized terminology of the TWC replaced political with financial metaphors, the report stated that:
We have used these economic terms because they seem aptly to describe the commercial aspect of the whole traffic. There exists or arises, owing to a variety of causes, a demand for prostitutes in some particular area. The trafficker deliberately sets out to supply it.Footnote 62
The body of experts were obviously aware of the tension between the vast heterogeneity of the places and peoples within the scope of their study and the suggestiveness of their terminology that implied the co-ordinating genius of a ‘trafficker’. The souteneurs and madames were said to speak many different languages, but to share a common slang. While there was not an organized international group, a ‘worldwide camaraderie’ of ‘honour among thieves’ bound these ‘parasites’ together. There were various causes, and circumstances, of the demand for trafficked women and children. These included: surpluses of men over women; theatres, clubs, and cabarets that encouraged prostitution; places with seasonal movements of men (especially soldiers and sailors, workers, or tourists); and vice districts or licensed houses (as discussed below). The Shield would report in 1935 that the League's definition of trafficking and its effort to suppress it had found success through forcing governments to consider the phenomenon and marking their efforts as a matter of prestige.Footnote 63 While consciousness of this amorphous traffic was essential, governments would be prompted into action by recognition of the subjects of mobility (the pimps and procurers) and the spatialities of transfer and storage (the brothel).
4.3. Trafficking subjectivities
No formal organisation exists to further traffic, but there is evidence of local associations of traffickers in many different countries with groups of their own and meeting-places. In connection with such places, souteneurs obtain news of what is going on, learn the movements of their friends and often obtain money or other forms of assistance to promote trafficking in women.Footnote 64
Having described the nature of trafficking, the League's 1927 report went on to try to explain the subjectivities of the people involved, and the mechanisms by which trafficking took place. As the quote above suggests, a cast of subjects was invoked that included traffickers, groups, souteneurs, friends, and the women themselves. Again, it came up against the dilemma of explaining how a complex whole was organized without a central co-ordinating agent. ‘The question naturally arises to whom did the profits go, or in other words who are the so-called traffickers?’ It was insisted that traffickers did not consist of a single class, but formed a group of individuals with various interests, merging into pornography, drug supply, and prostitution. As instanced in the quotation above, the trade operated through intermediaries who combined knowledge of a particular market with experience of transport or traders. Agents and commissionaries would be used to find houses suitable for brothel keeping, to locate moneylenders, and to source women themselves. The investigators were able to travel thousands of miles along these dispersed networks, linking up local groups that were not in touch with each other but had traffickers who could pass on contacts between locations. These different agents converged on specific ‘centres of information’ to circulate ‘dope’ (news) as to the prospects of trade in different countries, the number of tourists, the availability of false passports, immigration laws, regulations on prostitution, and rates of deportation. Despite the vast variety of these networks, traffickers were divided into four categories, with their attendant characteristics:
1. Principals: usually the owners of brothels, often retired souteneurs, who provided funds and gathered information in order to co-ordinate the traffic.
2. Madames: managers of brothels who kept houses full of ‘new attractions’; they were often in relationships with principals or souteneurs and often kept girls indebted to the brothel.
3. Souteneurs: financed the business, secured new girls, transported them, and introduced them to madames; they were continually on the move.
4. Intermediaries: transported women for madames and souteneurs. They procured artists and entertainers, accosted customers and brought them to brothels, and liaised with seamen who smuggled in girls.
The acknowledgement of these traffickers, and the instigation of action against them, were of course not new. Their histories show that, just as legal conventions relied upon norms and social networks, nominalist processes likewise drew upon legal acts and dialogues. In addition to the international congresses from the turn of the century, national legislatures had passed their own acts against traffickers. Following the ‘Maiden Tribute’ scandal,Footnote 65 for instance, the British Criminal Law Amendment Act (1885) against procuration had been passed. The 1927 report acknowledged the importance of the Act's penalization of procuration of a female under the age of 21 for unlawful carnal connection, whether in England or abroad, claiming ‘This Act was used as a model in connection with later international discussions’.Footnote 66 The League was proactive in seeking legal action against souteneurs in particular. It circulated details of legislative measures in force in various countries to deal with souteneurs and stressed the need to grant powers for the prompt arrest and penalization of such persons.Footnote 67 But the movement narrowed in on the brothel as the storing house of trafficked women and girls and the prime cause of demand for them.
4.4. Spatialities of the licensed house
We are led to the conclusion that commercialised vice leading to international traffic undoubtedly receives a strong stimulus where prostitution is either ignored or where the control takes the form of official recognition by the registration of prostitutes or the licensing of brothels . . .. We have definite evidence that licensed houses create a steady demand for new women and that this demand is met by traffickers and causes both national and international traffic.Footnote 68
Whilst the League de-racialized the language of the white slave trade, it clung onto the scalar connection that abolitionist discourses had forged between ‘licensed brothels’ (as above) and a supposedly global traffic. But it found its hands tied by its limitation to the international dimension of prostitution, namely trafficking per se, and not the supposedly domestic dimension of brothel control. Within these limits, the TWC Committee's first effort to target the brothel struck up uneasy comparisons with former efforts targeting the ‘slave trade’ in white women alone.
During the March 1923 meeting of the TWC Advisory Committee, a resolution by the Assembly was discussed that suggested that, pending abolition of the system of state-regulated prostitution altogether, foreign women should be banned from working in licensed houses.Footnote 69 These houses referred to brothels that had been registered and acknowledged by the state. This did not include tolerated brothels that were known of but not registered, allowing states such as British India to consistently proclaim that it did not have, and had not had since 1888, licensed houses.
The suggestions regarding foreign prostitutes were widely opposed. Mme de Sainte-Croix, representing various women's voluntary organizations, stressed to the committee that there were no remaining arguments left for state regulation of any kind, and that it led to a false sense of security regarding venereal diseases. The French representative, M Bourgois, objected on the grounds that state regulation was an internal question beyond the concerns of the League, although the Chair pointed out that the resolution did not propose to interfere in regulation directly.
The focus on licensed brothels increased over the following years. At the 1924 meeting of the TWC Committee, the answers to a questionnaire concerning the effects of abandoning licensed houses had been discussed.Footnote 70 Of the 14 governments that replied, having abolished tolerated brothels, only four suggested that this had led to an increase in trafficking. Following this, the Polish representative put a statement on record stressing that the committee was in favour of the abolition of licensed houses.
The TWC Committee very much adopted this viewpoint in its further sessions. In December 1927, ten months after the report was issued, it published the results of its questionnaire distributed in 1922 regarding foreign women in licensed brothels, and also incorporated the results of other questions circulated regarding the links between licensed houses and trafficking.Footnote 71 Eight countries, including Great Britain, suggested there was a link, whereas the four that did not (Hungary, Italy, Japan, and Siam) claimed that this was because of the strict observation under which their licensed houses were placed. As a result of this, at the 1928 TWC Committee meeting, governments were explicitly asked to close licensed houses. It was admitted, however, that public opinion would have to be worked on and the legislative and administrative measures necessary would have to be researched before such changes could be implemented.Footnote 72
The report's position on licensed brothels was also favourably received elsewhere. Between 28 June and 1 July 1927, the Seventh International Congress for the Suppression of Traffic in Women and Children was held in London.Footnote 73 Dame Rachel Crowdy, head of the Social Section of the League, presided over a lengthy discussion of the TWC report. Brothels were described as the ‘mainspring’ of trafficking, and a resolution was passed requesting the closure of ‘bordels’ in ‘all countries, at all times, in all circumstances’. In a further report in Health and Empire, Dame Katharine Furse used the report, and the 1928 TWC Committee's reflections on it, to reflect on trafficking more broadly, and the brothel in particular.Footnote 74 She commented on the discussions specifically from a ‘woman's point of view’, wondering how some male members of the committee could continue to defend licensed houses as a public-health measure when they were so clearly unhealthy for the women involved. An investigation by the Health Organisation of the League was suggested, which would surely prove the ill health and high mortality of women in licensed houses – the ‘retail’ part of the trafficking business.
While the League did not take up this proposal to focus on the fate of women within brothels, it did attempt to formulate the laws that had been put in place to guarantee public health and public order in cases in which licensed houses had been abolished, following a resolution by the TWC Committee in 1929.Footnote 75 Of the 15 countries that replied, six had instituted a system of compulsory treatment of venereal diseases, unlike the free and voluntary systems in Britain, South Africa, Canada, and some Swiss cantons, which some regarded as another form of regulation. Regardless of the system, however, it was argued that abolition of tolerated brothels had not led to negative societal or biological effects. This laid the groundwork for the 1933 conference that banned trafficking, even with consent, although the tolerated brothel remained untouched. The League had built up information to prove its specific argument about brothels, but, in so doing, had also outlined a new form of international governmentality that functioned, as the Indian delegates to Geneva reported back to their government, through productive rather than deductive power:
The work of the League in this field is a valuable example of the effects which can be produced, not by creating obligations, but by convincing analysis of essential aims and by mutual enlightenment as to the experience of different countries in securing these aims . . .. It is now recognised, as proved by experience, that the licensed house system is not justified as a means of protecting public order and health, and that the abolition of the system which is essential to the suppression of the traffic, can be carried out without disadvantage in other directions.Footnote 76
5. Conclusions
What I hope to have shown is that, during a critical period in the evolution of international law, the League of Nations used traditions of conventions and conferencing to tackle TWC. These top-down, prohibitionary, sovereign-power models were used effectively, but they also drew on non-state social bodies and operated through sponsoring new norms, deploying networked spatialities, subjectivizing new actors, and attempting to establish Geneva as a new authority in the (anti-)trafficking scene. More specifically, Geneva attempted to act as a centre of ‘authorizations’ through hosting conventions that bound co-signatories to act against trafficking, though in ways heavily inflected by Rockefeller authorizations emanating from New York. In terms of ‘subjectifications’, the League named and summoned forth governments (as reporting agencies), women and children (as victims), and a host of traffickers (as criminals). Furthermore, the League deployed ‘normalizing’ tactics that were aimed to make states, towns, and ports inhospitable zones for trafficking and to promote an abolitionist moral turn against tolerated prostitution. Finally, while League ‘spatializations’ tethered nations to international conventions, the League also circulated literature and terms along routes that aspired to the mobility and range of traffickers themselves.
But the League also experimented with biopolitical tactics that targeted ‘the life of individuals as well as of nations’, regarding sexual reproduction, drug consumption, economic performance, and moral regulation. Here, its tactics included circulating pamphlets and questionnaires, proposing definitions, compiling comparative data sets, and stigmatizing certain characters while calling others into being. But the chief aim of these governmentalities was to encourage national legislation beyond the scope of international law. This paper has focused on the League's methods. Its legal effects can be traced in the international conventions and national laws that were passed under its influence. Its normative effects are necessarily more diffuse, and must be tracked through intimate archives that trace the impact of League questionnaires, statistics, incitations, and stories.Footnote 77 At this level, the realization of the League's hopes will be transcribed, as will be the very differing experiences of women who found their brothels closed down, their movements newly surveyed, and their spatial life worlds radically reformed.
